The Tiger Lillies - Live in Concert

The last time I went to see The Tiger Lillies I didn’t get in. My mate did though. But he’s six foot three and eighteen stone. Tattooed inside his mouth are the words: ‘I love meat’. I wasn’t too drunk or poor or young or anything, I was just too small. We were in Hungary at the Sziget music festival, and England’s scariest musical clowns were playing in the theatre tent. The crowd was rammed in near the stage and jammed into every crevice. You had to stub your fags out on your neighbour. And lick booze off their sweaty necks. We got there late and the bouncers were at the door with, like, batons and bulldogs. They looked at me and said: “Bugger off.” My mate looked at them and said he’d bugger them off if they didn’t let him in. He bulldozed his way to the front and came out telling me never to miss them again.

So here I am, in the Pleasance courtyard waiting to see The Tiger Lillies. And I’m like, what’s with the crowd? It’s all sodden couples and ladies who brunch. What’s gone right with the world? How has this troupe of troglodytes found an audience among The Friends of The Fringe? What are they doing?

What they do is dress as clowns and sing songs about human freaks. The Tiger Lillies fit somewhere on the triangle between Slipknot, Edith Piaf and The Velvet Underground. Singer Martyn Jacques focuses on those left out by society, be they scabrous hookers or serial killers. Blessed are the meak and the violent. Blessed are the rapists and the killers. Blessed are those whose life is not like yours.

He sings about them with a prickly falsetto voice and a diction that is robbed from a phonology textbook. His delivery is empathetic and his timing poetic. The crowd winces and laughs at once as his words please and provoke. Singers and comedians alike would do well to listen and learn. Supporting him are drummer Adrian Huge and double-bassist, Adrian Stout, who are far more than mere assistants. Huge filters in Huge’s own pantomime drumming, and a steady bass, keep the show together.

Sat theatrically in pleasant rows, the crowd is shocked and moved as far as their uniform roots will allow them: middle-class, middlebrow, middle of the road. A few ladies are so moved that they walk out. Before they do, they patiently wait to the end of ‘Kick a baby’, with its refrain: ‘I kick a little baby / Or maybe an old lady / I kick a little baby down the stairs’

Their patience was telling. Because no matter how foul or crude these songs are, the world is ready for The Tiger Lillies, twenty-odd albums in. The next time you see them, the place will be packed. But the bouncers won’t need bulldogs to restrain the crowds.

Reviewed by Des Ryan

Tiger Lillies
Pleasance Courtyard
21:45 4-21 Aug