The Tiger Lillies are celebrating 30 years of their provocative brand of avant-garde punk-cabaret with their symphonic latest album, Devil’s Fairground (out 15 February).
The video was directed by Anya Dimitrov, an artist based in Bucharest Romania who’s shot over 700 music videos to date.
Devil’s Fairground takes the listener on a tour through the sordid underbelly of post-soviet Prague, where Jacques’s eye finds poetry in legless drunks, bored hookers and fatherless children. When the Tiger Lillies first began touring Europe in the early ‘90s, Prague was a place filled with exceptional hedonism. The Velvet Revolution had tossed out communism and separated Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia without a drop of blood being spilt, but the lost years between communism and capitalism had left a vacuum and the Tiger Lillies spent their time there cavorting with the artists and freaks. The band returned to Prague in September 2018 to record Devil’s Fairground live with a full orchestra, channelling the band’s experiences in the city between the fall of the Soviet Union and the influx of Western tourists.
“That was just the beginning of the band. It was a magical time,” says Jacques. “The bars were full. There were so many squats and parties, booze and drugs - but no tourists. This record’s filled with the people I knew at the time. Lots of them are dead now. Heroin addicts and junkies.”