The London-based trio The Tiger Lillies are Martyn Jacques (songwriting, vocals, accordion, piano), Adrian Stout (double bass, bowed saw, theremin, backing vocals), and Budi Butenop (drums, percussion, backing vocals). Long seen as masters of dark, acoustic-led cabaret, they toured globally throughout the 2000s but have been absent from our shores for ten years.

This tour promotes their album Serenade From the Sewer, together with selections from their back catalogue. Songs typically allude to those Jacques describes as “living on the margins”, such as prostitutes, drug dealers, etc., apparently inspired by his own experience of 1980s Soho.

Critics have compared The Tiger Lillies to Amanda Palmer and others who reference 1920s Berliner cabaret, particularly the grim, poetic lyricism of Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators, such as composers Kurt Weill and Hans Eisler.

The Tiger Lillies. Photo supplied

The members of the Tiger Lillies are made up as Expressionist clowns, with white smeared across their faces contrasting with black, caricatural lips and skull-like eye sockets. They wear stylish three-piece suits and hats that could date from anywhere between 1920 and 1959. Jacques presents himself as the thoughtful, straight performer. Stout is the indifferent, leering sidekick – though still very focused on playing. Butenop comes across as an open-mouthed naif who just can’t get enough of his drums.

There is, moreover, more than a dash of tango (similar to Weill’s musical borrowings), particularly in Jacques’ bandoneon-like use of the concertina to bounce up and down on the beats. When he moves to the piano, the Tiger Lillies’ music recalls a funereal torch song.

In the end, Jacques and his associates owe less to Brecht’s excoriating accounts of the systematic oppression of the underclasses and workers, let alone to the highly referential and structurally complex music of Weill, Eisler and others. The Tiger Lillies are in fact more sonically related to the bump and grind of Anglophone carnival, sideshow spruikers, vaudeville and burlesque, most recalling Tom Waits’ brilliant collaborations with Kathleen Brennan on Swordfishtrombones (recently reissued for its 40th anniversary).

Compared to Waits and Brennan, the Tiger Lillies opt for modest arrangements, employing dramatically shouted unison text and manically repeated musical phrases. This is salted with short solos and extemporisations, producing a “rock’n’roll” (some have said “post-punk”) effect.

Brecht’s focus on class and gender oppression is certainly lacking in Serenade From the Sewer. Jacques’ women seem to be whores and femmes fatales because that is all that these women, frequenting the margins of society, ever seem to do. Brecht himself, Lotte Lenya, let alone Australia’s own Robyn Archer (a peerless interpreter of Brecht’s songs), would not agree.

Ironically, though, this is partly what makes the Tiger Lillies so appealing and successful. With the Tiger Lillies, what you see and what you hear is what you get. Social critique, or even deep character studies, are left to others. It is rather the bounce of the music, and Jacques’ cracked falsetto, that form the central hook, adorned with a largely imagined, gothically romantic social milieu.

Moreover, despite their attire and generic links to theatre and cabaret, neither the musicians nor the subjects they sing about come across as psychologically nuanced characters. Refraining from any banter at all, the trio maintains an ambiguous, aloof flatness – as happy to sing about the tragic death of a prostitute as about the joys of heroin.

For those of us, like myself, who have haunted the theatres and fringe clubs of Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Edinburgh and elsewhere, the Tiger Lillies are similar to any number of bands involved in the post-1990s cabaret revival (my favourite of which might be Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen).

What sets The Tiger Lillies apart is their tightly focused musical delivery. The songs are presented almost without pause, each adding familiar but extremely well-executed musico-dramatic shadings. For an almost uninterrupted musical ride of variously thumping or quietly melancholic Gothic sideshow cabaret, the Tiger Lillies are outstanding.

The Tiger Lillies perform Serenade from the Sewer at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide (5-6 March; an Adelaide Festival event).