The Tiger Lillies @ the Moore

The Halloween crowd was bleeding out of orifices, jack-booted and silk gowned, and they roared at the songs about compulsive masturbation; the sheep fucked and sheared and shot; school kids on heroin and cocaine; the schizophrenic dead under an overpass; the anti-hymn with the chorus "banging in the nails." The Tiger Lillies stood on the Moore's stage beneath red and blue lights that left livid bruises on the smoky air and profaned life in an old English music hall vernacular, Martyn Jacques' accordion disgorging seasick gypsy melodies and his falsetto sliding lyrical knives gently, madly in. But there was also a slow moonlight stroll of a song, for after the tents were rolled up, Jacques' countertenor filling the house and dripping eerily from the balconies, the crowd a rippling sepia sea, waves of antique fascination:

The laughing and joking, they all end too soon
Forgotten memories, forgotten tunes
You dream of a better day, alone with the moon

People gasped when it ended, surfacing. Then the Tiger Lillies, repenting of a sentimental moment, played "Crack of Doom," which encapsulates the British experience, post-empire, and which on Halloween in America came off like an apparition glimpsed in a mirror, a rubber mask sliding off to reveal the future's disinterested skull.

For we're all equal in the end
The small and mighty all the same
This life a shallow, facile game
Where every empire turns to dust
And every ego will be crushed

The crack of doom
Is coming soon