Phantoms of the Junk Opera

The Tiger Lillies are coming to town (and you're gonna get Suicide for Christmas).

by Shaun Brady

Mark Holthusen INSANE CLOWN POLKA: The Tiger Lillies' holiday show at the TLA will compile a gaggle of tunes from the band's near- 20-year back catalog. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It was a scenario Edward Gorey himself could have written: Morbid-minded musician gets letter from reclusive author of a similarly macabre bent, inviting said composer to turn said scribe's unpublished manuscripts into cheerily bleak stage show. Two days before the two are set to meet in person for dinner and suitably off-kilter conversation, the author dies, maintaining his mystique to the end.

Of course, if Gorey had written the scenario, it would have involved lots of puns and rhymes, scheming children and improbably named lords and ladies. But he surely would have gotten some sort of enjoyment out of the idea of a collaboration from beyond the grave. The proposed show did finally happen — it was called "The Gorey End," naturally, with Gorey's writing interpreted by Martyn Jacques, leader of the British grand guignol cabaret band the Tiger Lillies.

One can see where Gorey may have found a kindred spirit in Jacques. After all, the holiday show the Tiger Lillies will bring to the TLA this week is festively titled "Suicide for Christmas," and will compile a gaggle of tunes from the band's near-20-year back catalog that fit the theme. If there's any doubt left as to where Jacques' songwriting head is at, the concentration will be on self-extinction rather than the holiday. "I haven't actually ever written a specifically Christmas song," Jacques admits, "but I might try."

The Tiger Lillies are best known in the States for their "junk opera" stage show Shockheaded Peter, which managed to channel their darkly comic aesthetic into the New York theater world a few years back. Currently in the works are shows based around the seven deadly sins, freak shows and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Jacques refers to their regular concerts as "cheap theatrical experiences," and he lugs around a suitcase full of props to illustrate the songs.

The frontman himself is enough of a spectacle: clad in a bowler hat and sporting a heavy layer of ghastly white makeup, manipulating an accordion while wailing in a high castrato voice about all manner of unpleasantness. His particular vaudeville of the damned was inspired in large part by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, which Jacques says he listened to fairly obsessively in his early 20s.

"The instrumentation and the songs about prostitutes and starving and war, and the general cynicism of Brecht's lyrics and Weill's music, were very inspiring to me," he says. "Jams and rock music had been extremely commercialized. Electronic music and synthesizers and electric guitars feeding back and saxophones, all that kind of music had been done, and I felt like the music of the Threepenny Opera was a lot more obscure, a lot less used, and a much more interesting area of inspiration than to use rock or jazz. As an artist I think that appealed to me as I tried to carve out some kind of original niche."

In 1989, when Jacques pulled together a trio of musicians to put his concept of Brechtian pop cabaret into action, he assumed that his vision would propel the Tiger Lillies to fame and fortune.

"The initial concept was that I would make a very original and unique-sounding style of music," he recalls, "and that would be enough to guarantee that I would be up there in the hall of fame now with Bob Dylan and U2. I believed that our uniqueness, the concept of playing the accordion and singing in a high voice, would hoist me into superstardom, because I believed that originality was key when developing music. I've spent the last 20 years in the not-so-slow realization that I was very naïve."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Tiger Lillies play Wed., Dec. 12, 7 p.m., with "Our Hollow Earth" by Geoff Sobelle and Bradford Trojan, $25, Fillmore at the TLA, 334 South St., 215-336-2000, livenation.com.