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Theatre Junction Grand

Britain’s notorious punk-cabaret troubadours, The Tiger Lillies, will play Calgary this Halloween, and their lead singer and songwriter, Martyn Jacques, likes the timing.

“It’s something that I’m very happy to fit into, Halloween,” he says. “For us, it’s a bit of convenient camouflage, in a way, because, obviously, we are like this all the year round, but it works very well in North America at this time of year. I guess it makes us slightly more mainstream and accessible in that respect, ’cause you can actually get people coming along who would find us a bit disturbing any other time of year.”

By anyone’s measure, The Tiger Lillies are a peculiar band. They exude a macabre charisma onstage, aided by ghoulish makeup, timely use of props, and eccentric antics. Percussionist Adrian Huge, for example, cheerfully dons a crown of thorns and literally hammers on his toy drum kit during “Banging in the Nails.” Jacques plays accordion, while Adrian Stout strums the upright bass and occasionally draws haunting melodies from his musical saw. Jacques’s unnervingly beautiful falsetto voice soars above musical arrangements that include stirring polkas, heart-rending torch songs and occasional anarchic bursts of noise.

The sound of their music is often at odds with the lyrical content of their songs. As Jacques says, “It’s slightly disorientating. There’s this sort of cheerful polka song, and then if you listen to the words, there’s actually something really not very cheerful going on.”

To say The Tiger Lillies’ lyrics are dark and disturbing does not do them justice. A random sampling of song titles (“Piss on your Grave,” “Masturbating Jimmy,” “Lonely Schizophrenic”) suggests that no subject is off limits. Jacques, who describes his writing as Freudian, plumbs the depths of his subconscious fears and most squalid thoughts and gleefully shares the results.

He is also interested in finding and crossing the line between hilarity and tragedy. “I play with the whole concept of humour, and when does something stop being funny,” he explains. “Some of our songs are really quite funny. Maybe they are quite offensive on one level, but they’re actually quite funny.

What’s rather interesting, if you do a very funny song, and then you go from doing that to doing a song that is really not funny at all, it’s quite curious. People carry on laughing, hoping, and then they find they’re in this kind of no man’s land, and they stop laughing. By the end, you know, nobody’s laughing, ’cause it’s not funny. [They’re] left in mid-air, and that’s something that I find quite interesting — it creates a kind of a tension.”

Although he finds that tension fascinating, Jacques isn’t out to antagonize his audience. Like any performer, his primary goal is to put on a good show.

“My function is actually to entertain, but I just want to make it a bit difficult, and a bit challenging,” he says. “That’s why I use that kind of dour material. In a way, it’s actually saying — maybe think about this. You have to be alert, and you have to use your brain.”

In Calgary, The Tiger Lillies will be singing songs drawn from several of their theatrical shows, including The Seven Deadly Sins, Sinderella and Freakshow, which will première in Athens in January.

“It’s a subject that interests me, that whole type of freak show world,” Jacques says of the new show. “Disturbing. It’s the outsider thing, you know…. I suppose some people physically are freaks, and some people it’s more in their minds. I suppose I fall into that category.”