Review Summary: What Table?
As we all know The Tiger Lillies are quite the shrinking violets, so of course they'd shy away from that giant heavy metal elephant lurking in the corner of the room. A humble silence is all you'll be hearing in response to Metallica and Lou Reed's more famous, and much maligned, updating of the Lulu story from this corner. After all, 'respect your peers' is the Martyn Jacques motto, there'll be no gloating here...'This is a play Lou Reed and Metallica stole from Frank Wedekind, and we’re here to steal it back!' he gleefully teases. Oh. Such fighting talk and you better be sure you can back up your claims, lest you fall flat on your faces; no such worries in this instance, the Lillies know they're on home turf and it's a mere formality that they'll knock their own interpretation of this sordid tale out of the park. Indeed the Tiger Lillies and the story of Lulu is such an obvious matchup it was more a case of Jacques fearing he wouldn't be able to hold back the creative swell from deep inside him; he's quoted as saying that after Opera North approached him to create the production he ended up writing 120 songs within a month, which he then painfully weeded down to a more manageable 20.
Well, 18 of the best ended up on this, the album release of the music penned for the stage production. 'Lulu: A Murder Ballad' was released a year after the dark, melancholy and pensive 'Either Or' and it's no surprise that it adopts many of the musical and thematic signatures from that exceptional effort. This being a stage play there was perhaps a recognised need for a few extra propulsive numbers thrown into the mix, which explains why more traditional Lillies fare like 'Gates of Hell' and 'Clown' made the cut. What works best however is the material that stays closest in spirit to this album's predecessor. In particular the piano ballads included here are absolute scene stealers; 'Daddy' sees Jacques adopting that perfect defeated tone of his, spitting out phrases like 'sentimental crap' with barely restrained nihilistic venom; the gentler 'Bird in a Cage' documents the earlier years of Lulu and brings to mind a young girl trapped twirling around inside her own musical box that's in turn being passed back and forth between her abusers; and then there's 'Jack', an attempt to dissect the motivations of Lulu's eventual murderer, Jack the Ripper. The latter boasts an utterly captivating spoken word performance that's backed up by the simplest of piano figures coupled with mournful saw, violin and creaky effects.
You get the feeling the character of Jack must have been equally intriguing to Jacques as Lulu herself. More so even. On re-listens he becomes a lurking presence on the album, a madness waiting in the wings, an unavoidable disaster. The way Lulu's other abusers are detailed makes them appear by turns cruel and hypocritical, but they always come across as regular, flawed men all the same; not so with Jack, he's painted here as a force of pure chaos and uncontrolled destruction, barely human. Once Jack makes his entrance a dash of madness is added to the music through the increasingly deranged approach to the singing, Jacques adding bizarre jazzy scat style embellishments seemingly at random. The key moment appears towards the end of 'Jack' where Martyn finally asks 'are you mad Jack? We know you're mad Jack, but do you?' He reaches his own verdict on the very next line, screaming 'Burn in Hell!' at the top of his lungs.
There's no escaping that this is a very dark affair, we're never allowed to forget that at the start of this story Lulu is very young, six or seven maybe, and as such Wedekind's work can be regarded as perhaps the first ever piece of literature to explicitly reference child grooming. Often classed as a cautionary tale really there's little to be learnt from the experiences of a girl who effectively spent the majority of her short life as a child abuse victim. So where does the entertainment come from? Obviously there's the usual human nature 'car accident neck crane' in effect, but also there are moments where Lulu's 'johns' are made to look very foolish, and there's a certain satisfaction to hearing about how they're taken down with the sinking ship. The Lillies, as ever, deliver the voices of these characters with great wit and as much humour as the material allows them to squeeze in; much as was the case with 'Either Or', here they flesh out a world that's not just wholly enveloping, but even more impressively, highly addictive.
I can hear you asking why anyone should be interested in the story of 'Lulu' in 2017. Well, as Jaques puts it 'there are Lulus everywhere...go to any lap-dancing bar and you'll find them'. Some things never change, so why not sit back and let the Tiger Lillies be your musical guides to this timeless tale. Leave your four legged furniture needs to Loutallica.
