27 years ago the “criminal castrato” Martyn Jacques placed an ad in Loot magazine to find a drummer and bassist to form a new band, and thus was spawned those ingloriously irreverent masters of Brechtian punk cabaret, The Tiger Lillies. They may have a few decades on the clock now, but if their intimate but nonetheless raucous performance on the opening day of the Sydney Festival’s Spiegeltent programme is anything to go by, this twisted trio have no intention of growing old gracefully.

The Very Worst of The Tiger Lillies, is a showcase of this group’s almost thirty years shocking and delighting audiences around the world. With their ghoulish makeup, devil-may-care stage presence and musically eccentric brand of story-telling it’s easy to see why The Tiger Lillies have enjoyed such enduring longevity.

All the unselfconsciously grubby themes that have made these wonderful songs such side-splitting guilty pleasures are present: infanticide, prostitution, drugs, sex and ukuleles. The lyrics are bawdy, brash and brilliantly funny, crackling with a vivid, caustic wit that is pricked with moments of charming whimsy.  Lead singer and consummate showman, Martyn Jacques, draws these grimy tableaux using the indecently lurid falsetto that has become The Tiger Lillies’ trademark sound.

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