25 YEARS IN KINSALE: ‘Fishy Fishy and Jim Edwards became my local spots...’
“In 1995 we were recording part of the album Boys For Pele in Delgany in a church, and we recorded everything else in Kinsale at the magical Ballywilliam House,” Tori told me.
It was so magical that she bought the house. “We lived in Kinsale from 1995 to 2019. I would come in and out,” added
Tori of her two-and-a-half decades in Co Cork. “Kinsale is probably one of my favourite towns in all of Europe.
“The crew [for the recording of
Boys For Pele] could be seen crawling through the windows at the White Lady after having dined at one of the many restaurants. Over the years Jim Edwards and Fishy Fishy became the local for me.
“The Irish couldn’t have been kinder and more tolerant when I didn’t get the humour at first. But eventually they helped me get there — and I will always be grateful for understanding the ‘Oh Bejesus!’ of it all.”
She sold her gorgeous Georgian home, with its own beach on the River Bandon, late last year for a song — for €1.2m.
“It really breaks my heart to see her go,” Tori said at the time, “but this magical place needs to find a new owner who can fully live and breathe everything that she has to offer. I will miss her, but will always cherish the memories, both personal and artistic.”
While living in Cork, Tori was sufficiently inspired to write Ireland, from her 2005 album The Beekeeper and Walk To Dublin (‘Do a jig, do a jig, do a jig/If I walk to Dublin’), from Boys
For Pele. She shot the video for Star
Whisperer at Ballywilliam House in 2011, while the photography for her Night Of Hunters album was taken on the grounds of her estate that same year.
In 2014 her album Unrepentant Geraldines
came into creative being courtesy of Cork, when Tori’s attention was drawn to Geraldine, an etching by 19th-century Cork painter
Daniel Maclise of a penitent woman of that name.
“When I saw it,” she said of Geraldine,
“it reminded me of the Repentant
Magdalene paintings of Seghers, De la
Tour and Titian and what women have had to go through, over the centuries, and how
women’s sexuality has been judged and shamed.”
This started Tori thinking about religion and the world in the 21st century, and wondering “if most women can honestly say they feel that their spiritual and secular aspects are completely integrated.
“Women I’ve spoken with in many countries have talked about compartments and that their spiritual self is in one drawer protected from their sexual self, which lives in its own detached realm,” she said.
“There has to be a way where we as women can integrate our spiritual self and our passionate self that is harmonious.”