Alternative cabaret artists The Tiger Lillies have created a two-part album written and recorded during lockdown.

 

Covid-19 II will be released exclusively on Bandcamp on Friday June 5, with songs including ‘Lockdown Blues’, “Care Home,” ’Poor Man Killer’ and ‘Don’t Drink Bleach’.

 

The album takes a more serious tone than Covid-19 Part I, which came out on April 10, with songs such as ‘Cough’. ‘Keep Washing Your Hands’ and ‘Toilet Rolls Mummy.’

 

 

Singer/songwriter Jacques says: “The first part of the album is much funnier than the second. I thought the toilet roll thing was really funny. In the second it’s getting sadder because more people have died.”

 

Eventually there are plans to turn the song cycle into a stage show - evoking the grief, the frustration and the absurdity of the global pandemic.

 

Martyn Jacques says: “There are a few people who have said I shouldn’t write about it but I write about the streets - and this is what is happening at this particular moment in history.

 

“I think I am part of a tradition of artists who write about poor people. My favourite visual artist is Hogarth and my favourite author is Charles Dickens. They weren’t interested in rich people and celebrities.”

 

In their thirty-year career The Tiger Lillies, whose style is inspired by Brechtian cabaret of 1930s, have never been afraid to sing about death, disease, pestilence and misery.

 

But it is the heartbreak of the epidemic that has made the strongest impression on Jacques.

 

“I suppose the biggest thing of all is the suffering of the people who have died from it and the suffering that creates for many other people who love them.”

 

One of the songs on the new album ‘Frank Has Passed Away’, was inspired by Frank Gabrin - the New York doctor who died after warning about the lack of protective equipment in hospitals.

 

Jacques says: “He was a really lovely man.  He worked at a poor hospital in New York and spent a lot of his time helping people.  He had to wear the same mask for three days because they didn’t have any replacement masks.”

 

The Tiger Lillies have worked on the album in isolation - with Jacques writing and recording in Berlin and bass player Adrian Stout collaborating from a home studio in Athens.

 

Adrian Stout says: “Martyn records things in a studio and sends them to me.  I add my part and send them back. I’m really missing travelling, seeing people, playing in front of people. It’s about people sitting in small rooms together.”

 

The band is scheduled to play Wilton’s Music Hall in East London in September. Staging two performances a night with reduced audiences is one of the options being discussed.

 

A semi live launch party for Covid 19 II will take place on June 19 on Youtube, with Jacques and Stout appearing on a split screen.   

 

Adrian Stout says: “We can’t find a way to do it live with people in two different countries, so we record a live performance and then correct the time lag which comes from playing down a phone line. So it’s a live performance but we can’t play in real time.”

 

The live launch party for Covid-19 Part I, on May 1, had 150,000 views, from 30 different countries.

 

Stout says the chance to interact with fans, albeit online, was welcome. “It seemed to get a good response.  It was interesting watching it being watched.”

 

However, like many artists around the world, The Tiger Lillies are watching and waiting until live performances are allowed to resume.

 

Martyn Jacques says: “I used to spend quite a lot of time complaining about not really wanting to go on a plane and fly somewhere. I have been getting more and more reluctant to tour. But when it stops altogether…

 

“I don’t like it at all.  I have spent most of my life travelling round the world and playing in different cities.  It is so much a part of me to wake up in another city another town.

 

“Suddenly to be stuck in one place with the same scenery and the same kitchen - it’s really traumatic.   There have been moments where I have been mildly depressed - although I am not really a depressive.

 

“Some people do the gardening - but my hobby is writing and recording songs.   I’m trying to keep myself sane.”