Tori Amos wrote her first song when she was just three years old.

The ‘Cornflake Girl’ hitmaker began playing the piano when she was a toddler and insisted her musical abilities have always been as natural to her as breathing.

She said: “No one taught me how to play the piano. It’s just something I was able to do from a young age.

“Somehow I sat at the keyboard and I was playing it, without knowing why or how.

“People would act surprised, like, ‘What’s happening?’ but when you’re a child and you can do something, you don’t think, ‘How did that happen?’

“I must have been two-and-a-half when I started and I never questioned it.

“I wrote my first song when I was three. I can’t recall what it was called or what it was about but writing and playing were like breathing to me.”

The 58-year-old singer – whose real name is Myra Ellen Amos - had planned change her name to Sammy J in honour of Heather Locklear’s ‘Dynasty’ character when she first started looking for a record deal, but is glad she listened to different advice.

She told Reader’s Digest magazine: “I was around 17 and it was just before I began sending demos out to record companies.

“Then a friend of mine brought along some guy she was dating to see me perform and he said, ‘You’re a Tori’. I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

“Then someone in the bar said that it was either a pine tree or a political party in England and I went, ‘I’m going with the pine tree.’

“So I was no longer Myra Amos, I was Tori Amos.”