The trio, which Jacques describes as heavily influenced by the style of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, are playing a series of shows around the country, including an appearance at the Brunswick Town Hall as part of the Brunswick Music Festival. “We’re playing in Adelaide, Hobart, and Canberra as well,” Jacques confirms. “We’ve been doing this for 25 years now…the Tiger Lillies have been going for 25 years. It’s changed a lot and people have changed. The original bass player, drummer and I – it’s no longer the same. When you’re younger you’re more excited, aren’t you? It’s a bit like dogs. You see a young dog and they’re quite excited, aren’t they? And as a dog grows older it becomes a bit less excited by, well, everything really.
“The analogy with the dog is quite good I think. I still enjoy it all very much, and I actually really like Australia. I’ve really enjoyed coming there – every time I come to Australia I like it more. The first time I went there, which was quite a long time ago now, I think we went to the Adelaide Festival when Robin Archer was doing it. That was the first time we went over. She’s a great singer.” And no wonder they got on, as Archer had previously appeared in a production of Threepenny Opera playing Jenny, the turncoat prostitute originally portrayed by the Austrian actress Lotte Lenya of From Russia With Love fame.
“She was very nice and it was very exciting to go over,” recounts Jacques. “But I didn’t like it that much that first time. I don’t know how many times we’ve been to Australia, it must be around six times now, but I like it more and more. The thing in coming to Australia is the journey – it’s a long way, isn’t it? I find it a really fascinating place. All the buildings are really strange, the statues of Queen Victoria and so on.” It’s Jacques’ theory that early British settlers wanted to create a little slice of Britain wherever they landed.
They really tried to make it look English. You know we did a whole album and a show in Sydney Harbour called Cockatoo Prison, it was all based on that whole convict thing. I studied all these folk songs. Quite often they didn’t do very much, nicked a purse or something, and that was it, they were shipped off to Australia. It was pretty extreme.”
A prolific group, The Tiger Lillies these days tend to rely on a broad range of subject matter for inspiration. “After you’ve written a few hundred songs, you’ve sort of covered the internal stuff,” says Jacques. “I’m always looking for inspiration from different things, and history is interesting. We do a lot of project based stuff these days – we did an album based on Hamlet, one on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Wordsworth, and we’ve done lots of different projects.”
Their latest show, Lulu: A Murder Ballad – also produced as an album released earlier this year, was based on Frank Wedekind’s classic plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, both written around the turn of the 20th century. The chief protagonist, Lulu, is described as the “primal form of woman”, seducing and murdering her way to a violent death at the hands of the infamous Jack the Ripper. The show incorporated 20 of Jacques’ songs, woven into a single, haunting ballad. The British trio’s latest visit to Melbourne shouldn’t be missed by anyone who likes their music dark, twisted, and strangely beautiful.
BY JOSH FERGEUS
