Quotes of Praise and Damnation

Praise

All these bands are my favourites, but here is a favourite, favourite. Ladies and Gentlemen,  The Tiger Lillies - Matt Groening introduction at ATP Minehead, UK May 05, 2010

There is nothing else like them. Any description of them is an injustice – they are completely peerless.  - Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand

This delicious dark cabaret is Kurt Weill as scripted by Aleister Crowley, and the execution is impeccable throughout. Phenomenal.  - Ian Gittins, The Guardian March 21, 2006

Just brilliant and utterly fantastic!! You'll never hear more perverse and twisted as well as haunting and sorrowful songs. Just get a ticket by hook or by crook, if there's any left (which I doubt) and catch them while you can. -  Marc Almond

IF YOU have never seen the Tiger Lillies before, I urge you to seek out a ticket for this glorious show, which sees them revisit some of the darkest and goriest songs in their repertoire. It is hard to do justice to the dark poetic brilliance of the Tiger Lillies, so the best thing I can advise is that you go and see them yourselves. - Claire Smith, The Scotsman 24.08.2009

'The Tiger Lillies are as fragrant as ever - just don't put them in a vase. Because a Lillies gig is a stroll on the seamy side, down crack alleys and cul-de-smacks where life's unfortunates come terrible croppers. It's Threepenny Opera territory - hookers, freaks and ne'er-do-wells - and no sin is left unturned. - Joseph Woby, The London Paper  30/04/2009

The Tiger Lillies must be one of the weirdest and most disconcerting bands of all time, right up there with Captain Beefheart in his Trout Mask Replica days, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. The prudish and the squeamish should avoid this show like the plague, but those with a taste for the dark side will find it just the ticket. - Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph 12/04/2008

If you are partial to deftly crafted bad taste and have a penchant for toilet humour, this sinful show will leave you greedy for more - Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard  14.04.08

Bigger, prouder and fleshily engorged with the pustule throb of the garishly gaudy and gloriously obscene. - Time Out

A Tiger Lillies gig is a journey into wild emotion that passes right  through melodrama and out the other side into bizarre beauty.  - David Gale, Evening Standard

In an ideal world, the Tiger Lillies would represent Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest. - David Rose, The Times Online, March 23, 2006

Performed with a manic crispness and glee that reduced the audience to helpless paroxysms, such material also points an implicit accusing finger back at us: what on Earth are we doing, laughing at this stuff? -  Sue Wilson, The Scotsman 20/08/2005
 
Imagine Kurt Weill conjuring up images of prewar Berlin while a falsetto vocalist screams, squeaks and squawks his way through every number like some rambling madman - TIM ARTHUR, Time Out Magazine, 9/11/1996
 
“I met them in a studio in London, showed them clips and they wrote the music to scenes then and there. They’re geniuses,” - Valdís Óskarsdóttir, BAFTA winning Icelandic film editor/director

Damnation
 
I reckon a night being roasted in hell would be more fun than watching this tedious display of exhibitionism - Lyn Gardner, The Guardian 17/04/2008

It’s nothing, in fact, save for a sweaty, noise-filled misuse of two hours, two hours during which one could have been watching something comparatively enlightening, such as a spaniel licking itself, or maybe that ABBA musical. - Kristin Anderson is a DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College

...the songs themselves are so relentlessly simplistic, so ruthlessly imbecilic that it is difficult to consider this disc as anything but the ravings of a diseased mind. The fact that the Tiger Lillies' founder, leader, and singer Martyn Jaques has set texts by Edward Gorey, that minor master of the melancholy and the morbid, doesn't excuse the arrogant banality of his music or the excruciating vulgarity of his singing. - James Leonard reviews the Grammy nominated Gorey End

Martyn Jacques, the Tiger Lillies’ singer and accordionist, is a very alarming man. Painted like a nightmarish clown with a disgusting plait slung coquettishly over his shoulder, he yowls his way through numbers like I’m Just a Whore in an ear-splitting falsetto that makes you wonder if he’s fully intact. - Nancy Durrant in www.timesonline.com

Before the premiere of the films of the two well-known film-makers, the British Tiger Lillies performed, who have been determined by the Western media as “the most incorrigible scoundrels, blasphemers and sado-nazi in the world”. The Tiger Lillies are banned over Europe, and they play only in the skinheads’ clubs.  - Alena Fadeeva, confused Russian Journalist