The Tiger Lillies’ live launch party for COVID-19 Vol II – and Russian fans

The Tiger Lillies (Photograph ©Daniela Matejschek)

A couple of weeks ago, I chatted to singer/songwriter Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies in Berlin, where he lives, about the release of their second album about the COVID-19 pandemic – COVID-19 Vol II, now available on Bandcamp.

Tonight (Friday 19th June) they are having a live launch party for the album on YouTube.

Well, that’s the simple description of it… It is actually more complicated than that, as fellow Tiger Lilly Adrian Stout, who is currently living in Athens, told me in a FaceTime call…

Adrian Stout (Photograph ©Andrey Kezzyn)

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JOHN: So you’re doing the live launch party tonight. You sit in Athens, Martyn sits in Berlin. You play live with each other, just like a stage show. That’s easy, then…

ADRIAN: In an ideal world, that would be how we do it and we have tried to, but the problem is the online audio delay…

I have to physically shift the audio to compensate for the delay – sometimes it speeds up; sometimes it slows down. So I have to do lots of tiny little edits to get everything in sync with Martyn.

We set up a Zoom meeting. So we both see each other on-screen. Then Martyn plays, but he doesn’t listen to me. He just plays without any headphones. And I listen to him, so I play along with him. It would be better if he could hear me, but he doesn’t need to. If he tries to hear me, he hears me half a second late, so he can’t really play with me. He can see me – he can see what I’m doing – he can react – but he can’t hear me.

The Tiger Lillies’ latest album – COVID-19 VOL II

So I drop in my audio afterwards in post-production and then I make a video which I send to him and he watches it.

As far as I’m concerned, I am playing with Martyn live but, because of the half-second delay, I have to compensate for that afterwards.

It IS a live performance. I actually am playing along with Martyn live…

It’s just I have to do some post-production stuff to sort out bits that might be half a second out.

Martyn says it feels like a ‘real’ gig to him. He is performing. He can see me. He doesn’t necessarily need to hear me. He’s performing in his own world most of the time. Martyn is in his own reverie of performance and I play with him.

It is kinda the same thing we do in a concert, but we are doing it in two different countries.

JOHN: So the online audio signal on Zoom can both slow down and speed up within the same recording?

ADRIAN: Yeah. The video is buffering. It’s speeding up a little bit; sometimes it slows down a little bit. I have sometimes had to move individual notes to get them in time with Martyn on the faster songs… to get it musically where it should be. I think it’s to do with the way it streams across the internet. It drifts. Sometimes the link just disappears while he’s playing. It is quite skittish.

It took me six or eight hours to adjust the one-hour performance you’ll see tonight.

The globetrotting Tiger Lillies in Berlin…

JOHN: Is it in the nature of Zoom to do all this skittishness?

ADRIAN: It’s not really designed to do what we’re trying to do with it.

JOHN: It must do your head in. 

ADRIAN: It is quite frustrating. 

JOHN: Perhaps this is the future of worldwide performance.

ADRIAN: I’m not convinced. It’s a stopgap during the pandemic.

Last week, there was a bar here in Athens that put on a live gig. The band was in the bar and the bar was open so people could stand outside watching it from about 2 or 3 metres away. But I have to say I didn’t feel very comfortable. It felt a bit risky.

JOHN: Risky? I think The Tiger Lillies actually played during a riot in Athens?

ADRIAN: In 2011, there was a big protest movement going on in Athens about the Greek financial bailout. The demonstrators basically occupied the central square opposite the Parliament. It was like a whole camp. It was like M*A*S*H. There were about 10,000 people or more. They had field tents and there were people there manning it 24-hours a day.

They asked us if we would go down and play a few songs for them. As we were playing, there were people rioting, storming the police barricades. People in combat gear. Molotov cocktails being thrown. The police were returning that with tear gas and rubber bullets. You could smell the tear gas coming in. It was like a cross between M*A*S*H and the First World War. It was a very surreal concert to play.

JOHN: So, in the middle of all this anarchy, The Tiger Lillies are playing with painted faces?

ADRIAN: Well, a lot of the demonstrators had put this white stuff – Maalox – you drink it to treat heartburn and acid indigestion – they had put it on their faces to protect themselves from the gas. So they all looked like they had white-painted faces as well.

JOHN: At one time, The Tiger Lillies were described as a comedy band.

ADRIAN: I think maybe when we first started we a bit more of a comedy band. I joined in 1995; within about two years, we were in our comedy phase. It was lots of jokes; lots of props.

Previously to that, we had played to rough pubs in London where we had to try and play loud and fast and hard to be heard over the noise of the audience – that was sort-of our punk phase. There wasn’t a lot of room for nuance.

Whereas, around 1997, when we started playing in smaller cabaret-style venues and theatres in Germany and so on, we felt we could stretch out a bit so we could start telling stories they might actually listen to and we started buying loads of props – those whirly things you whizz around and little battery-powered dogs that would flip over. We had a song called Car Crash about Princess Diana and we had a Barbie Doll and used to drive it off the stage.

Then we moved into Shockheaded Peter, when we moved into a more theatrical kind of world. We also did a circus show – with contortionists and acrobats and all that sort of stuff. But when we started doing Shockheaded Peter more full-time, we dropped a lot of the props, because it became crazy to carry round suitcases with little bits of plastic in them.

Martyn was always writing new songs, so the material was always moving on. We’ve moved on continuously. Each phase only lasts about six months. We must have done about 45 albums by now.

JOHN: Is COVID-19 ripe for comedy?

ADRIAN: Black comedy. The whole affair has been rife with it. We had the whole toilet roll debacle which we used for a song in the first album. And now we have Donald Trump telling everyone to ingest bleach and we got a song out of that one as well. But this album is definitely more serious than the first one because the situation is a lot more serious. The first one was more absurdist. 

In the first phase, it was the public who were acting bizarrely. In the second phase, it’s the governments that have been behaving bizarrely. This album is a lot more about loss – more tragedy in it. Martyn is a bit more riled-up. Angrier. Seeing a lot more injustice.

JOHN: I hear The Tiger Lillies have a following in Russia and Mexico. That’s surprising.

ADRIAN: l think any place where they’ve had a significant amount of death and tragedy and they sort-of drink themselves through it as well. We’ve been big in Russia since the 1990s, really. We used to go there a lot and still go there a couple of times a year and play to a couple of thousand people. 

There’s lots of underground stuff going on in Russia and I think the waltzes are very like the oompah stuff. Russians love ska music. It’s very similar to traditional Russian folk music. There’s a whole punk/ska scene there. The death oompah stuff we do goes down there very well. 

There is a band called Leningrad who covered some of our songs in the 1990s and that’s how they got to know us. The singer Sergey “Shnur” Shnurov. – he’s like the Shane McGowan of Russia – did some gigs with us and we did an album with them. So we’re quite well-known in the Russian underground punk/ska world.

JOHN: I’m surprised there’s a musical connection.

ADRIAN: It’s like the Czech polkas – like military bands playing polkas.

Mexican mariachi stuff all comes from Central European marching bands and the Central European thing is something we mine a lot. Lots of Austro-Hungarian soldiers went over to Mexico in the 19th century. There was Czech-Bohemian music over in Texas and Mexico.

And they love us in Mexico. It’s the whole accordion/death thing and the make-up. I would have thought they’d seen it all before, but they seem to think it’s wonderfully charming and flattering for us to be singing songs about Mexico with accordions

JOHN: But to get back to the point of this blog – your launch party tonight on YouTube at 7.00pm UK time (8.00pm CET)… It’s free…

ADRIAN: Well, yes, but we would hope they would donate the £10 entry fee.

Zuma Puma is on her way to Mexico via Canada: “Clown is nothing like improv!”

Zuma via Skype, going to Mexico via Canada

Canadian performer Zuma Puma aka Nelly Scott is leaving Britain next Thursday. She has left her London flat and was with family up in the Midlands when I talked to her via Skype.

“Why are you going back to Canada?” I asked.

“To get to Mexico.”

“Why via Canada?”

“Because it was £100 cheaper and I can visit my family in Toronto. I might even teach a clown intensive at my mum’s university – Brock University. She teaches playwriting and directing there. I am going to Mexico on a one-way ticket.”

“Why Mexico?” I asked. “It’s full of Mexicans.”

“Exactly,” said Nelly. “I love the Mexicans. I have wanted to go there for a very long time.”

“Why? Are they lacking clowns in Mexico?”

“Yes. I’m going to work with my friend and his company La Bouffant Sociale. He was my clown partner in the Cirque du Soleil School in Montreal. I studied there for a year – L’École de Clown et Comédie.”

“You are going to Mexico City?”

“We are just meeting there and then we’re going to a salty beach where we have a 15-day artist residency, building a show out of beach garbage. So that’ll be exciting. Then there is a tour in Mexico.”

“But before you go, you’re busy in London,” I prompted.

“Yes. This Thursday, we’re doing One Man, Two Ghosts at Unscene 199 Festival at New River Studios in Manor House.”

“Which is…?”

“You saw it in Edinburgh and said you liked it.”

“I did, but for those who didn’t see it…”

“It’s a clown farce: basically Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit as told by three complete idiots. A two-layered story of what’s happening in the play and with the players beneath the play.”

“And then,” I said, “your last Lost Cabaret show in Stockwell on Friday.”

Annie Bashford and Nathan Lang at last month’s Edinburgh Fringe

“Well, it’s not the last. I’m handing it over to Nathan Lang and Annie Bashford who will be continuing it monthly.”

“Until you come back from the Americas?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t know if I will come back to London. I might come back to Bristol. I feel I’m pretty much done in London.”

“You’ve been invited back to do a full run of One Man, Two Ghosts at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe at the New Town Theatre.”

“Yes. I will be back maybe in June or July next year to take One Man, Two Ghosts to the next stage.”

“And this coming weekend you are also doing your Clown Life Intensive workshops…”

“Yes. At The Pleasance Theatre in London on Saturday and Sunday.”

“What is Clown Life Intensive?” I asked.

“It’s a merging between the world of clown and personal development. So it’s clowning but not just for performers – it’s for anyone who’s interested in building their confidence and personal development, discovering their humour and looking at tools to play and understand themselves a bit more. So it’s a deep development process. You look at yourself and it’s an amplification of who you are.

“There are bits of themselves that most people don’t want to admit – they’re OCD or forgetful or a bit slow. Everyone’s got an issue. It is taking that issue and amplifying it, owning it and saying Yeah, this is a part of me. For instance, in One Man, Two Ghosts, I play a bit of a star diva and it’s all about me and how good the show is and a perfectionist and that IS me – that’s who I am. It’s just amplified to the next extent where everyone can laugh about it because it’s something and someone they all recognise.

“Clown is honest and it’s real. It’s liberating for audiences but also for the performers and my objective with the workshop is not for everyone to leave saying: I am now a clown! I am interested in people who are interested in personal development and understanding self and owning themself as a person and understanding how they connect with audiences and relate to people in life.

“Clown has been the most healing and incredible tool for personal development in my life. And there are loads of tools and techniques that have a real parallel between life and performance that I want to teach.

“It’s not like a weekend of intense guru-type development. I’m not there to be a therapist. But there are loads of tools and techniques and exercises that can teach someone a lot about themself and which are loads of fun. It’s basically a weekend of insane amounts of laughter and play, which is good for anybody… with the added bonus of being challenging at times. It is rewarding for anybody.”

“You did the Gaulier course in Paris, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why would these people not go to Gaulier instead?”

Sacha Baron Cohen – The hardest thing he has done? (Photograph by Michael Bulcik)

“To go to Gauilier, you have to be the most committed performer in the world. Gaulier is the hardest school anyone’s ever gone to. Sacha Baron Cohen said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. You have to really want to be a performer to go to Gaulier.”

“Why is it hard?” I asked.

“Because he is so challenging. He does not accept anything that is not your most brilliant. You are shit until you find magic and how rare is it to find magic? When you have the whole audience in your hand, that happens once in a while and he teaches you to recognise when that happens and how to make that happen as much as possible. You are not hungry enough as a performer until you want every performance to be at that level. That’s what he teaches.”

“That’s it, then,” I said. “You happy with all that?”

“As long as you don’t say again that Clown is just like improv. Last time you said that, I had to write this whole post about No! It’s nothing like improv! It is so far from improv.”

Alright.

Clown is not like improv.

There. I have said it.