Back on home turf for a month-long residency to mark their 20th year, “punk cabaret” trio The Tiger Lillies are as fragrant as ever - just don’t put them in a vase.
Because a Lillies gig is a stroll on the seamy side, down crack alleys and cul-de-smacks where life’s unfortunates come terrible croppers. It’s Threepenny Opera territory - hookers, freaks and ne’er-do-wells - and no sin is left unturned: the Lillies’ overdriven oompah songs, but one facet of their repertoire, could soundtrack George Grosz’s caricatures of 1920s Berlin.
Backed by longtime foils Adrian Stout on contrabass, theremin and bowed saw, and Adrian Huge on a grab bag of percussion, frontman Martyn Jacques, wearing bowler hat and greasepaint (the Fat Controller via Baron Samedi), gives shape to listing sea shanties, sly ballads and wind-up tangos - hymns to death and deviancy all - with gusto, accordion, and a keening falsetto that is the band’s hallmark.
By turns hectoring and tender, if at times suggestive of Dame Edna Everage gargling with cellophane, Jacques’s voice merits a wider audience.
But a warning to the faithful. Playing a set culled exclusively from their most accessible works - Shockheaded Peter’s cautionary tales for impossible brats, and their adaptations of illustrator Edward Gorey’s unpublished stories - this isn’t the Lillies in all their gleeful extremity.
Mincemeat is made of no sacred cows; there’s no Banging In The Nails, Killer, or Piss On Your Grave (whose subject, the summary execution of the Good Book’s major players and subsequent, erm, watering in, caused an outbreak of smelling salts in Canterbury’s Gulbenkian Theatre).
Though there are moments of menace, notably on Bully Boys, Fidgety Phil and Besotted Mother, this is the parlour version, intimate, almost domestic - it’s a sight easier on the bestiality, blasphemy and sadism, but also, for non-fans, to find some room for.