Adelaide Festival. Serenade From The Sewer. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 5 Mar 2026
This really was a beautiful performance from the Tiger Lillies, full of subtlety, of light and shade (more dark than light) and acutely perceptive. It was as though the three performers knew an Adelaide Festival audience wanted nothing more than to relax for a couple of hours and be entertained by klezmer inspired songs of heroin addiction, prostitution, and death.
The Tiger Lillies have mellowed since I saw them last, to be expected in the passing of 14 or 15 years. Less snarled savagery (in fact, none) and with their punk antecedents well and truly rubbed into a dull sheen, this was, for a Tiger Lillies fan, a reflective performance, reliant upon the exploration of melody and the tonalities of the music, and in the use of reduced syncopation from the percussion, “quick and slow, that’s the way it goes”.
The three have an easy presence on stage even given the inherent menace of contrasting white facepaint and deep black eye sockets. From the left is bassist, theremin and musical saw player Adrian Stout; centre is founding singer and accordion and grand piano player Martyn Jacques; and on the right the newest member (since 2021), drummer and maestro of strange sounds man Budi Butenop (drums, percussion, washboard, rubber squeaky toy etc). It is of course Jacques who is the centre of attention, his singing voice a sharp tenor which focuses the attention upon the lyrics. He plays it fairly straight and there is little to no overt interaction with the audience.
The three come on stage and begin with Soho Song, Adrian Stout gestures to the audience as the tempo picks up, then eases. He says nothing but his lanky body working the upright bass conveys plenty. On the far side of the stage Butenop’s face is much more expressive, he becomes a firm crowd favourite playing a minor jester’s role to Jacques lyrical menace. “A junkie always gets the blame,” he intones at one point. A Tiger Lillies gig is a lyrical descent into the cesspit with songs about heroin (Heroin), being a junkie (Junkie), whores (Bar Italia) and the plumbing of vice (Down To Hell). Not for nothing is this touring iteration billed as ‘Serenade From The Sewer’.
Highlights? There are many. The way this band has transcended their punk influenced Weimar cabaret roots whilst keeping the crazed-accordion klezmer base to their music is exceptional, and I write this noting that many three piece bands fail on precisely this point, unable to break free of their initial constraints. For me it came to pass with the syncopated rhythmic chug of Stabbed In The Back. All credit to Butenop who leads the 12-bar bustle: “Stabbed in the back by a railroad track…” which then devolves into a lengthy drum solo, a good proportion of which I’m almost certain was a paeon to John Bonham’s seminal Moby Dick.
Nothing shows their development more than the final song of the evening, the first to give me a clear indication that they do much more than playact through a portal of Brecht-like societal decay and horror. Birds Sing In Ukraine is a poignant and deliberately low-key delivery of a song, sparse instrumentation which does nothing to detract from the stilted vocal delivery of a song about corpses in the field and dedicated in its final moments to ‘the butcher of Moscow’.
“Fuck Putin,” says Jacques, drawing down the curtain on our evening’s entertainment. Adelaide loves the Tiger Lillies and the Tiger Lillies assuredly love Adelaide.
Alex Wheaton
When: 5 to 6 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
