Don't let our beautiful new layout distract you from the topic at hand: the deliciously morbid music of the Tiger Lillies, a bizarre and truly unique musical trio from England. The Tiger Lillies have made a farce of just about every taboo topic in the universe. They make it their business to write the most morbid, offensive songs possible, and manage to do so with quite a bit of humor while they're at it. They're also kind of brilliant, as their past works, among which are the theatre show Shockheaded Peter and the album (and possibly future theatre show) The Twopenny Opera, would attest. In this interview, in which we talk about quite a few serious subjects in an utterly cavalier manner, I do not intend in any way to make light of real tragedy... I just mean to showcase people who are creating art from the humor that can be salvaged from it. Enjoy the interview.So, this is the Seven Deadly Sins tour, right?
MARTIN JACQUES: Well, not really. Unlike most bands, we work the other way around. Most bands, they make a record and they go on the road and promote the record. We do it the other way around; we go on the road to practice for the next record.
[laughs]
MJ: So this isn’t the Seven Deadly Sins tour. It should be the Seven Deadly Sins tour, because we should be promoting Seven Deadly Sins, which was our last album. Instead we’re practicing our next show, which is Freak Show, and Sinderella. So we’re back to front. We’re a bit cockeyed.
ADRIAN HUGE: Because we’re touring all along. We don’t have the luxury of a record company paying us to go into a studio to work on new songs, and the best way to try out new songs is in front of a live audience. And then you discover which ones work well, they develop, and then you go and record them once they’ve developed. So, no, is the answer.
So the audience is the guinea pig.
AH: But I think they like it.
[considering this as an audience member] Yeah.
MJ: Well, sometimes. We did a gig in San Francisco, and some of them were actually a bit pissed off, because I’m learning the songs, you see. But we’re doing two shows for Christmas in January, so we’re kind of working in these new songs for the show. See, that’s the other thing, we tend to do music theatre shows, and we do so for the purpose of developing shows.
So tell me about the show you’re developing now, Freak Sh—wasn’t “Freak Show” a song on one of your past albums?
AH: Yes, that was the Tiger Lillies' Circus, which we started maybe ten years ago, and we wanted it to be more of a freak show, but it was quite an interesting circus-type show with performers and a whole set of circus songs, which was of course our album. And now we’re developing a new one called the Freak Show, which has three little people, two identical twins, and a contortionist in it.
Oh, wow.
AH: And a whole new set of songs all about freaks.
[laughs]
AH: So it’s a little bit closer to what we probably would have liked to have done in the first place, with the first show. It was a good show, and we’re hoping this one’s even better, aren’t we?
MJ: Yeah. You can talk so I can eat my food.
AH: Yes. Thank you. [laughter]
So basically this one’s kind of been percolating since Circus.
AH: Um, I think Martin wrote some new songs a couple of years ago and we’ve just been finding someone who would support the show with other people in it. We needed a producer. We have some producers in Athens, and we have a German sort of artistic director who did the first show, and so we’ll see what happens with that. Some good songs, interesting people in it, and, yeah, we’ll find out in January. As we said, we have to know the songs by the time we get there.
That would be ideal, right?
AH: No one could really afford to pay for months and months of rehearsal time, even for that goal. So we’ll know the songs and we’ll know what we can do and we’ll have a new show, hopefully.
So do the concepts for the shows come first or do you come up with those based on the songs you’ve been writing?
AH: It comes in all different directions. For example, I think two or three years ago there was the two-hundred-year birthday or death day of Hans Christian Anderson, and there was a lot of money and funding for celebrating that, and so we had I think a French producer—
Well, that sounds like a regular goldmine, that sort of thing. I don’t know about Hans Christian Anderson, but the original Grimm fairy tales are so much more gruesome than the ones we read today.
AH: Yes! Oh, yeah! Well, that one, for example, that came about when a producer in France suggested we compose something, and that became The Little Match Girl. That became a show, with us playing all the music, an actor and actress as the father and the little match girl. Ten years ago, Shockheaded Peter, that was when a producer saw us playing in bars. So fifteen years ago. And he liked what we were doing, and we worked on different things, got different people together over the years, and finally it came together once he had raised the money, and that all came together as that show, which took us all over the world, and it became quite a hit. And we did that in New York three times. The New Victory theatre—
The New Victory? They usually put on stuff that’s appropriate for kids! [laughs]
AH: Yeah, we were the ones who did the first “late show” there, apparently. That was quite interesting.
Huh! Well, I hope it wasn’t included in the yearly program next to all the kids’ shows.
MJ: Well, I always thought it was kind of… semi-alright for kids.
AH: It wasn’t too blasphemous, there was no swearing in it…
Yeah, I guess everybody dying is kind of mild in terms of your subject matter.
AH: Yeah.
MJ: Yeah, it was one of ours that was really a more acceptable mainstream sort of thing. Just death.
[laughs]
AH: That was another one of those funny old stories from a hundred and fifty years ago. And other times Martin will come up with a theme of songs and try and get people interested in putting it on.
MJ: Yeah. We’ve done a few things, even our Twopenny Opera, which was—
Yeah, I was about to ask you about that. I mean, it seems kind of fitting that you would choose to do a takeoff of The Threepenny Opera, because one of the most-used descriptors for your music is “Brechtian”.
AH: Exactly.
MJ: There’s a producer in New York who wants to put that on as a theatre show.
AH: It’s all a lot of patience and a lot of waiting, rather like planting seeds, and then you wait. Some will fall down, and some you’ll water.
MJ: What happened to the wine?
AH: [gesturing] It’s in there.
All right. Wine break. It’s okay, we’ll talk while you get the wine—you guys also collaborated with illustrator Edward Gorey, right before he died.
AH: Yes. That was amazing. I don’t think he went out that much any more, and he had a friend that used to take him CDs that he might be interested in and took him a Tiger Lillies CD, and he liked it, and then he sent Martin a box of unpublished work.
Oh, wow, he just sent the box?
AH: Well, I think they had some communication—
MJ: Yeah, he did, he sent me a box.
AH: Yes. He thought you were the cat’s pajamas.
MJ: That’s right, he thought I was the cat’s pajamas!
AH: So Martin went through and put some of them to music, and then unfortunately… you were going to fly over and meet him, weren’t you? About how many days before did he die?
MJ: Two or three days.
AH: Yeah. Because we were going to try and make that into a theatre show; as you may know, we worked with the Kronos Quartet, from San Francisco, on the album, and we were hoping to have a new theatre show to take over from the Shock Headed Peter show we were doing, which was just coming to an end then. But it, yeah, sort of stalled then.
MJ: It was a long process before it failed. Terry Gilliam was going to direct it, before it all went wrong. It all ended. It would have been good. It would have been nice.
AH: We did some shows with the Kronos Quartet.
MJ: Well, that’s true.
AH: But it wasn’t a proper theatre show. It was more like a requiem for Edward Gorey in the end.
MJ: Yeah. But, you know, we got a good album out of that, didn’t we? And that’s what we… well, the only thing I really care about is the albums I make. I love that album, The Gorey End. It was a great album. So, you know, that was all right. It was worthwhile.
The first time I ever saw you guys play was when you came to St. Ann’s Warehouse—what show were you guys doing then?
AH: Was it our Halloween show, or something? Was it our suicide show? Our Christmas suicide show?
Yes, there was quite a bit of suicide in there.
MJ: Suicide for Christmas? It was at Christmas.
Yes! Yes, yes, yes, now I remember the title, too. I just couldn’t remember which show.
MJ: Yes, Suicide for Christmas. There was a Christmas tree, and razor blades.
Yes, I remember because I went with my family, and none of us had any idea what we were in for, and my mother and my brother have kind of weak constitutions so they walked out fairly quickly but I was like, “You go! I’m stayin’!”
AH: [laughs]
MJ: Great. So your mother and your brother both hated it entirely, but you liked us.
I think all the morbid jokes and the—there was quite a bit of body humor, too, in that show. You know what, I think the suicide did it for my brother and the body humor killed it for my mom.
MJ: Well, it’s nice to know we’re alienating people.
[laughs]
MJ: We like to do that. Well, that’s good. I quite like that. I think I might mention that in the future to some of the other interviewers. “She came with her mother and her brother and they both left.”
[laughs] “But she stayed. And came back to conduct an interview two years later.”
AH: That’s right, yeah.
You wanna know more about the Tiger Lillies or either of their current shows, Freak Show and Sinderella? Visit their website or their MySpace.
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