The idea behind Tori Amos' sixth album, Strange Little Girls, was to reimagine 12 songs written by men from a female perspective. The album included covers by a diverse range of artists - The Beatles, The Velvet Undergound, The Stranglers, Tom Waits, Eminem - but it was the Methodist minister's daughter's decision to reinterpret Slayer's Raining Blood which arguably drew the most attention when the album emerged in September 2001.
In subsequent interviews, Amos credited Beck's bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen for suggesting that she should consider covering a metal song, and turning her on to Slayer's Reign In Blood album, one of his personal favourites.
"This is when the Taliban was in full power," Amos told The Quietus in 2009. "When I heard Raining Blood I just had this picture at the time, of this beautiful vulva [laughs] . . . raining blood over this male abusive force. That was how Raining Blood came about — that was the picture I saw when I recorded it, and what I see to this day when I hear it."
In addition to reinterpreting each artist's music, Amos also conceived a female character for each song, and was photographed as each one. The personae she possessed for Raining Blood was a WW2 French Resistance fighter.
"The Raining Blood girl revealed herself to me from the moment that I heard the song," Amos explained to Dutch magazine Oor in 2001. She said from the first line: 'Come with me Tori, I'll show you everything'. She took me to a war field, pure horror. Still I felt safe with her, because of her braveness."
"I really like Raining Blood," she told the Musiq Queen website that same year." I really like her. I don’t think she’s with us anymore, but when I met her and I began to see her story: she was in wartime, and she did things that I think she thought she would never do, for causes she believed in because she was at war. She saw death on a day-to-day basis, and she chose to infiltrate, and become part of the French Resistance. Do I think she made it? No, I don’t."
It's fair to say that the men who wrote Raining Blood were more than a little confused and nonplussed by all this.
"I would have to say her version was the most original," Jeff Hanneman conceded in a 2011 interview with Revolver. "Is this our song? It’s like, why would you even do that song? Something about the rag? I don’t know."
"It's so weird," Kerry King added. "If she had never told us, we would have never known. You could have played it for us and we'd have been like, What's that?"
