The Tiger Lillies (UK)

The Tiger Lillies defy any singular description and operate within their own eccentric definitions. Formed in 1989, they tour the world both with the Shockheaded Peter production and by themselves, developing a dedicated following from New York and San Francisco in the US to St Petersburg in Russia. Their songs (once described as 'Surrealist Pornography') are captured on numerous self-released albums including Brothel to the Cemetery, Farmyard Filth, Ad Nauseam, Shockheaded Peter and Circus Songs.

They are an extraordinary three piece band with a large cult following in London. The band is fronted by singer Martyn Jacques, who trained himself as an opera singer with a castrati style voice of heartbreaking beauty, whilst living alone above a strip joint in Soho for seven years. Accompanied by drummer Adrian Huge, whose appearance was described by David Byrne as James Joyce on drums, and double bass player Adrian Stout, Jacques plays accordion and sings savage and passionate songs about prostitutes, drug addicts and losers, his voice soaring and growling like a man possessed. Ken Campbell has described him as "the criminal castrati", and with his dickensian style of dress, long pigtail and bowler hat, his corrosive lyrics and his astonishing voice, all the while singing with his eyes closed, he makes an indelible impression. Jacques sings about life at the bottom of contemporary Britain with the voice of an angel. The music is a startling mixture of opera, gypsy song and left bank Paris, but what really marks out this band from any other is the emotional charge and raw passion of the delivery.

"Brilliantly twisted" /The Guardian/

"It's not surprising that their cult following is worldwide - a Tiger Lillies gig is a journey into wild emotion which passes right through melodrama and out the other side into bizarre beauty" /Evening Standard/

The Tiger Lillies

Martyn Jacques, the founder of The Tiger Lillies, spent much of his early years living above a brothel in London's Soho. His songs describe (in lurid detail) pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, losers and other unsavoury characters. He wrote the music for Shockheaded Peter and won an Olivier Award for Best Supporting Performance in a Musical for his memorable role in the work. He is currently working on several theatrical projects.

"James Joyce on drums" exclaimed David Byrne on seeing Adrian Huge at work with the Tiger Lillies. Adrian has worked in butchers, pie shops, banks, motorcycle shops, and as a ham-fisted-but-cheap car mechanic before co-founding, in 1982, Dover's only surreal, theatrical jazz/punk/calypso comedy ensemble: Uncle Lumpy and the Fish Doctors. The group floundered shortly after arriving in London in 1989 which coincided with the formation of The Tiger Lillies and the start of his bashing ever smaller, re-cycled drums, toys and kitchen-ware. The man that once turned up to gig in the Czech Republic expecting to find a drum kit waiting for him only to discover a pile of freshly polished kitchen utensils instead. This did not deter him for a second as he went on to deliver an amazing performance that night armed only with pots, pans and spatulas. With his usual drum kit looking like a cross between a modern sculpture and a childrens toy shop its all in a days work for Adrian.

Adrian Stout had played blues, jazz, country, and other primitive musical forms in various known and lesser known bands throughout the UK, Europe and as far afield as India, and recorded two albums for blues diva Dana Gillespie before being co-opted by The Tiger Lillies for 1995's Edinburgh Festival. This once serious musician has since then found himself dancing in leider hosen, making love to inflatable sheep and dressing as a cheap prostitute. He designed and maintains both the Tiger Lillies and Shockheaded Peter websites.

Nan Goldin is an example of an artist who works at the most intimate level: her life is her work and her work, her life. It is nearly impossible to discuss Goldin's photographs without referring to their subjects by name, as though the people pictured were one's own family and friends. It is this intimate and raw style for which Goldin has become internationally renowned. Her "snapshot"-esque images of her friends -- drag queens, drug addicts, lovers and family -- are intense, searing portraits that, together, make a document of Goldin's life. Goldin herself has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying, "My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic . . . Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history."

On September 12, 1953, Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter, she and her family moved to a suburb of Boston, where Goldin was to spend several primarily unhappy years before moving away from her family. In 1965, when Nan was 14 years old, her older sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, committed suicide. Deeply disturbed by this event, Goldin sought comfort in her friends: in them, she created an alternate family. Having decided that conventional family life and traditional schooling were not for her, Goldin moved in with a series of foster families, and soon enrolled in an alternative school called Satya Community School. It was at Satya, located in Lincoln, Massachusetts, that Goldin met two people who would be great friends and influences for many years to come: David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher. As the memory of her sister started to become hazy, Goldin began to take pictures to preserve the present, and thus her fading memories of the past. She photographed her friends so she would never lose the memory of them, as had happened with her sister. Her photographs were her way of documenting their lives, and, in turn, her own.

It was at Satya that Goldin's fascination with photography truly began to take shape. Goldin, along with her new friends Armstrong and Fletcher, used photography as a way of reinventing herself and those around her. Heavily influenced by fashion photography, Goldin and her companions would dress up for one another. Trying their hands at cross-dressing and drag were commonplace; this early experimentation would shape Goldin's lifelong fascination with the blurry line separating the genders. Through Armstrong, Goldin was introduced to the drag subculture in Boston, and thus a nightclub called The Other Side. There, she photographed drag queen beauty contests during the early 1970s and became friends with many transvestites. Goldin sought to depict her subjects in a straightforward, non-judgmental way: she saw drag as a way to reinvent oneself, and reinforced this idea by taking photographs of her friends in full drag regalia, as well as in various stages of preparation. In photographs such as David at Grove Street, Boston, 1972, Ivy Wearing a Fall, Boston, 1972, and Kenny Putting on Make-up, Boston, 1973, Goldin depicts her companions in various stages of drag. In the first two, the subjects stare unflinchingly at the viewer, each proud of his transformation, yet still calling attention to the fine line between masculine and feminine. In the third, Kenny is shown absorbed in his own beauty, concentrating intently on creating an alternate version of himself in the mirror. Through these portraits, along with the many others taken of her classmates and friends, Goldin illustrates the confusion and recklessness of the time in which she was creating her art.

It was during this period that Goldin began her course of study at the Boston School of Fine Arts. This transition marks a change in Goldin's photographic style. Prior to college she had used only black and white film, shooting primarily from available light sources (with the exception of some of the photographs made at The Other Side, for which she used flash). She soon began experimenting with color, which would become an integral part of her photographic style. The introduction of flash into her work also greatly contributed to what is known today as the "Goldin look." Rarely working from natural light, Goldin illuminates her subjects with careful use of flash that extenuates her vibrant colors. She achieves bright, deep hues by printing her 35 mm film with a photographic process called Cibachrome. While normal, c-type prints are made from printing from color negatives, Cibachrome prints are photographs printed from slides. This process allows the photographer to achieve optimum colors and contributes greatly to the sharp, bright quality of color in Goldin's prints.

Goldin's 1978 move to the Bowery in New York City marked a major life change, both in her career and her personal life. Goldin's photographs of this period reflect her hard-living lifestyle: excessive use of drugs and alcohol and abusive relationships were commonplace in Goldin's circle of friends. Goldin wrote, "I believe one should create from what one knows and speak about one's tribe . . .You can only speak with true understanding and empathy about what you've experienced." True to her credo, Goldin documented everything: drunken parties, relationships good and bad, evidence of beatings, all of which created an intense portrait of a close-knit group of friends. In the early 1980s, these photographs would be shown in the form of slides during Goldin's now-infamous slide shows.

A melange of photographs and music, these shows were originally held at punk rock clubs in New York City in order for Goldin's friends (and photographic subjects) to see the photographs that she had taken of them. Tin Pan Alley was one of the most frequent spots for these events, a locale that conveniently provided a working place for such up-and-coming artists as Kiki Smith, Cookie Mueller and Barbara Ess. At the time, the show (later called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency), which was made up of color photographs lit with flash, ran approximately 45 minutes. As Goldin evolved as an artist, the show also changed, and more photographs were added and songs were changed. Despite changes to the content of the show, the basic atmosphere of intimacy remained, and Goldin's visceral style communicated raw emotion. It was in 1986 that Goldin began to take her show on the road, traveling abroad to exhibit her work. Ballad saw screen time at both the Edinburgh and Berlin Film Festivals.

By 1988, Goldin's drug and alcohol abuse had begun to take a toll on her life and work, and she entered a detoxification clinic. Though she had previously experimented with self-portraiture, it was in this clinic that she created many images of herself. Photographs such as My Bedroom at the Lodge, Self-portrait in front of clinic, and Self-portrait with milagro reveal an introspective Goldin, somewhat humbled by her experiences at the hospital. In Self-portrait with milagro, the viewer sees Goldin in her room at the clinic, sitting up on her bed. She leans toward the camera, taking up most of the frame; the remaining portion of the frame is taken up by her institutional bed pillows and a small crucifix hanging on the wall. Goldin's proximity to the camera has caused her face to be slightly blurred compared with her sharply defined hand, which is resting on the pillows. This slight blurring, combined with the cramped composition of the photograph, communicates Goldin's feeling of being trapped within the hospital. The colors in the photograph are neutral except for Goldin's mouth: situated in the center of the photograph, it is covered in bright red lipstick. This flash of color in the institutional setting catches the eye, then leads it down the pyramid-like positioning of Goldin's body to her ringed hand, tense on her pillow. Self-portrait with milagro is a fine example of the simple way in which Goldin uses seemingly haphazard composition to carefully build the feeling (in this case, her claustrophobia in the hospital) that she is trying to communicate.

During this time, Goldin faced an additional personal struggle: many of her close friends were dying of AIDS, which was then a relatively new disease. Perhaps most important of these was Cookie Mueller, a friend since 1976, the year in which Goldin started photographing her. Goldin's series, entitled The Cookie Portfolio, is comprised of 15 portraits of Cookie, ranging from those taken at the parties of their youth to those from Cookie's funeral in 1989. During the next few years, Goldin continued to photograph her slowly dwindling circle of friends, many of whom were afflicted with AIDS. She showed these photographs in many group exhibitions across the country and around the world and spent a year in Berlin on a DAAD grant, sponsored by a German organization that brings artists to Berlin.

In 1994, she and her longtime best friend David Armstrong collaborated on a book called A Double Life. Composed of photographs taken by both Goldin and Armstrong, the book displays their differing styles of photographing the same person. Also included are some of their portraits of one another. A 1995 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston grouped Goldin, Armstrong and fellow photographers and friends Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson and several others, and dubbed them the "Boston School." This name stuck, and the photographers have since been referred to by this title.

The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Goldin's work in 1996; it was called I'll Be Your Mirror. Composed of photographs from every period of her career, the exhibit also boasted a showing of a version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Goldin continues to photograph and recently had her first solo show in London, at the popular White Cube Gallery. Her work continues to evolve with her life. Of this she writes, "My work changes as I change. I feel an artist's work has to change, otherwise you become a replication of yourself." With Goldin's close, immediate style and stunningly beautiful images, there is no threat of her becoming a replication.

Musicians:
Martyn Jacques - vocals, accordion, piano
Adrian Hughes – drums, percussion, toys
Adrian Stout – contrabass, musical saw, vocals