Immoral sonority

>> London’s Tiger Lillies sing “songs of filth” with only the best intentions

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There are plenty of lyrics in the Tiger Lillies songbook that give one an unvarnished glimpse into the psychological machinery of this London trio. To wit: “I could’ve been a killer/Who ate his victims’ flesh/I could’ve eat them rotten/I could’ve eat them fresh” (from “Killer”).
Then there’s this jaunty nautical gem, from “Sailors”: “And the wind it blows inland/And the death you can smell/Smashed on rocks and smashed on boulders/Smashed in living hell.”

Or how ’bout some dysfunctional family values: “My mother was a prostitute/My father was a thief/My auntie ran a brothel/It gave cheap relief” (from “Crime”).

The rather appropriately titled “Terrible,” however, neatly summarizes the raison d’être of the Tiger Lillies, with these lines: “I’m terrible, terrible, shouldn’t be allowed/To sing my songs of filth to a decent crowd/ I’m terrible, terrible, shouldn’t be allowed/But when I do offend someone, it makes me feel so proud.”

What’s so funny about ...

If giving offence is the main aim of singin’, songwritin’, accordion-squeezin’ Tiger Lillie Martyn Jacques, his lyrical loop-dee-loops about rape, infanticide, blasphemy, disease, freaks, feces, doom and the devil—just to name a few jolly topics—are right on target. But the fact is, Jacques’s primary goal is to plaster a smile on your face.
“Sometimes, when you read things, they may not read very funny,” the friendly, soft-spoken Jacques says over the line from London, “but when you listen to those lines being performed, because of the way they’re performed, they can take on a different life. That’s certainly the case with what I do. Some of the lyrics I sing may not seem funny, but when you actually see me perform them, they become funny.”

The Tiger Lillies’ formula for funny sees Jacques delivering his nutty notions in a ridiculous castrati falsetto over music that at once suggests vintage German cabaret, garlic-flavoured Parisian chanson and minimalist yet energetic ska—all care of three yobs dolled up like Dickensian droogs. What’s perhaps funniest is that as offensive as they are, as they have to be, it’s with nothing less than the most noble intentions.

“I think it’s quite interesting that, for example, you get a lot of radical clothes designers who are very interested in the swastika and the use of it in their clothes designs. Something like the swastika has a huge taboo about it. By actually using symbols like that is the only way of deflating the taboo. I mean, people these days will make jokes about Attila the Hun and nobody would care. But if you make jokes about Adolf Hitler—it’s still relatively close, historically.
“I’m also very interested in gay culture, in the way gay men take something like the skinhead look. It’s the same thing—deflating the taboo. There was a time when, if you saw a skinhead walking down the street, everybody was really frightened. Then a group of gay men started dressing up as skinheads. Nowadays, in London, if you see a skinhead walking down the street, you actually think, oh, he’s probably gay. You can imagine how humiliating and deflating it is for an extremely nasty, macho skinhead to walk down the street and have all these people looking at him, thinking he’s gay.”

The real enemy

Not everyone sees things the way Jacques does. The Tiger Lillies have incurred the wrath of not only the church (a blasphemous, cancelled Good Friday concert saw to that) but of its self-righteous, authoritarian equivalent on the left.

“These politically correct people who object to my lyrics are the real enemy, the really dangerous ones. They’re fascists! Fascists! They keep all the taboos in place, making no attempt to deflate the taboos and in fact, they oppose people like myself who do. They are, actually, the most dangerous group of people in society. Maybe they’re not fascists in the literal sense, but they are the curators of fascism, the curators of all the reactionary, nasty, right-wing people that exist in our society because they keep their power in place.
“That’s why artists through the centuries have been persecuted. They try to deflate and take the piss out of the church, for example, which has obviously been an extremely dodgy and fascistic institution through the centuries. Artists have come along and mocked the hypocrisy of the church. Then you get all the nice people saying, ‘You really musn’t do that! You really can’t criticize people’s faith!’ But what they’re really doing is keeping that hypocrisy alive and strong.”

At Cabaret (2111 St-Laurent) from Monday, July 15 to Sunday, July 21, 9pm nightly, $23.95

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