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tigerlillies.ru
The Tiger Lillies are double bassist Adrian Stout, singer and accordionist Martyn Jacques and drummer Adrian Huge.
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Cabaret Sinners
The Tiger Lillies bring their music hall sound to Moscow.
By Sergey Chernov
Published: March 28, 2008
Cult punk-cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies will showcase songs from its new albums "7 Deadly Sins" and "Love and War" at Apelsin on Saturday. The band, which describes itself on its web site as "[A] criminal castrati and his accordion-driven anarchic Brechtian street opera trio," is a regular visitor to Russia with its unique sound and dark, controversial song material.
Released earlier this month, "7 Deadly Sins," the band's 21st album, was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting "The Last Judgment," said Martyn Jacques, the band's falsetto singer and squeeze box player, in a telephone interview from his home in London.
"[Bosch] has a triptych painting in Vienna called "The Last Judgment," where you have a picture of the Garden of Eden, and then a picture of the seven deadly sins, and then the third part of the triptych is hell, where all sinners will go," he said.
The "7 Deadly Sins" full stage show, which Jacques said he hoped to bring to Russia in the future, features comic burlesque performer Ophelia Bitz as well as Punch and Judy, the puppet creations of British puppeteer and performer Nathan Evans. "[The painting] is a narrative story, if you think about it. So I used this narrative story and had the puppets tell the story through the eyes of Punch and Judy."
"It's something I'm quite obsessed with," said Jacques, whose band released an album called "Punch and Judy" in 2004.
"It's very violent. The classic scene in Punch and Judy is Punch killing his baby, then his wife, then several other puppets. He's a kind of a psychopath who kills everybody. He has a club and he beats them all to death with it."
"It's a strange, kind of ambiguous thing, these puppets are used to entertain children, and yet, actually, he's a very horrible character, a murderer."
The Tiger Lillies, which also features double bass player Adrian Stout and drummer Adrian Huge, has released two new albums since performing in Russia in June last year.
The band shocked the conservative audience at the Edinburgh International Festival in August when it performed its other recent release, "Love and War," written and recorded specially for the festival.
The festival's opera offerings were themed around the 400th anniversary of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo," considered one of the first operas in music history. The band's tribute, inspired by Monteverdi's "Madrigals of Love and War," was a set of passionate anti-war, violence-filled songs, with lyrics such as "There is no glory in battle / There is no glory in war / You are all just fools / The politicians' whores."
Jacques said that Jonathan Mills, the festival's new artistic director, approached The Tiger Lillies because he saw a link between the London cabaret trio and Monteverdi, who also wrote harsh and obscene lyrics.
"[Monteverdi] was actually quite a controversial figure in his time," said Jacques who described the concert as "difficult," as the audience that filled the 2,000-seat Usher Hall turned out to be "old people interested in classical music ... expecting something like Bach or Beethoven."
"It was, I think, done on purpose by the artistic director of the festival, because he wanted to try to do something that was a bit more sort of dangerous and a bit more avant-garde than the usual Bach-Beethoven thing," he said.
"So he [Mills] did manage to cause a little bit of a shock by working with The Tiger Lillies, I guess. But it was a strange one, really. It was obviously not particularly nice to have people walking out of your show before you finished."
The crowd at Apelsin on Saturday should be a little more clued in as to what to expect.
The Tiger Lillies perform Sat. at 8 p.m. at Apelsin, located at 15 Malaya Gruzinskaya Ulitsa. Metro Krasnopresnenskaya. Tel. 253-0253.
Copyright © 2008 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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May 8 - 15, 2008 
