Tiger Lady
Trish Lyons of VIRALUX performing Tiger Lady at Generator Projects, Dundee, Scotland, Sept 30, 2018. To hear the track, click on the audio player below.
Inspired by the novel The Public Image by Muriel Spark, VIRALUX created the track Tiger Lady for the limited edition vinyl record ‘The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark’ produced as part of the exhibition The Public Image - Scottish Tiger Lady by Michael Curran at Generator Projects, Dundee (Sept. 2018). Curran and curator Hari MacMillan invited audio artists to choose a novel by Spark and create a recording. The resulting LP was released as part of a series of performance events held throughout the exhibition period, including a performance of Tiger Lady.
The Public Image tells the story of Annabel Christopher aka the Tiger Lady, an English actress of mediocre talent whose uncanny ability at managing her public image brings her greater success than her talent merits. Living in Rome surrounded by film types, paparazzi, wannabes, has-beens and a jealous husband, the Tiger Lady manages to keep up appearances to great effect, until her husband hatches a morbid plot of revenge. A deeply superficial tale of savage narcissism, The Public Image looks in the mirror darkly at the cult of personality and the power of image, and is as relevant today as it was prescient at the time of its publication fifty-one years ago. Published in 1968, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize the following year. The novel inspired the name of the band Public Image Ltd., which John Lydon formed in 1978 following the breakup of the Sex Pistols.
Hear the track on the audio player below,
“Tiger lady”by VIRALUX, text drawn from The public image by Muriel spark
It is easy to look back and paint a picture of how things went. At the time it was all unclear. He was entirely aware of the image making process. She took it for granted that she would be photographed with him, after all she was an actress. She had the capacity for achieving the most impressive effects by the most superficial means.Her face had changed, as if by action of many famous cameras.He was jealous of her career.He was hypnotized by a sense of the enormity of his deception. His actor’s good looks had sunk into his cheekbones and eye sockets. As her husband, he presented a very good public image indeed. He could have played the part well had he not been inhibited by the idea of revolt from his marriage.“You never feel the part, do you?” “What do you mean, when I’m acting I’m working”. “It’s what I began to make of you that you’ve partly become””Before I made you the Tiger-Lady, you didn’t even look like a lady in public, never mind a tiger in private.” What is personality but the effect one has on others? Life is all the achievement of an effect. Only the animals remain natural. She spoke like the jab of a needle, and watched to see if her words had gone in. He seemed aware that she was trying to stick a pointed idea into his mind. The range of emotion was as grand as grand opera. He wanted to leave her, and made up his mind that he would do so, eventually. He disappears for a week, throws a party, without telling her, and without showing up himself, and then commits suicide. Oh, the treachery. Having awoken from the dead sleep of arrested hysteria. She felt cold with a coldness that nothing could warm. You are a beautiful shell, like something washed up on the sea-shore, a collector’s item, perfectly formed– but empty, devoid of all life it once held. She felt neither free nor unfree. She, as an empty shell contains, by its very structure, the echo and harking image of former and former seas.
The vocals for Tiger Lady were recorded at the NMMP recording studios in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was mixed and mastered by Gordon Dawson of VIRALUX at the Cream Guillotine Studios in Camberwell, London.