London-based experimental rock trio the Tiger Lillies have long resisted easy categorization thanks to their singular fusion of chanson, opera, and Gypsy music. Formed in 1989 after singer Martyn Jacques ran an advertisement seeking a drummer and a bass player, the group received replies solely from Adrian Huge and Phil Butcher, who rounded out its first configuration. Early output appeared on cassettes later compiled as Bouquet of Vegetables: The Early Years, followed by the 1994 release Births, Marriages and Deaths; bassist Adrian Stout took Phil Butcher’s place the following year.
Throughout the remainder of the decade the trio maintained a brisk pace, delivering Spit Bucket in 1995, The Brothel to the Cemetery in 1996, and Farmyard Filth in 1997. In 1998 they supplied music for Shockheaded Peter, a darkly comic stage adaptation of a nineteenth-century German collection of cautionary children’s tales; the production yielded a same-titled album and later earned two Olivier Awards in 2002. Another landmark arrived in 2003 when the band joined forces with the Kronos Quartet and illustrator-writer Edward Gorey for The Gorey End, an album drawn from a cache of Gorey’s unpublished stories and drawings that surfaced shortly after his death and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Crossover Album.
Subsequent projects found the Tiger Lillies reworking established narratives in Punch and Judy (2004), The Little Matchgirl (2006), and both The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Hamlet (2012), while also partnering with the Symphony Orchestra of Norrlandsoperan on 2007’s Urine Palace and with photographer Nan Goldin on 2011’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Adrian Huge departed in 2012; touring drummer Mike Pickering filled the role until Jonas Golland became a permanent member in 2015.
The 2010s brought an ever-widening range of source material. Lulu: A Murder Ballad (2014) drew on Frank Wedekind’s nineteenth-century German plays, A Dream Turns Sour examined World War I, and Either Or engaged the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. In 2016 the group issued the Cole Porter tribute Love for Sale alongside Goosebumps Alive, a song-cycle homage to R.L. Stine’s popular books. Early the next year A Cold Night in Soho offered a stark, reflective portrait of Martyn Jacques’s experiences in 1980s Soho.
