DRUMMING WITH DEAD CAN DANCE AND PARALLEL ADVENTURES

Peter Ulrich RED HEN PRESS

A long-overdue tale recounted by way of an erstwhile member’s memoir.

Since the early 1980s, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard have infused neoclassical soundscapes with medieval, gothic, folk and world music influences to plough a singular artistic furrow. They have had help from a supporting cast, of course, including Peter Ulrich, their drummer in the early years. Ulrich has remained close to Perry and Gerrard since then, so he’s well qualified to write this account of the band’s development (the first such biog to be published), interwoven with a personal memoir that may be of less interest to most readers but is still engagingly written.

On joining DCD on the back of an audition in 1982 in the south-east London tower block where the band were based, the self-taught percussionist was involved in some of their defining records and shows, and his insights are often illuminating. He describes the way the band wrote songs “upside down”, starting with a drum pattern or other unorthodox element to avoid falling into rock music’s traditional compositional patterns.

Part autobiography, part band biog, this is nothing if not unorthodox, but then that’s fully in keeping with the band that inspired it.