Review: SOHO SONGS - THE TIGER LILLIES, Soho Theatre Walthamstow

After a third of a century, and with a title like Soho Songs to boot, few in an audience that looked like it was venturing north of Camden for the first time in decades, were looking for surprises in this one-off show at Soho Theatre’s splendid new outpost in Walthamstow. Not that anyone would have it any other way of course.

Martyn Jacques, accompanied by Adrian Stout and Budi Butenop, mines his experiences of Soho in the 70s and 80s for a new show drawing on old songs and new. We hear of the clip joints, the hookers in the basement windows, the rent boys leaning against walls, the shooting galleries, the over-occupied gutters. Like me, Jacques loved its sordid glamour, but saw the price it exacted on its victims. His songs celebrate the former and lament the latter, without ever making excuses, without ever blaming the victims. 

Back then, I was merely visiting Berwick Street market at lunchtimes, buying coffee at Angelucci’s, breakfasting at Maison Bertaux, watching football in Bar Italia, eating at Muriel’s or Braganza, seeing George Melly at Ronnie Scott’s at Christmas, but Jacques, like Jeffrey Bernard, lived it 24/7. When Paul Raymond hiked the rents in the early 90s and Westminster Council got tough in enforcing this country’s ancient, hypocritical laws targeting sex workers, it was the opening of a Next on Old Compton Street that marked the beginning of the end. Our enclave, with its Rue St Denis vibe, was inexorably, transforming into a Boulevard St Germain - still good fun, but not the same. It hit me a bit; it must have hit Jacques harder.

These songs, some old, some new, look back to the post-war Soho as it seedily stood in the 50s up until the end of the 80s. We hear of girls on the game being beaten by their pimps; of the fatal allure of heroin; of the mothers of the younger girls still turning tricks to make ends meet or feed a habit. We hear of the drifters who came through and the drifters who stayed; of the violence that lurked in alleyways, especially for those who didn’t know the myriad unwritten rules; and of the addictive frisson of excitement that always attends on the possibility, well, likelihood, of transgression. 

The melodies are still timelessly Weimarish, Jacques’ signature accordion lending its unmistakably poignant timbre, Stout, a double bassist, but often going to the musical saw (and, occasionally, a theremin) to layer on a dreamy, ethereal backdrop and Butenop, on the brushes as often as the sticks, providing a bit of Bourbon Street backbeat.

The key instrument is, of course, Jacques’ extraordinary falsetto, soaring and swooping around this cavernous new venue, art deco excess everywhere you look, the hint of decadence welcome. At 66, and after a lot of work, the voice has lost a little of its precision but, when he goes to the piano for a plaintive rather than defiant number, we catch its full unique majesty, once heard, never forgotten.

Less successful is some curious video back projection, a 20 minutes or so loop that looks like an AI programme has been asked to channel the “West End Girls” video through the lens of Andrei Tarkovsky in his Stalker period. For a while, its otherness fits with the dreamy music, but second time round you notice the buses are on the wrong side of the road, the shops have names that might be found in Diagon Alley and vehicles keep disappearing through walls. Third time round, that’s all you can see.

No that it matters much. As it is for my 28 year-old son and I, The Tiger Lillies, still in painted faces that I still force myself not to compare to Kiss, are a band which one doesn’t so much watch, as pay homage. They are unique, a rebuttal to the jibe often returned when we say that the Europeans can’t do pop music. “You can’t do cabaret!”. 

Well, three of our blokes can.     

The Tiger Lillies are on tour