Brighton Dome, Monday 30th Nov
The “anarchic Brechitan street-opera trio” the Tiger Lillies last appeared in these parts the Festival before last, with their take on Coleridge's epic poem 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Now they're back with another theatrical song-show. Lulu was the protagonist of two expressionist playswritten by Frank Wedekind between 1895 and 1904.
And many times since. As singer and
main man Martin Jacques states in the programme “today the figure
of Lulu is one of the most widely known characters in fiction... in
many ways Hamlet is perhaps Lulu's closest equivalent, widely
recognised but nevertheless mysterious, the inspiration for countless
re-interpretations, but without a stable or agreed core meaning.”
In other words, neither are fixed
texts. Each iteration of them doesn't re-recite the canon, nor do
changes negate what went before – it just adds on another layer.
Except of course the Prince's story is about having the power to
choose and being paralysed by it. While Lulu's is about being given
no choice at all. Though a figure on stage she never sings or speaks.
All is narrated by Jacques in the character of malevolent lowlife
Shig, her primary pimp and ostensible 'father'.
She first appears pushing flowers at
the unaccepting musicians. If it's reminiscent of flower sellers on
the street, there's also something childlike and innocent about her
movements. For much of the running time she's held between two
projection screens situated behind the band, imprisoned and shown off
like a fish in a tank. She'll dance to one side, then back again. At
one point the struts of a bannister are projected, which come to look
like prison bars. Oddly, I was most reminded of Mark Fisher's quote about Carroll's Alice – this story is
Lulu's, but she has no place in it. She's essentially a sexualised
possession, a flesh sex toy passed from one 'lover' to the next.
In the programme Jacques continues “it
was hard writing the songs for 'Lulu'... you have
to breathe the putrid air.” And it shows. For one thing, the Tiger
Lillies aren't just renowned for their black humour, they celebrate a
tradition which commonly found dark humour in stories of sexual
abuse. That kind of salaciousness is not confined to cabaret of
course, it also appears in blues or rock music, or for that matter
tabloid newspapers. But cabaret is more associated with a 'decadent'
era where such things went on, or at least happened more openly.Which
gave proceedings the unsettling sense of walking a tightrope. I'm a
Tiger Lillies fan largely because I share Jacques' black sense of
humour. And even I found myself willing them not to screw up and slip
into rape gags.
They don't. And yet when they don't,
harsh as it sounds for damning them for doing the right thing, they
lose something of themselves. That black humour has always been the
killer app of the band, the carefree irreverence to offence of songs
like 'Hammering in the Nails'. They're not without
this, they just hold it in check in places. They have to
hold it in check in places. Yet it still feels like they're
performing with one arm tied behind their back.
And without the humour we're left with
just the black. To use Jacques' analogy, theres a whole lot of putrid
air to breathe. It's like hearing the low notes of the piano hammered
over and again for seventy-five minutes. Moreover, the sheer
arbitrariness of the story adds to this sense of inevitability. You
could swap the order of her 'lovers', or cut some out completely, and
lose little. For she's but a flower petal on the wind.
With the suggestion Lulu may not have
been murdered by Jack but a copycat killer, perhaps planning to pass
the blame, its clear that if Lulu stands for our innocence Jack
stands for our corruptibility and hypocrisy. They're both part of us.
Notably, Jack's the only character to have a song addressed directly
to him.
Yet I also overheard a fair few people
emerging afterwards to say they found the message obvious. (“Is
anyone here likely to think its okay to sell a young woman into
prostitution?” and so on.) Which suggests the links between then
and now aren’t being made, as if sexual exploitation is considered
only a subject for history books. Perhaps a better way to challenge
misogyny isn’t to meet it head-on but glove-puppet it and expose it
from within. I’ve never heard Lady Sings It Better but the approach seems interesting – take
the most misogynistic lyrics you can get hold of, and have a group of
women belt them back at you. It also counters the
ludicrous-yet-prevalent notion that 'political correctness' is about
being too namby-pamby to use those illicitly thrilling bad words.
Ultimately, Jacque's schema works not
wisely but too well. In his insistence on the harsh male-dominated
world Lulu finds herself in, in his foregrounding of her silence
within it he perpetuates that silence. At one point she's compared to
a sponge and, rather than a character, she's no more than the
accumulation of what a patriarchal world will do to a woman if given
the chance.
I confess I'm not sure what I'd suggest
to improve proceedings. Perhaps Lulu discovers a voice and gets a
song of her own, only briefly before she is killed. Scenes such as
when Shunning gives her a gun and orders to shoot herself, and she
instead sticks a hole in him, could have been made little moments of
proto-feminist triumph. Some hint somewhere she doesn't have to be a
total victim or hapless innocent. But perhaps the whole project was
intrinsically flawed. After 'Rime of the Ancient
Mariner' was such a full-blown success, I wondered if this
might have been an earlier prototype of a full-length show, now
brought back out from the desk drawer. And while when I checked I
found it's first appearance was 2013, a year after 'Mariner',
that still feels the way it is.
CALVIN JOHNSON
Brighton Railway Club, Mon
23rd Nov
Most gigs, you'll see at some point all
the equipment shunted off stage and the house lights go up.
Yet there aren't too many where that's your signal the main act's
about to come on. But then there's nights when you know to expect the
unexpected.
With the lo-fi DIY indie-punk of Beat
Happening, the deconstructed dance music of Dub Narcotic and the
founding of the influential K records Calvin Johnson has done much to
break the punk mould. If he didn't ship records, he made waves. The
stereotype of angry white kids swearing against the system never
quite withstood him. Kurt Cobain tattooed himself with the K logo,
while Courtney Love namechecked him on 'Olympia'.
(Well, depending on which version you listen to.)
Tonight, alone and entirely
unamplified, he diffidently strums an acoustic guitar like his eyes
might have flicked over a chord book for the first time while
backstage. His baritone voice, the sound of deadpan, is delivered
from a Easter Island impassive face above a tight black sweater. It
has less the air of a punk event than something which might have
happened in a Greenwich Village folk club in 1963. But probably
didn't.
And it was the absolute absence of
anything remotely resembling punk music which came to be the most
punk thing about it. It worked as a projection of the artist's
personality, to which the actual music and words were mere means to
that end. (I'm really not sure that would come over so well on
record.) He exudes a childlike 'Being There'
persona, while displaying a master comedian's gift for timing,
including mutiple meaningful...
...pauses. Entirely unaccompanied, he
recites the nonsense dance lyrics of a Dub Narcotic number like
they're metaphysical poetry. Returing to the neologism I coined for Goat it's bironic – simultaneously
a self-parody and in deadly earnest. You laugh out loud and are
entranced at one and the same time. The bizarre choice of venue, a
place down a residential cul-de-sac which no-one present seemed to
previously know existed, made for the perfect setting.
It perhaps veered too far towards
straight songs at times, at which points my attention did start to
wonder. I wondered if the best numbers had been written for some
different setting, and were now sparking off on the incongruity. As
he encores with a cover of 'Diamonds Are Forever'
you find yourself thinking “this song is actually really stupid”
and “this song is actually a classic” at one and the same time.
Which is probably the whole night in microcosm.
From Manchester. But there was punk
rock floor-sittin' apleanty at Brighton too...
...and from back in the day, D Narcotic
go...
Mentioned in dispatches!
After having previously written about both Jeffrey Lewis and the Cravats, there's not really much I could add. But tehre's
some YouTube clips just to confirm the things happened. The Lewis
clip is not only from elsewhere, but features one of his cartoon
lectures he didn't even perform down here. (He said it might be hard
for people to see given the venue.) While the Cravats clip is
from Brighton but doesn't have much in the way of sound quality. But
then that's what makes it punk innit, y'get me bro?
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