Adrian H: It was like pugilism, wasn't it?
Martyn: So that was a very aggressive and screaming phase for The Tiger Lillies. "Ad Nauseum" is the album, probably, which sums it up. It's a very aggressive, noisy kind of style that we developed because there were no dynamics. If we did anything soft or quiet then the drunks' attention span - they would immediately start talking to each other. So we just had to keep screaming at them just to keep the, you know...
Adrian S: Just sort of pin them to the wall, basically. It worked. It took a lot to play unusual music in a bar full of people who didn't really arrive to see that. You kind of have to take some strategies, I suppose to engage them and it worked. They were engaged. They were actually kind of more than engaged.
Martyn: They enjoyed it. They managed to get into it.
Adrian S: More and more, we had people who actually did want to see us play. So it became more balanced after a while. People would come to see us rather than just to come see their friends. We've been turning into a really old band. We spend most of our interviews reminiscing. Let's talk about the future.
Adrian H: I see the future but we're not in it.
Do you have any plans to resurrect your famous 17th century gothic shock cabaret Shockheaded Peter or do you have any plans for any other theatrical works?
Adrian H: Yes we do.
Adrian S: We plan to resurrect it starting in February in New York for a period. The original cast and us, The Tiger Lillies, will be performing in Shockheaded Peter for three months in New York. And then after that we'll probably transfer it to an American cast and company and then it will carry on without us.
So it will just be in New York with you?
Adrian S: Initially, yes.
Adrian H: We'll see what that generates.
Martyn: We may be doing the West End (London). There were plans to do the West End again at some point in the distant future.
Adrian S: So initially, it's gonna live again in New York in February, 2005.
Any other theatrical plans?
Adrian H: There's lots of things on the go.
Martyn: We're doing "Little Match Girl" as a show, which is a story about a little girl who freezes to death in the snow. Hans Christian Andersen. Kiki did it. You ever heard of Kiki and Herb? That's a very funny cabaret band. Yeah, so we're planning to do that, "Little Match Girl". We've got another show called The Tiger Lillies Circus in France, in a suburb of Paris. We do a smaller show called "The Punch And Judy". So we have a few different theatre projects and shows.
Adrian H: It does take a bit of a while to get bookings in America.
Martyn: We have a dance show we do sometimes called "Circa", which a film has just been made of, with a dance group called The Holy Body Tattoo. We do have a few different theatrical projects.
Is that the thing that Steve Severin from Siouxsie And The Banshees is involved in? I also noticed his name on some of your albums.
Adrian S: Yeah, he produced some of the albums.
Will The Holy Body Tattoo be doing shows in the States?
Adrian S: The show has been touring for a while now.
Martyn: I think they're in New Zealand next year.
Adrian H: As I said, it's quite irritating cos we'd like to know but it takes years, it seems, to sort of book bigger shows like that, where as we can virtually arrange a tour or Menno [Tiger Lillies agent], can arrange a tour for the band.
Martyn: We do plan things a year in advance. We're booked pretty much solid for next year.
Adrian H: People need to look at the website and sign up for our newsletter and then they'll get a newsletter when we're touring again. That works really well. The Internet's fantastic for us. A little band with tentacles reaching out.
Martyn: There are a few bands, people which seem to be, I don't know, seem to be like this cabaret thing, bands like Gogol Bordello and The Dresden Dolls. We're meant to be doing a concert with them. What's that other one? Rasputina. So there seems to be a few younger people taking an interest. We're meant to be playing at the Royal Festival Hall with this group called Lost Vagueness, which is a kind of funny nightclub promoter. This whole cabaret thing and dressing up seems to be - we were in Melbourne recently and there's a mirror tent there and everybody seems to dress up in suits and hats and things. So there seem to be some younger people who are interested in this kind of style of music which we were talking about earlier. So who knows. Maybe one of them will become more successful and that will be a way for us to maybe become a bit bigger. We live in hope.
I think part of the reason for your popularity is the fact that modern life is so boring. You're kind of a timeless band. It's kind of a nice outlet to be able to escape to a more interesting time.
Adrian H: What are they gonna remember from the first half of the 21st century, the first decade? What music is there?
Martyn: The Tiger Lillies.
Adrian S: He summed up the decade. One of the smallest bands of the '90s, now one of the slightly larger known bands of the 21st century.
Martyn: Is the voice of reality speaking this?
Your music was used in the film "Plunkett & Macleane" and you even had a cameo appearance, if I'm correct, in a bordello scene?
Adrian S: Yes. If you hold your eyes open for about four seconds as the camera pans past us.
Martyn: They spent half a day shooting it, which is quite a lot of time in a big major feature film and as we were leaving one of the productions persons actually said, "So we spent half a day filming you." Like, "Why the fuck did we do that?" That was their kind of charming riposte as we made our exit. So yeah, they did film us. Jake, I think was a bit of a fan. He's the director. He saw us playing in Prague and he liked us and he wanted us to be in the film and sort of have the title music at the beginning, as well. But I think there were quite a few other people in the company that actually didn't really like us very much. I think they thought we were - it's the thing about being a bit weird. This is the same company that I think did "Four Weddings And A Funeral" and had the band Wet Wet Wet. So having a band that made very, I suppose what they would regard as being very avant garde music -
Adrian S: But it wasn't an art house movie.
Martyn: So I think there were certainly people within the film -
Adrian S: Commercial suicide for us to be doing this in the film. They hated us. So they cut us out as much as possible.
Adrian H: I think it was a foible because of the director liking us and they sort of had to have us in there.
Adrian S: This was his first feature film and I think he wanted us to be more involved in the film and eventually we were.
Martyn: At the end of the day, you know, he was young and I think he actually had a rather artistic vision and the producers tried to reign him in a bit and try and -
(Martyn is interrupted by the loud sound of my digital voice recorder falling off the chair, smashing onto the ground)
Adrian H: Oh dear! That's it for the interview.
(Looking at voice recorder) No, it's still going.
Adrian H: Remember you did that when you've got your headphones on, otherwise you'll be deaf.
Martyn: It's knocked all the other stuff because it's one of those digital ones. So you've lost the interview now. We've done interviews like that where they said, "It was a great interview. But I'm terribly sorry, you know what?" I've seen them a year later and they say, "You know what? The machine didn't work. So I had to do it all by memory."
Well, if that happens, I'll send you a tape of me crying.
Martyn: Was there anything else on Plunkett & Macleane - I mean, a lot saw the film.
Adrian H: It brought people into us.
Martyn: I remember Jake. He was really almost like boasting to me that this would really make us. And I think his vision, first of all, he wanted us in it much more and we were meant to do the title tracks as well. But we got elbowed off the title track. We were meant to do half the soundtrack but we kind of got manipulated by this other guy out of doing that. I think he thought that it would really do a lot for us. It did do something for us, I'm not denying that but it could have been a lot more.
I noticed a discussion on a website message board regarding your music in the film and people were saying how much they liked your music.
Martyn: That's the great thing about the Internet for us. Some people think the whole web thing is very bad. Without wishing to name drop, I remember talking to Nick Cave about that. He said to me that the whole Internet thing is really shit. He didn't like it. And from his perspective, because he's got a proper record company that's promoting him, it probably didn't seem to be - but for us, as a very little band, it's quite useful.
Adrian H: Really, it's completely useful. You've got to make the most of it. It has got stupid sides to it but it's very useful to us. Even five or six years ago, people would travel with their children - I remember a German housewife whose husband was working that night, she drove about 300 kilometers because she saw on the website we were playing and then came and bought the CDs and then drove home again. Didn't even see the show but she wanted the CDs and she bought five CDs. And that was just because she knew about it on the website.
Adrian S: We've always tried to kind of keep a little bit ahead. We had CDs before a lot of bands actually were making CDs. We had tapes and then it was like pressed up CDs which was quite unusual for independent bands when they first happen. And then we had a website kind of quite a bit before people. We were trying to keep, you know, just try and use everything we can really. We're not adverse to things like that.
Martyn: We are desperate men.
Adrian H: If you go into a record shop and they've never heard of The Tiger Lillies then what do you do?
Can you talk a bit about your 'post mortem' collaboration with Edward Gorey?
Martyn: Yeah, he sent a letter and said he really liked us and his favorite song was "Banging In The Nails". And I wrote back and said I'd love to do something. And then he sent us all this unpublished stuff and I turned it into 12, 13 songs and then I was gonna go and play and rehearse with him. And then, three days before I was due to leave he died so it was very upsetting. That was basically it. So I never actually got to meet him, you know, even though I had written all these songs specifically to perform to him over a weekend. He had actually delayed going into the hospital because I was coming over. So actually, in a horrible kind of way, I was even sort of responsible. He may not have even died if it hadn't been for me coming over to see him. He would've died sometime.
I'm sure he'd be happy with what you did with his work.
Martyn: Well, I hope so but we'll never know. It's one of those strange things.
What other people or groups have you worked with or collaborated with?
Adrian H: The Kronos Quartet.
Adrian S: In Russia, a band called Leningrad, we did an album with them about a year ago. They're from St. Petersburg and someone said they're the most famous rock band in Russia. I think they're quite unusual. The singer's very - he's kind of like a cross between a poet and a street thug. He's kind of like one of these 'men of the people'. He sings in a very low voice.
Martyn: Lots of vodka, they drink a lot.
Adrian S: But he's like a poet and he does acting and he's got this crazy band, sort of a ska band. We did an album with them where they were doing versions of our songs in Russian. They'd take the songs and he'd adapt the words a bit and we'd have like a whole brass section. That was an interesting collaboration. And on the whole, with other sort of things, we worked with Steve Severin from Siouxsie and the Banshees. He produced "Circus Songs". Blixa Bargeld from Einstuerzende Neubauten played on a couple of tracks on "2 Penny Opera". A couple of guys who played on the "Poe" CD and toured with Lou Reed on a couple of our CDs, German musicians.
Martyn: German theatre musicians. They go all the way back, in Hamburg they were on Tom Wait's "The Black Rider".
Adrian H: Didn't we have someone from The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band?
Martyn: Oh yes, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They're dead.
Adrian H: That was in the '60s.
Adrian S: They were like sort of arty. They kind of wore old clothes and did funny sort of - one of the guys in the bands was friendly with The Beatles. They did that sort of mockery of The Beatles: The Rutles. They were kind of a funny sort of old fashioned sort of band using a lot of Victorian music hall songs.
Martyn: So if we meet any funny people, strange or unusual people we are always quite keen to work with them, collaborate and stuff. We're still thinking of doing something with Kiki and Herb at some time in the future.
One final question. What is the meaning of life?
Adrian S: It doesn't have one.
Adrian H: That's a good answer. I don't know. Can we email you?
Is that your answer?
Adrian S: Have you seen the film?
Yeah. It's excellent.
Adrian S: The film sums it up.
Martyn: That's true, "The Meaning Of Life", the film, it's quite good. He's a fan, Terry Gilliam. We meant to work with him.
Adrian S: On the Gorey thing. It was a theatre show based on the Edward Gorey songs and he was gonna direct it.
Martyn: Yeah, "The Meaning Of Life" was quite nice. It was quite humorous and cheerful. Cos I think you can get very - what's the word? Morose.
Adrian H: Morose? Can you get morose in America or is it just Europeans?
People are in denial but yeah, you can get morose in America.
Adrian H: Can you get decaf morose or morose lite?
Martyn: I quite like them. They're quite humorous and cheerful, aren't they?
Adrian S: It's black humor. We use a lot of humor in -
(Interview is suddenly interrupted by a passerby in the hotel lounge)
Passerby: I like those hats, guys. They're fucking cool, dudes. Who are you dudes?
Adrian H: We're The Tiger Lillies.
Passerby: Never heard of you. Where are you guys based out of?
Martyn: London.
Passerby: Oh, London. I'm English also. I'm from Chester. Bloody bollocks.
Martyn: We're playing at The Knitting Factory this evening. We expect you to be there.
Passerby: Can you put me on the guest list?
Don't ask me.
Martyn: He's not even in the band. He's a journalist.
Passerby: Of course he is.
You wouldn't believe what I had to do to get on the guest list.
Passerby: I don't suck dick. I'm just fucking with you guys. I'm a composer and writer for Streisand and Ozzy Osbourne. That's what I do. I'll give you a card. You guys can give me a call if you want. Come out to my house, I'm in Encino. I don't know how long the fuck you guys are gonna be here -
Adrian H: We're leaving tomorrow morning.
Passerby: Come out tonight, party with me.
Martyn: We're playing tonight.
Passerby: Well, then come over afterward. I don't give a fuck. I've got a pool table, I've got a big house. I've got seven bedrooms in my house and eight bathrooms.
Can you get me on "The Osbournes"?
Passerby: Serious, no shit. Nice to meet you all. I've got a whole fucking lot of band shit set up, all sorts of crap. You guys wanna come over, come over. Give me a fucking call.
(Passerby walks out the door)
Welcome to LA.
Adrian S: "Fucking Streisand and Ozzy Osbourne."
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