In “Rats”, Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies sings from inside one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most gruesome stories, “The Rats in the Walls”. In it, an American heir restores his family’s priory in England and discovers, beneath its foundations, the caverns where his ancestors bred human beings for food. The 1924 tale ends with its narrator confined at Hanwell asylum, insisting that the rats devoured his friend. Jacques offers his listener the same alibi: after warnings of a strange smell and a shadow on the move, he assures them in falsetto that the twisted corpse in the foundations is “all in your mind of course”.
Jacques wrote the song for Mountains of Madness, the Lovecraft cabaret the band created with Alexander Hacke of the Berlin industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten and the artist Danielle de Picciotto. It premiered at Arena Berlin in August 2005. In that production Hacke’s electronics and spoken interludes ran through the band’s accordion, piano, double bass and musical saw, the first time the trio had performed with electronic instruments. The new version clears the electronics out and hands the song back to the trio’s own instruments: accordion, double bass, drums and percussion, with Jacques’s falsetto out front and two backing voices beneath it.
Jacques founded The Tiger Lillies in London in 1989, drawing on the Soho street life he had watched since moving there in the 1980s and on the Weimar-era theatre songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, played with the provocation of punk. Double bassist Adrian Stout joined in 1995 and brought the musical saw and theremin into the band’s sound. Drummer Budi Butenop, a veteran of Berlin theatre and of crust-punk and Americana bands, arrived in December 2021, six years after settling in London. The trio release their work through their own label, Misery Guts Music.
The song has history with Soho Theatre: a live version recorded during the band’s residencies at its Dean Street home appears on Live in Soho. On 1 November it was on the programme of Songs for the Dead, the trio’s Day of the Dead concert at Soho Theatre Walthamstow. The video premiered on Halloween. It was directed by the Berlin-based photographer and filmmaker Andrey Kezzyn, who also shot the band’s clip for “Stupid Life” from 2025’s Serenade from the Sewer.
Listen to “Rats” HERE and find the 2005 original, “Rats (In The Walls)”, on Mountains of Madness via THIS LINK