or an amphitheatre, to bring the best out of their classically infused, hyper-ethereal ethno-fusion.
In summer 2012, sat around a modest conference table in a plush hotel in Dublin’s city centre, Gerrard and Perry were about to release the first Dead Can Dance album in sixteen years – and their first not on 4AD. The photograph on the cover of Anastasis features a field of sunflowers blackened by the sun, their seed-heads drooping, exhausted. But once the heads and stems are chopped down, the roots will ensure that life, and flowers, will return. As Perry explains, anastasis is Greek for ‘resurrection’, as Dead Can Dance’s ongoing worldwide tour – at the time of writing, it’s been going for over a year – proves.
Perry also explains that anastasis also means, ‘in between two stages’, an appropriate term, as Gerrard and Perry are two very distinct characters. One is female, blonde, Australian, possessing a glorious, mournful, open-throated contralto and a penchant for speaking-in-tongues, or glossolalia, who later made her mark in Hollywood with film soundtracks, yet sees improvisation as the key: ‘That’s when I have that initial connection and everything seems to unlock,’ she proclaims. ‘If I try to refine that, I start thinking as opposed to feeling.’
The other character is male, bald now but once dark-haired, of Anglo-Irish stock, possessing a gorgeous, stately baritone, and a penchant for a painstakingly prepared music inspired by the distressed heartbreak grandeur of 1960s-period Scott Walker and Joy Division’s late talisman Ian Curtis, tinged with the Gaelic ballads absorbed via his Irish roots. After meeting in Melbourne in 1979, these apparent polar opposites were to strike up a formidable alliance, traversing not just genres but centuries and continents, bound up in a uniquely visionary sound. Anastasis shows how age, and time, hasn’t withered their cause.
Gerrard was raised in East Prahran, one of Melbourne’s melting-pot neighbourhoods, largely Greek but with Turkish, Arab, Italian and Irish communities. She recalls, ‘Exquisite, dark, arabesque voices that would blare out of the windows. It was so sensual and moving.’ By the age of twelve, Gerrard was playing the piano accordion and able to sing in her own sensual, arabesque style. ‘It was the most alive I’d ever felt. This sounds arrogant but I felt I could change things because of this great gift.’ Only a few years later, she was bold enough to perform, on her own, in pubs, ‘Some of the most insalubrious environments on earth,’ she says, ‘with broken bottles and fights, and people screaming, “Get yer top off!”’
By the end of her teens, she’d joined a local band, Microfilm, and mastered the yang ch’in (Chinese dulcimer), which resembled a metallic harp: ‘There was no concept of tuning, you just wound it up, and off you went,’ she says. When Brendan Perry first saw Gerrard play with the yang ch’in, he says, ‘It was frightening! Lisa was singing a song about taking a man home …’
Gerrard obliges with the lyric: ‘I found a man in the park, I took him home in the dark/ I put him in the cupboard, can I keep him for a treat?’
Perry’s background had been equally eventful. Born and raised in Whitechapel in east London, he left for Auckland, New Zealand with his whole family when in his early teens. He learnt guitar at school and after considering teaching or the civil service, he sensibly changed course to play bass in the local punk band The Scavengers. He called himself Ronnie Recent. When original vocalist Mike Lesbian left, Perry began singing too, but feeling New Zealand was too small a scene, the band moved to Melbourne and changed its name to The Marching Girls. After a year and one minor hit single, ‘True Love’, Perry had re-adopted his real name and was investigating electronics and percussion with bassist Paul Erikson and Marching Girls drummer Simon Monroe as Dead Can Dance.
The first time that the pair had met, Gerrard taught Perry how to cheat on Melbourne’s tramway system. Gerrard had already seen a Marching Girls show: ‘I’d never heard bass guitar played that way, with a classical, anchored approach. Brendan was a brilliant musician.’
Gerrard joined Dead Can Dance, and the pair became lovers. The first piece the new line-up attempted, she recalls, ‘didn’t sound like anything either of us had done before, which drew us close together’. That first demo, ‘Frontier’, didn’t resemble much else on earth. Mixing yang ch’in, Aboriginal rhythms and the duo’s hypnotic vocals, it sounded both ancient and modern. Perry says audience reactions were very positive, adding, ‘But there was no future in Australia, just like New Zealand. We kept playing to the same crowds. But bands like The Cure, who we supported in Melbourne, showed that this kind of music was appreciated overseas, so we had to go where it was happening.’
Monroe chose to stay behind, so only Erikson joined Gerrard and Perry on the flight to London in 1981. For three months, the couple stayed with Perry’s parents (who had also returned to the UK), in east London. Craving independence, they had accepted a hard-to-let flat on the seventeenth floor of Bowsprit Point, a council housing block on the Isle of Dogs, near to the now bustling business district of Canary Wharf but in 1981, one of London’s most derelict districts (Stanley Kubrick’s war film Full Metal Jacket was partly filmed there because of the available wasteland in which to stage explosions).
When I visited the couple in 1986, Perry admitted that his unemployment benefit had initially sustained them and Erikson alike, with odd jobs on top. Showing her propensity to roll up her sleeves, Gerrard also sold houseplants, door to door. What little spare cash they had after buying instruments and seeing concerts was spent on beer, the odd piece of hash and an art-house movie every Sunday. Music was really their sole driving concern. ‘There is so much negativity in London, one is inspired to do something positive here, something untainted,’ Gerrard said that day. ‘You put your ear to the ground, and describe what’s lacking.’
‘It was incredibly tough,’ she says today. ‘We’d eat just bread and water sometimes, and the venues we’d play were fashionably filthy and it wasn’t unusual to get food poisoning. But we knew people would love our music if we could just get it out there.’
One technical tool was a cassette player with built-in drum machine, and on their rickety second-hand bicycles, they took their demo to a select number of independent labels across London. ‘We knew from import copies of the British music press who to approach. Factory was our first choice because of Joy Division – they changed my outlook on music, and their incredibly atmospheric qualities that mirrored Ian Curtis’s wonderful lyrics, and the industrial sound by [producer] Martin Hannett. I knew 4AD from The Birthday Party, though I wasn’t a fan of their big, cheesy American gothic. Bauhaus’ first album, though, was very forward thinking, mixing guitars and percussive rhythms. I only heard Cocteau Twins when we got to London. I’d tape John Peel’s show every night.’
Yet Ivo initially turned them down: ‘He said he had a full roster,’ recalls Perry.
‘Ivo had a bit of a phobia about signing acts,’ recalls Deborah Edgely. ‘It’s a big commitment taking on people’s lives, and he wouldn’t sign long-term deals because then you’d be responsible for their future, and have to maintain a band’s income. These young kids would pitch up, and who was going to look after them? If you have a relationship built on one album at a time, there is less responsibility. You release something and hope for the best and then make a choice whether to carry on.’
Though both Mute and Cherry Red reacted positively to Dead Can Dance, the trio carried on without signing a deal. A new drummer, Peter Ulrich, was found living in one of the neighbouring tower blocks, and more demos recorded. Perry says Ivo eventually called again: ‘Two tracks, “The Fatal Impact” and “Frontier”, had captured his imagination, and he said he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tape. But he wanted to see us play live.’ 4AD helped by finding them two support slots to Xmal Deutschland. ‘Ivo was so impressed we’d got it together, and really enjoyed it [the gigs],’ says Gerrard. ‘That turned things around.’
Ivo:
