OUTER LIMITS
They’ve rubbed shoulders with the Cocteau Twins, been unafraid to indulge in medieval instruments, been sampled by Steven Wilson and influenced, among many others, Riverside. So the time comes to ask the question: how prog are Dead Can Dance?
Born out of Australia’s post-punk independent band movement, this neoclassical duo were swiftly signed to 4AD in the 80s where, along with labelmates Cocteau Twins, they unwittingly found themselves lumped in with the burgeoning goth scene. Four decades on, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry’s groundbreaking music has inspired a new generation of ethereal and otherworldly progressive acts, as well as a certain Mr Wilson. So now we have to ask: how prog are Dead Can Dance?
Lisa Gerrard frequently uses the word “arrogant” in conjunction with Dead Can Dance, the band she formed with longtime musical partner Brendan Perry in 1981. “We had this arrogant belief that what we were doing was important,” she says at one point. “We never believed it couldn’t be something amazing. That was never a consideration.” Later, she puts it even more pithily: “We both had this extraordinary arrogance.”
Arrogant is perhaps overstating it, from an outside perspective at least. But the music Dead Can Dance have made over four decades undeniably has an elevated otherworldliness to it. Their songs are impossible to pin down: the cavernous post-punk of their early years swiftly gave way to a sound that has drawn from multiple places and cultures, from traditional Mediterranean music to medieval.
Their protean approach has influenced some of progressive music’s key figures. Steven Wilson has cited Dead Can Dance as a formative inspiration – he and sometime collaborator Tim Bowness sampled DCD’s Song Of Sophia on the track Simple from No-Man’s 1994 album Flowermouth, while Wilson has long expressed an interest in collaborating with Gerrard. More recently, DCD’s imprint is evident in the transcendental musical journeys of Wardruna, Heilung and Russian dark-folk mystics Theodor Bastard.
Riverside and Lunatic Soul frontman Mariusz Duda is a confirmed DCD fan. “They’ve always been one of my greatest music inspirations and if it wasn’t for Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, certain elements wouldn’t be present on Riverside albums, and Lunatic Soul would certainly not exist,” he says. “They created their own language, genre; their own music world, constantly evolving. For me it’s an internal journey, an attempt at answering the questions: where do we come from and where are we going? A journey between dream and reality, between life and death, which has always intimidated me with its dark trance quality, its metaphysical maturity and mysticism.”
“Music to me is a language, a way of connecting musically,” says Gerrard, speaking on the phone from her native Australia. “It’s certainly not an entertainment thing. Art is something you communicate with. It exists outside of normal existence.”
When she says this, it’s not out of haughtiness so much as a general disconnection with anything other than the sounds within her own head. But then Dead Can Dance seem to inhabit a singular musical plane. Like onetime 4AD labelmates Cocteau Twins, they created their own universe, with its own unique language.
It wasn’t always that way. They emerged from Melbourne’s late 70s art-punk micro-movement, the Little Band scene. Gerrard grew up in the suburb of Prahran, an area with a heavily Mediterranean population. Her earliest musical memories were of Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian music spilling from neighbouring houses and supermarkets. “That was my pop music,” she says.
Her early songs were defiantly avantgarde. “I remember one song that she sang about finding a man in the park and asking her mother if she could bring him home to keep in her wardrobe, as she attacked this Chinese dulcimer with two bamboo sticks,” the London-born Perry, then a member of post-punk outfit Marching Girls, later recalled.
“I think he hated what I was doing,” says Gerrard now. “But then I hated what he was doing, too.”
These fundamental differences didn’t prevent the pair from becoming musically and romantically involved. Within a year of forming Dead Can Dance, they had left Melbourne and moved to London in search of a record deal. “I went with him ’cos I was in love at the time,” says Gerrard.
“I didn’t want a record deal.”
Their living circumstances were anything but otherworldly. “We
“MUSIC TO ME IS A LANGUAGE, A WAY OF CONNECTING MUSICALLY. IT’S NOT A GENRE THING. IT’S CERTAINLY NOT AN ENTERTAINMENT THING.”
lived in a council flat on the Isle Of Dogs [in east London],” says Gerrard. “I wouldn’t say it was fun, but we had a purpose. And we had the Limehouse Library. We listened to a lot of records and read a lot of books. We spent a lot of time just researching stuff.”
The nascent band – and it was a band at that point – attracted the attention of 4AD founder Ivo WattsRussell, who signed them to his influential post-punk label. Their selftitled debut album, released in 1984, fitted in with 4AD’s cerebral, gothadjacent aesthetic. “Brendan was really into bands like Joy Division,” says Gerrard. “Who I hated.”
Dead Can Dance were down to a duo by the time of the following year’s Spleen And Ideal, and the pillars of their approach were coming into focus. Unlike the debut, this was only infrequently recognisable as ‘rock’ music. The post-punk influences were largely dispensed and the more overt gothic influences nudged towards the margins. Instead, the songs hovered somewhere between medieval liturgy and mystic ritual.
The yin and yang of Perry and Gerrard’s approaches were becoming clearer too. His voice was stately and sonorous. Hers was deliberately mercurial: as dramatic as Maria Callas one minute, as swirling as a Bulgarian folk singer another, as stark as Edith Piaf the next (the fact she often sang in a made-up language only made her voice seem more unearthly). “I wanted to send my voice out in the universe, like an arrow,” she says.
Perry pushed his partner to write her own songs. “I didn’t want to write – I wanted to be like Celine Dion, have someone else write for me,” she says now. “But he said if I didn’t write the music, I didn’t get to sing. At the time I thought, ‘Why is he being so cruel? He knows I have this magnificent voice!’ But it was good for me, it forced me into writing.”
The musical partnership would evolve over their next albums. A run of three superb records – Within
The Realm Of A Dying Sun (1987), The Serpent’s Egg (1988) and Aion (1990, by which time Gerrard and Perry were no longer a couple) – wove together gothic grandeur, ornate classical ambition and music inspired by indigenous cultures from the Middle East to Northern Europe to Australasia.
“I look back on those times with such joy,” says Gerrard. “They were beautiful times. I felt like we had nothing to do with the world – what we were doing was spreading a message. We were going to open up human beings’ hearts. When people said, ‘I don’t really like you,’ I used to think, ‘What a pity that person doesn’t understand. It’s not their fault. But they will get it one day.’ It wasn’t arrogance.”
Though their music was a tough sell, they still built a devoted cult following. But with 1993’s Into The Labyrinth – a record partly inspired by Ancient Greek mythology – they made a commercial breakthrough thanks to The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove appearing on the soundtrack to the Sean Penn film The Crossing Guard. Equally surprising was the fact that the album’s opening track, Yulunga (Spirit Dance), was played in heavy rotation on the National Geographic channel – although that was probably a better fit for Dead Can Dance than MTV. “It finally put Brendan and I’s music on the map,” says Gerrard.
1996’s Spiritchaser was another impressive album, but it marked a turning point for Gerrard and Perry. The sometimes fraught but always fruitful dynamic that existed between the two of them had been stretched to breaking point.
“I went to work with Brendan, but he’d already written the music for the next album,” says Gerrard. “That’s never a good thing for Brendan and I. We need to write together, even if we’re writing separately. He said, ‘You can sing this bit or that bit.’ It just wasn’t true for us. And so I left.”
The pair embarked on separate careers. Perry released his debut solo album, the gentle Eye Of The Hunter, in 1999 and a follow-up 11 years later, the more electronic-centred Ark. Following the release of her own debut solo album, 1995’s The Mirror Pool, Gerrard veered off into the world of film, working on scores and soundtracks for The Insider, Whale Rider and, most famously, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
The latter bagged her and co-composer Hans Zimmer a prestigious Golden Globe. “I hadn’t even heard of a Golden Globe,” she says, ever disconnected
“WE HAVE THIS EXTRAORDINARY CONNECTION. I’M SURE BRENDAN WOULD LOVE ME TO DISAPPEAR AND I WOULD LOVE HIM TO DISAPPEAR, BUT WE ALWAYS END UP TOGETHER, BECAUSE THERE’S SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T UNLOCKED.”
from mainstream culture. (One unlikely side-effect of her work on Gladiator is a lasting friendship with its star, fellow Aussie Russell Crowe).
Yet Gerrard and Perry’s bond was too deep for them not to gravitate back to each other. They reunited as Dead Can Dance for a tour in 2005, and followed it seven years later with Anastasis. That in turn was followed by 2018’s Dionysus.
“I’ve never had a break from Brendan despite sometimes being distant from him,” she says. “We have this extraordinary connection. I’m sure he would love me to disappear and I would love him to disappear, but we always end up together, because there’s something we haven’t unlocked.”
Gerrard says that she and Perry have talked about a recording a new Dead Can Dance album, but even without the pandemic, geographical concerns have prohibited it. “Brendan says, ‘Let’s do an album where you can work in Australia and I can work here.’ [Perry is based in Ireland.] That’s never going to work. It’s got to be the way it was.” She sighs. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to it.”
Instead, 2021 has seen a new Lisa Gerrard album, the remarkable Burn, which she worked on with former Dead Can Dance keyboard player and regular collaborator Jules Maxwell. In an era where pessimism reigns and travel is largely ruled out, it’s an uplifting, truly transportive experience. Ironically, Gerrard says she had very little to do with putting it together, to the point where she seems mildly baffled by it today. Maxwell built the songs around unused vocals from sessions she’d recorded with The Mystery Of The Bulgarian Voices, a choir she collaborated with in 2015. “He took my voice and turned it into these songs,” she says. “Other than that, I had nothing to do with it.”
She struggles, too, to quantify the influence Dead Can Dance have had on subsequent generations who picked up on their exploratory spirit. “I don’t believe we own anything,” she says, semi-cryptically. “Songs and poems and art: it takes you out of the system. Maybe that’s what people draw upon.”
And the arrogance which fuelled Dead Can Dance for so many years? Gerrard says that’s abated. “As you get older you can no longer rely on your arrogance, you have to rely on your humility.” She laughs. “And that’s a real struggle.”
Lisa Gerrard & Jules Maxwell’s Burn is out now via Atlantic Curve. See www.lisagerrard.com for more.