"When I heard Raining Blood I had this picture of this beautiful vulva raining blood over this male abusive force." How the Taliban inspired Tori Amos to record a Slayer classic, and what Slayer's Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King thought of it (2024)

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?"

Paul Brannigan

Contributing Editor, Louder

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.