Of all the bands to have a dedicated and rowdy following in Istanbul, the Tiger Lillies would be among the least likely. At least that’s what I thought going blindly into their recent show at the İş Sanat concert hall in Istanbul’s luscious Levent neighborhood. With a musical orientation every bit as dire as their monochromatic clown makeup and a sound prominently featuring by sounds of the accordion and the wood saw (to clarify: a saw that cuts wood rather than a saw made of wood), this fool might be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t the musical diversity present in the city to fill a concert hall for such an act. Yet, the Tiger Lillies have come to Istanbul many times over the years and it shows the mark they’ve made when the audience is standing and dancing at their seats for tracks of a brand new album.
This time the Tiger Lillies were in Istanbul in support of their most recent album, The Devils Fairground, newly available on February 15. I have almost no knowledge or credibility to discuss the songs played in the context of the band’s prolific discography, so I won’t try. I will say that for someone who’s only ever heard a couple of tracks at the insistence of the guy who ultimately nudged me to go to this performance, the album is a familiar mix of melancholy and unpredictability. Maybe it wouldn’t be familiar to everyone, but I’m 36, foreign, run down by life, and committed to carrying on; so it struck me like a sonic acquaintance.
Slower than I’m told some of the band’s past sets have been, it opened with the title track: Devils Fairground. As one might expect, it focuses on death, lives lived poorly, and come what may. All were recurring elements to their set, and I suspect they recur throughout the band’s history. Later memorable tracks included “Lucky to Get Out of Here Alive”, “Gypsies”, “King of the Gutter”, and a delightful song about cocaine and rum that could easily have been a rock ballad but was better off the way the Tiger Lillies sang it. The songs themselves stand out in my memory more for their tone and feel than for their lyrics, which were clever and consistently delivered in a falsetto brimming with piss and vinegar by lead singer Martyn Jaques. With Martyn alternating between the accordion and piano, it was up to Adrian Stout to jazz things up instrumentally by incorporating not only the wood saw but also the theremin with his double bass. Jonas Golland, the drummer, started the night off wearing what I think was a monkey mask before spending most of the night looking like he was doing an impression of Stan Laurel.
Unmistakably the band knows what they want to be and waste no time faffing about. They played each song, received audience applause while repositioning to new instruments as necessary, and got on with the next song. There were little moments of play with the audience, but far less than almost any other band I’ve ever seen perform. It was interesting how little audience engagement there was for a band known for enjoying something of a cult following, but over time the crowd got more confident and the songs themselves prompted more audience involvement. Over the last five or six songs, around the time that a few people started leaving (I presumed the came without fully knowing what they were in for), a majority of the audience was standing, cheering, and shouting out lyrics. The guy sitting next to me was ready to go from the opening song and was either a fan deaf and thus with no concept of his own volume or the single biggest Tiger Lillies fan in all of Thrace and Anatolia.
As is customary, the band threw it to the crowd to determine a few of the last tracks before closing it out with their customary show-stopper, “Crack of Doom”. I really only knew one of their songs before the concert, “Banging in the Nails”, and I got to hear it live as the penultimate song. As a rousing toe-tapper of a song that reminds us all that the crucifixion of Christ wasn’t necessarily a depressing moment for everyone, “Banging in the Nails” best personifies the fatalistic optimism that imbued the Tiger Lillie’s performance. “Crack of Doom” continued that sentiment and sent us all home knowing that whether our lives have been full of success, with pleasure in excess, or whether our lives have failed, having made the progress of a snail, the crack of doom is indeed coming soon for us all.
I reserved the last bit of this review for the venue, which is perfectly fine as a music hall but has the kind of concessions that would have been depressing at a public school PTA meeting. Serious, what’s the deal with that İş Bankası? Get your concert hall game together.
All photos courtesy of Andrey Kezzyn.
