This Grammy-nominated band has released 60 albums, and never had a record label

In the mid ’90s British “death oompah” band The Tiger Lillies released a song titled Bumhole. At the time, singer-songwriter Martyn Jacques was inspired by the plight of Pacific people suffering the fallout of nuclear testing, including some who were born without the titular orifice.

“Bumhole, bumhole, give me a bumhole do,” he sings in his signature falsetto. “I don’t care about the size, I don’t care about the shape, but when you haven’t got one, it feels like a mistake.”

Thirty years later, Jacques himself was diagnosed with cancer. “They had to remove my bumhole. So I haven’t got one. I sent the guy who removed my bumhole the song. When I wrote the song, it was a surreal song. Thirty-five years later, the song suddenly all makes sense now.”

It’s an anecdote both bizarre, darkly funny and true to life, which goes some way towards describing the music of The Tiger Lillies and the long, strange journey the band has been on. The group – Jacques on vocals, accordion, piano and guitar, Adrian Stout on double bass, musical saw, theremin and vocals, and Budi Butenop on drums – are in Australia this month and next, touring the live version of their latest album, Serenade from the Sewer, and Jacques is looking forward to the return here after a long hiatus.

He’s speaking from Santiago, Chile, after a hellish week that included being stranded in summer clothes in a freezing Amsterdam, a desperate 230-kilometre Uber trip across Europe and an airline losing all their luggage. As you might expect, he relates all the drama with a wry smile.

Fans of The Tiger Lillies describe their songs as each being “like a little theatre sketch”, Jacques says. “The lyrics are about all sorts of tragic and unpleasant subjects.” Then there’s the grotesque outfits and ghoulish makeup, which have grown more and more elaborate over time.

Jacques founded the band a whopping 37 years ago, and despite several line-up changes, the group’s prodigious output has never faltered. Even lockdown didn’t cause a hiccup; in fact, The Tiger Lillies released two COVID-inspired albums in 2020 alone (with songs such as Don’t Drink Bleach sewn through with the band’s macabre humour). All up, the band has released close to 60 albums, though it’s hard to count them precisely when the earliest material was released on cassette.

New album Serenade from the Sewer is a trip back to those early years in the late 1980s when Jacques was living in London’s Soho district. This was long before the area was gentrified.

“I remember ringing up an insurance company and I said, ‘I live in a flat in Rupert Street in Soho and I think it might be a good idea if I was to get it insured’. The person from the insurance company just started laughing. He said, ‘You want to get a flat in Soho insured? I don’t think so.’ And of course they were right because in the end my flat was burnt down by local gangsters,” he says.

Jacques’ landlord was a gangster, too, but he warmed to the young musician and even gave him a job cleaning the stairs. The neighbours below his flat were less friendly: heroin dealers who stayed up until dawn playing very loud games of mahjong.

“Then one day I heard this blood-curdling scream in the street, and the scream started getting louder and louder, coming up the stairs. I went down, and the guy was sitting there, screaming, and he’d been cut from ear to ear with a razor blade, right across his face,” Jacques says.

Some people might be fazed by this variety of local colour, but Jacques was captivated. “The whole place was run by gangsters. That was the kind of atmosphere. But it was really amazing for me because I used to lean on my window ledge, and I looked down on Rupert Street, and it was just like a cinema.”

Some cabaret acts play with this kind of imagery like a form of poverty drag. You get the sense the performers have never stayed in a three-star hotel, let alone hung about with sex workers and pickpockets. Jacques’ songs of the down and out always feel authentic, however, with a genuine sense of connection to the desperate and downtrodden and an affection that rings equally true.

“It was a happy time for me,” Jacques says. “I felt like a journalist a little bit when I was there. I was writing songs about the people I knew. Writing songs is a bit like writing stories, writing articles, it’s a form of journalism in a way. I just add music to it, and make it dramatic.”

Over the decades, The Tiger Lillies have earned a Grammy nomination and five Olivier nominations. They’ve never signed to a music label.

“Of course we haven’t got a record company,” Jacques says, laughing. “We’ve never had a record company. But we’ve been very lucky in the sense that we’ve met various people in the arts, mainly theatre people, that have helped us and supported us and made it possible for us to actually travel around the world and make a pretty good living. We’re very lucky.”

The outrageous theatricality of The Tiger Lillies has very much endeared the band to the world of performing arts, and they’ve long been a mainstay at major festivals around the globe (including this year’s Adelaide Festival). Yet despite a superficial resemblance to the acts of the contemporary scene, Jacques is uncomfortable with the label.

“We’re not really a cabaret band at all. The Tiger Lillies have got nothing to do with the cabaret scene. I’m not saying the cabaret scene is shit or anything, but we have nothing to do with it. I mean, we’re death oompah. That sort of sums it up in a way, doesn’t it? We’re a death oompah band.”

That’s playing things down a bit. The Tiger Lillies nod to other acts who have given voice to the suffering on the street – Brecht and Weill, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf – but Jacques says his influences go much further afield. “Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, jazz, blues, klezmer, rebetiko, the great old Turkish singers. I’ve spent years absorbing all these great artists.”

Apply all that musical erudition to songs about nailing Jesus to the cross or lobbing a petrol bomb at an orphanage, and you’re bound to leave some listeners unsure how to take it.

“There are people who don’t really like hearing weird songs. I’ve written songs that some people find very disturbing. I’ve looked at people’s faces looking up at me and they really don’t like it, you know? And then there’s somebody who’s sitting two bodies down and they’re in hysterics of laughter.”

For Jacques, The Tiger Lillies have never been about giving the audience what they want, after all. “You’re meant to write about things that are bizarre and try to stretch people’s imagination, try to take them places where nobody has ever taken them. When I was brought up, that’s what an artist was supposed to be. I still believe that.”

The Tiger Lillies play the Brisbane Powerhouse on February 22, Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom on February 28, The Vanguard in Sydney on March 1, and Castlemaine’s Theatre Royale on March 7.