A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
[375] Luna - Tiger Lily (CD)
This is a radio promo CD of Luna’s Tiger Lily that I picked up on Discogs a few months back as a collection filler. Although technically it does contain something I never had before, or maybe more accurately one of the tracks doesn’t contains something I did have before.
There are two versions of Tiger Lily on the disc the LP version and a single edit which chops off the intro, chops out a bit of the solo, and fades early - basically lopping 39 seconds out of the song to supposedly make it more attractive for radio play, although I’m a little puzzled at how much more attractive that would make it? The single edit is still over four minutes long so I do wonder how attractive that made it for the radio.
Since this was from Bewitched it was only a “single” in the US and I wonder how much radio play it got and whether the 39 seconds helped with that.
Dean wrote about the tiger lily girl in the sleeve notes to Best of Luna:
In 1993 Howard Thompson, Elektra's head of A&R, came to Paris to see us on the V.U. tour. We hooked him up with one of our "All Access" passes for the show, but Howard was tossed out of the club by the bouncers (they caught him taking 3-D photographs of the show), and we were lectured by the Velvet's tour manager about loaning out our passes. My wife was visiting too, and Howard had some powdered ecstasy that we dropped into our wine at dinner, and he took us to a beautiful/sleazy club called Lily La Tigresse, in Pigalle (which can be seen in the opening sequence of Jean-Pierre Melville's film Bob Le Flambeur). I was struck by the presence of a skinhead girl dancing topless on the bar. She became the "tiger lily girl" as I set these lyrics to a riff that Justin had written.
There’s a lovely (if a little fuzzy and low-res) clip of Luna playing Tiger Lily on MTV back in 1994:
There’s also a nice clip of Luna rehearsing for their lockdown show back in 2021.
You can also watch Stanley playing Tiger Lily in his practice room back in 2010.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/179
- Artist: Luna
- Title: Tiger Lily
- Notes: Radio promo
- Packaging: Jewel case
- Format: CD
- Bought from a Discogs seller for £3