The foyer of the Soho Theatre Walthamstow is grand and gorgeous, even bigger than on the photos and crowned by a monstrously big disco ball. And the bar is equipped with a cauldron serving this year’s first mulled wine to the sounds of Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac and 80s Madonna. The crowd is the type of folk you would expect to have a theremin on the kitchen table, in Halloween tights, coloured beards, feathered hats, with Tatty Devine brooches and novelty bags – the nowadays rare type of Londoners still rocking leopard print in a non-normcore manner. My favourite audience tote states “Plays, Books, Theatre”. These are my people!
The venue, a former cinema, was reopened in May last year and is proof of why initiatives like the London Borough of Culture are so essential for communities at the very end of the Tube lines. I gasp when I find the way to my seat in the stalls: Arabesque grandeur, enhanced by carefully positioned and ever changing lights – an art deco dream!
I have been meaning to see The Tiger Lillies for at least two decades: The trio’s signature make-up has greeted me from posters at many train stations all over the world. They appear to constantly tour the world and pop up in unexpected locations, always curious to play in locations off the big cultural centrepoints, they embrace the right classics (I grew up with the Shockheaded Peter stories) and were probably one of the first bands making their solidarity with Ukraine clear from the very beginning of the conflict.
And the theremin is indeed the first instrument played tonight on stage, followed by a singing saw with a skull on its shaft. Further in this vaudeville set-up is a piano, a drum set, an accordion and a wonderful contrabass, and then there is head-Tiger Lillies’ Martyn Jacques’ voice straight out of a Brecht / Weill scene: High, clownish, convincing. Not pretty, not genteel but straight in your ear, no matter how many repetitions it might take.
It does siren songs, odes to undertakers and feasting worms, it can laugh at a grave and it can do Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – all against the backdrops of Victoriana and Weimar photographs, stills from Dalí and Magritte, morbid, historic ads, lost places and graveyards all over, some more obviously haunted than others. It is this voice which has kept The Tiger Lillies a well-known secret to be discovered and experienced live – but then again, a lot of vinyl and CDs are being sold at the merch stall afterwards where everyone can meet the band after three (!) standing ovations. What kind of a theatre evening is Songs For The Dead? A happening of mourning? Happy mourning? All at the same time. Well, it doesn’t always have to be Wilton’s – but I need to get out more again.
**** out of 5 stars
The Tiger Lillies have already scheduled further gigs for 2026 and 2027 with varying repertoire.
