Brighton Year-Round 2019
The Devil’s Playground
The Tiger Lilies
Genre: Dark Comedy, Live Music, Music
Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
This new offering from the Tiger Lilies is dark, cruel and yet strangely seductive and beautiful as always. The band go straight for the jugular right from the start as they invite us to ‘roll up, roll up’ to the Devil’s Fairground, a cheery little song about death and heroin addiction, whilst the audience are wreathed in plenty of smoke. Dressed in their signature look of hats, checked suits and dark clown make-up, they are tricksters and pranksters from an avant-garde punk world, tempting us into joining them in their sinful pleasures.
The Theatre Royal was filled with a rowdy, enthusiastic audience, and showed the venue at it’s best, packed with life and a truly diverse crowd.
Review
This new offering from the Tiger Lilies is dark, cruel and yet strangely seductive and beautiful as always. The Brechtian street opera trio have followed up their West End hit Shockheaded Peter with a series of shows in a similar vein, covering the dark side of life with their favourite themes of drug addiction, prostitution, violence and despair, temptation and sin. It’s now their 30th anniversary tour, and the Devil’s Playground does not disappoint.
The line-up consists of the extraordinary, needle -in -your -veins vocals of Martyn Jacques, who also plays accordion, keyboard and a home-made ukulele which looks like it consists of no more than a fretboard and machine heads. Adrian Stout, wearing a sharply loud plaid suit, took breaks from the electric double bass to provide eerie, haunting strains of theremin and musical saw to underpin Jacques’ camp, theatrical falsetto. Jonas Golland is on drums and percussion including bowed cymbals.
The band go straight for the jugular right from the start as they invite us to ‘roll up, roll up’ to the Devil’s Fairground, a cheery little song about death and heroin addiction, whilst the audience are wreathed in plenty of smoke. Dressed in their signature look of hats, checked suits and dark clown make-up, they are tricksters and pranksters from an avant-garde punk world, tempting us into joining them in their sinful pleasures.
The instrumentation is usually accordion, bass and drums, but to change the mood for ‘A Million Sins’, Stout pulls a musical saw out of his scabbard like a sword as Jaques swaps the accordion for keyboard. The accordion breathes, the cymbal is bowed, and the lyrics are straight in there with mentions of the Golem and blow jobs with bitter, vicious, dark humour.
The songs are set in post-soviet Prague, where the band spent time in the early 90’s, and are loosely based on characters they met there, and the dark underbelly of the city at the time. There are political references to the KGB, Siberia and torture, and yet sometimes Jacque’s charming and yet chilling falsetto crosses over into comedy and we are reminded of Screaming’ Jay Hawkins, Anthony and the Johnsons, and nights dancing in the Polka-dot tent at a festival…
The audience complied enthusiastically when asked to supplement a chorus with cries of “Drugs!” and laughed with delight as Martyn Jacques spat at them that their throats would be CUT, while drawing his finger sharply across his own, and head-butting the microphone with his bowler hat. Other than within some of the songs, there was little audience interaction, the band simply moving on to the next number as the applause died away.
The second half of the show began with a number featuring the musical saw then moved on to a breathtakingly beautiful song ‘Golden Brown’, which featured Jacques’s falsetto at it’s bittersweet best. Then , after some bowed bass, the audience were treated to a superbly hammed-up cover of Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’.
As the theatre was packed with major fans who, when prompted for requests, bellowed out such a medley of song titles, it’s a wonder the band could make any single one out. Perhaps, under those circumstances, it was inevitable that we were treated to the supremely bellowable ‘Bastard’.
The show closed with what felt like that rare thing – a genuine encore, the house lights going back down, the record music that had common after the band left the stage being turned off, and people who’d begun heading for the exits swiftly retaking their seats or standing fo the final number 0 the superb and very camp ‘Gin’.
The Theatre Royal filled with a rowdy, enthusiastic audience, and showed the venue at it’s best, packed with life and a truly diverse crowd.
