Grammy-nominated post-punk pioneers The Tiger Lillies continue to provoke and excite with their joyfully mordant Brecht and Weill-inspired set
Grammy-nominated post-punk pioneers The Tiger Lillies are coming to Basingstoke’s Haymarket on Sunday, October 6 (8pm), with their new show Come On Down (The Nihilism Tour) so @newburytoday caught them in Oxford first to give you the heads-up. One of the foremost avant-garde bands in the world the Olivier Award-winners shows are dark, peculiar, and varied, with moments of black humour and immense beauty. Their music is a mixture of pre-war Berlin cabaret, anarchic opera and gypsy music, echoing the voices of Bertolt Brecht and Jacques Brel. https://www.anvilarts.org.uk/events/the-tiger-lillies
The Tiger Lillies’ Come on Down: The Nihilism Tour
at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
on Saturday, September 14
Review by JON LEWIS
Shockheaded Entertainment
With their ghoulish, clownish make-up and downbeat Middle-Europa clothes, the Tiger Lillies (Martyn Jacques, vocals, piano and accordion, Budi Butenop, percussion and Adrian Stout, guitar, theremin) would not be out of place playing a Berlin cabaret in the 30s.
Performing Come On Down: The Nihilism Tour at the North Wall, the band, which jointly created the incredible Olivier-winning Shockheaded Peter musical in 1998, continues to provoke and excite with their joyfully mordant Brecht and Weill-inspired set.
While the musicianship of the band excels, it’s Jacques’ uncanny falsetto voice that marks the Tiger Lillies as unique. No one else sounds like him, a rasping, sometimes mocking, occasionally touching, voice that brings a feeling of irony and humour to each song. Many of the numbers feature gruesomely jolly narratives such as Hey Jack from 2014 which asks questions of mass murderer Jack the Ripper before condemning him raucously to burn in hell. A bouncy number that starts the second half of the show begins with the startling lines ‘I like burning houses down, and factories as well, I like burning anything, it’s the truth I tell’ from 1999’s Start a Fire.
Each song is performed rather than just played, the band using humorous gestures, mime and over-exaggerated movements to create a visual as well as an aural impression. Several songs encourage the audience to join in such as ‘Hell’ from 1994, the number that begins the concert. Singing along to the Monty Pythonesque Banging in the Nails from 1996 is like a guilty pleasure, enjoying a jolly refrain where the audience imagines they are the Roman soldiers nailing Christ to the cross.
The humour faded away during The Birds are Singing in Ukraine, written last year, with Jacques on grand piano. The song contrasts the hope signified by the birdsong, itself a haunting image of First World War trench warfare, with the grisly lines about corpses in the earth, deathly images in keeping with the rest of the show.
The Tiger Lillies performed in Ukraine after the Russian invasion and this number is part of an album called Ukraine where the proceeds go to Ukrainian charities.
A unique band.
