How could The Tiger Lillies resist working with a discomforting, macabreillustrator? Maddy Costa reports
Anyone would think the Tiger Lillies had planned it. Five years ago they became a cult hit thanks to Shockheaded Peter, their cabaret puppet show inspired by Heinrich Hoffmann's tales of naughty children coming to gruesome ends. Now they have made an album based on the writings of Edward Gorey, whose most famous work, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, dispatches an alphabet's worth of unwitting kids to a grisly death. Coincidence? Surely not.
And yet it wasn't until the British band toured the US with Shockheaded Peter that they even knew Gorey existed. "He's like the Tiger Lillies," says bassist Adrian Stout. "Unless someone tells you about us you'd never hear about us. People who saw Shockheaded Peter in America would tell us: 'You should look at Edward Gorey, he'd be right up your street.' So we did - and he was."
In Gorey's beautifully illustrated books the band found a kindred spirit: an author obsessed with Victorian melodrama and Edwardian ennui, who took a macabre delight in tracing the violent twists of fate and imbued his darkest tales with discomforting humour. He wrote about death, unmentionable vices and people who went mad and vanished without trace - everything the Tiger Lillies' lyricist Martyn Jacques had been putting into song for the past decade.
While the band were making these Gorey discoveries, the author himself was living in a farmhouse in Cape Cod, taking care of countless cats and writing puppet shows for local theatre groups. Nobody in the Tiger Lillies is sure how it happened, but towards the end of 1999 Gorey discovered them, too. He bought the Shockheaded Peter soundtrack and liked it so much he wrote to Jacques, asking to hear the rest of the band's work. That went down so well that Gorey wrote to Jacques again, suggesting they collaborate. Jacques could hardly refuse.
Gorey's next correspondence was a large cardboard box containing a stone that looked like a frog (and would, Gorey promised, turn into one if stared at long enough) and a neatly organised pile of his as yet unillustrated, unpublished works.
Several were plays: a grim tale of infant fratricide, an absurd comedy about chintzy wallpaper, a bizarre mime in which adults toss babies about. But mostly they were poems: abstract verses about the unfortunate Hipdeep family and the dangers of gin, and 210 stanzas devoted to a curious compound called QRV. With the ultimate aim of creating a theatre piece, Jacques started sifting through the box "in a very brisk way, looking for songs". Poems that rhymed and had verses - "things that lent themselves to songs in a very traditional way" - he put straight to music.
Anything that took his fancy but was too long or didn't scan he adapted as faithfully as he could. "I changed a few of the rhymes and added a line here or there but didn't want to radically rework anything, because the work is so wonderful already. I tried to keep the spirit of it."
Not everything worked, and it was hard to escape poems about death. "I like the works where people are slightly uncomfortable," says Stout, "walking around empty grounds with nothing to do. The pictures are great when they show emptiness. But in music you want to go for some drama."
QRV presented its own challenge: every stanza neatly rhymes. "It's like an epic poem: it goes on and on," says Stout. "It could almost change on a daily basis." For the recorded version, Jacques settled on perhaps the least representative stanzas: 10 in which people die from QRV. In the rest of the poem this mysterious substance is a miracle cure, able to numb arthritis, do the housework, even work like Viagra: "Once whores would frown when I let down / My pants uneasily / But now my ----- is long and thick / From taking QRV." Those dashes are typical of Gorey, who wrote about sex euphemistically. The Tiger Lillies, by contrast, revel in the explicit, and Jacques now can't understand why he passed over QRV's filthy bits.
Jacques spent a few months learning the songs so he could perform them to Gorey. But he never got the chance: a couple of days before he was due to fly to the US, in April 2000, he heard that Gorey had died of a heart attack, aged 75.
Plans for a theatre piece were rapidly shelved. Terry Gilliam wanted to direct it but didn't have time; everyone else was too worried the work would be a rehash of Shockheaded Peter. Reluctant to junk the songs, the Tiger Lillies set about turning them into an album. When the Kronos Quartet approached them after a Shockheaded Peter show in San Francisco, suggesting a collaboration, the band felt the Gorey album would be the perfect opportunity.
"A string quartet is a Goreyesque thing," says Jacques. "You can imagine a string quartet playing in a Victorian living room. And the Kronos are open to experiment. I was proud because we got them to bark like dogs in the studio." The advantage of this sort of project for the Tiger Lillies is its air of accessibility. As Jacques says: "It has the potential to reach a bigger audience than the pornographic filth I normally write." But he is worried what Gorey's fans might make of it. The album radiates the author's humour, but tales of a baby being ripped to pieces and a prostitute dying of a "loathsome disease" seem far more gothic and alarming when sung in Jacques's eerie falsetto, accompanied by the band's lurching clatter.
"I'm open to criticism that I've altered his works for my own ends," Jacques admits. "The tragedy is, if Gorey had lived another week I could have said: 'I played these songs to Edward and Edward liked them.' Now people can easily say: 'Those Tiger Lillies have ruined it' - and I can't contradict that."
The Gorey End is on EMI Classical
