"My grandmother said you need to give your body to your husband and your soul to Jesus," Tori Amos tells us, her eyes wide with innocence, her lips fighting back a smirk.
"Well, what's left?" It's a fitting question. In this hushed and holy environment, Amos appears with only her piano, revealing her heart through her songs.
Ostensibly a warm-up gig before a US tour, the evening is more like a prayer meeting for Amos and a few hundred of her closest friends, so reverential is the atmosphere. The lady herself is an iconic but fragile figure, looking bashful as the standing ovation that greets her refuses to die.
Her appearance is as contradictory as her music: wearing a strappy black dress that falls to her feet, her shoulders covered by a diaphanous material adorned with glimmering sequins, she could almost look stylishly prim if it weren't for the shock of bright auburn hair.
As she sings tales of miscarriage, rape and sexuality, her lyrical honesty is made more brutal by the lovingly crafted, haunting melodies beneath.
Amos's new album, Strange Little Girls, stays true to her quest to understand femininity in all its forms. Here she takes songs written by men and reshapes them to locate the point of view of the female characters involved.
She tackles Slayer - never the most girly of bands - on Raining Blood, taking the overblown original apart until only a hymn-like melody, dripping with warmth, not gore, remains.
The high notes that Amos employs can be a little too much, her impressive vocal range giving rise to theatrics, but at least the venue's acoustics allow the notes to fly. She harmonises with herself on Rattlesnakes, her hands hitting the piano keys hard until she grabs for something invisible hanging in the air, lost in the song.
Amos is an intense performer and a completely captivating one. When she abandons her instrument and stares into the crowd, softly singing Me and a Gun, it's a chilling sight, her eyes frozen as though she is reliving the source of her lyrics - her experience of rape - as she sings them.
Her voice is distant and disconnected, words curtly delivered through clenched teeth against which she clicks her tongue, defying anyone not to feel her pain.
There is unexpected laughter, however, during Crucify, Amos throwing back her head with a childlike giggle as she reflects on her lyrics. And, although the songs are loaded with drama, eerie confusion and lots of big breaths, the acoustic treatment gives them - and that voice - an ethereal loveliness.
