The Tiger Lillies

Who are the Tiger Lillies? It depends

With 21 albums since 1994, elaborate and acclaimed stage shows, a collaboration with the late, great Edward Gorey, and a recent art book collecting all their lyrics, the Tiger Lillies’ singer Martin Jacques attributes the band’s artistic success to the shifting range of emotions they have been able to cover in their work over the years — and to the accordion and operatic falsetto that he utilizes to do so.

“It seems to work,” said Jacques. “I’ve been able to portray emotion and pathos and comedy and violence and all these different emotions through it and that was what was lacking before, I didn’t seem to be able to do it, playing guitar or playing piano and singing in a low voice. I think it’s mainly emotional power, a transparency in a way of expressing yourself and then being able to express all these different emotions.”

It’s hard to pin down the Tiger Lillies’ musical style. Often, it pulls from German cabaret sounds, other times it has been described as circus music. The band’s lyrical concerns float about the macabre and perverted — tales of pimps and hookers and criminals and misfits and violence. Their biggest success in the United States was a musical celebration of Edward Gorey, called “The Gorey End,” which was nominated for a Grammy. In England, they made a splash with “Shockheaded Peter,” their stage adaptation of the violent 19th-century children’s fables of Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, which one two Olivier Awards in 2002.

The presentation of their work is equally shocking. Their stage presence with demented makeup and costuming conjures up thoughts of demonic clowns and silent movie zombies, playing arcane instruments, including a drum kit fashioned with kitchen utensils.

“I’m trying to create something interesting,” said Jacques, “trying to play at something less pedestrian. I’m just trying to make something you can look at, sit there and watch or listen to and say ‘Oh, that’s weird, that’s strange, that’s disturbing!’”

Jacques admits that this has not made for easy commercial success for the band. He’s actually had record company people tell him that while they think the band is excellent, there is no way in the world to market them. Being so hard to categorize can be a business weakness if you are seeking to be a superstar, but Jacques is not and he’s content to do his own thing regardless of whether normal folks get it.

“We’re a record company’s nightmare, we’re a marketing man’s worst dream,” said Jac-ques. “People come up to us in airports and say ‘Oh, you’re in a band’ and they say ‘What sort of music do you make?’ and the three of us sort of look at each other. ‘What should we say today?’ We usually say ’satanic folk,’ that usually scares them away. You can’t even put us in a category in a record shop.”

Inevitably, being different — and accentuating the macabre and the perverse — comes back to slap the band in the face. Recently in England, the band made local headlines in Islington — “Satanic Rock Band Plays In Church on Holiest Day of the Year” screamed the front page.

“How dare they call us a rock band, that was my initial reaction,” said Jacques.

There have even been attempts to have them banned by some outraged citizens in Australia and New Zealand who seem to have confused lyrical subject matter with reality.

“There are a lot of worse things in the world than writing some silly songs about having sex with sheep,” said Jacques.

Sometimes it appears that the mainstream world only attacks freakiness when it is on parade in the actual music — Michael Jackson might be a bit freaky, but that’s not reflected in his songs. Given that reality, there may be more weirdos than anyone would expect, they just don’t celebrate it. Besides, Jacques thinks the he and mainstream musicians have more in common than most people think — and that’s what gives him the shivers.

“If you listen to typical rock star people talking, they sound just like me,” said Jacques. “That freaks me out. They really take themselves very seriously. They talk about their craft, they talk about lyric writing and stuff just like I would.”

The mainstream has far more in common with the Tiger Lillies than that, however. All you have to do is look around at the number of ordinary kids of all ages embracing Goth culture signposts, from Marilyn Manson to Lemony Snicket to Hot Topic to Tim Burton to Harry Potter and scores of other pop culture pheonomenons. The macabre is in.

“I must admit that I have these horrible feelings,” said Jacques. “I’m quite old and fat and I do think there are these young, thin versions are going into it now, same sort of thing that I’ve been part of, grubbing around little bars doing it for 16 years, crawling around various dives around the world playing this sort of music, then these young, slim types are going to come along and become successful.”

Not that the up-and-comers don’t take notice of the old guys as they careen to the top — recently the Tiger Lillies were asked to open for the Dresden Dolls, who are fans of Jacques’ band.

“It was ever so very funny,” said Jacques, “because we turned up and there were all these people with makeup on and bowler hats and they were all like 16. They play a version of rock, but they still call themselves Brechtian Cabaret, which is what we have been calling ourselves for years. They very nicely asked us to come and support them and so we went and it was very funny and they really liked us, all these young kids.”

That was the first time the band had ever found themselves with an all-younger audience, but some do creep into their own shows.

“We have young kids coming up to us in our concerts,” said Jacques, “and they say ‘You’re like death metal without the metal.’ So they seem to like it, a lot of these people. There’s not many of them because we don’t get the exposure.”

For Jacques, that’s just the way the music industry works — his band gets attacked as devil worshippers in England, while kids everywhere are buying into the image that is being assaulted and younger people are getting record contracts and marketing deals. That’s OK with Jacques and his band, who have been able to build careers doing the types of music and shows they want for a good-sized audience. In fact, he’s proud that he actually has created something unusual and original that has gotten quite a bit of notice — and he views the people who attack his band for moral reasons as just part of the mix of weirdos in his creative realm.

“There a lot of lonely people with brains that are totally twisted and confused, I suppose,” said Jacques. “And I write about those people. I like writing about those people. Give me a twisted, confused story and I’ll write a song about it.”