Dead Can Dance: ‘It’s Like Being Thrown From A Building’

Before she became a Golden Globe-winning composer and solo artist, Lisa Gerrard was half of genre-less duo Dead Can Dance. Three decades after forming in Melbourne, DCD are back with a new album and a visit to their homeland. Gerrard opens up to DOUG WALLEN.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Signed to 4AD through the 1980s and ’90s, Dead Can Dance baffled and seduced with their indefinable offspring of ambient, classical and – to say the least – world music. Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard formed the duo in Melbourne in 1981 but relocated to London the next year, going on to release seven self-produced albums on 4AD before splitting in 1998.

Both have since released uncompromising solo albums. Among a great many collaborations, Gerrard has made four albums with German iconoclast Klaus Schulze and scored a string of films that includes The Insider and Ali (with Pieter Bourke), Balibo and Whalerider. She has worked with Hans Zimmer to score Mission: Impossible II, Tears of the Sun and Gladiator, the latter earning her a Golden Globe.

Sixteen years after their previous album together, Gerrard and Perry returned last year with Anastasis, which translates to “resurrection” in Greek. It confidently picks up the Dead Can Dance legacy, with Gerrard’s half of the lead vocals manifesting in her very own non-language. Despite its dense and far-flung splay of sounds, it was made by the two of them alone. Their voluminous compositions are as likely to plunder reggae as cosmic electronics, and they remain impossible to truly deconstruct.

Yet the band will do just with a modest Australian tour – their first since 1981, according to a very funny Gerrard.

[Photo: Jay Brooks]

So you’re living in Australia now. What part do you live in?
I live in Drouin West.

Where’s that?
It’s somewhere between Uruguay and Moscow. [Laughs] It’s actually in Gippsland. God, don’t ask me where it is. It’s two hours from Melbourne. Something like that.

Do you look forward to playing Australia, as distinct to other countries?
Australia’s come too late for me, because my father’s passed away and it’s all about family, really. It would have been really nice if the whole family could have been there. So much has happened since we played together there last.

When was that?
It would have been in 1981, I think. Probably before you were born.

No, I was two years old. To be fair.
[Laughs] And probably a lot brighter than you are now! Let’s be honest: you’re born a thousand years old and you end up about two years old before you die.

With the new record, I was interested in how you and Brendan each sing four songs? Was it intentional to have a balance that way?
I have no idea. I don’t know how these things work in the universe. Maybe four’s the number this year. I don’t know; I’m not very New Age. I mean, it wasn’t planned that way.

Were there many songs that didn’t make it onto the record?
Yes, there were this time, because we have lots of material we wanted to bring to the table. Everything takes such a long time because it’s only the two of us. It’s just, time escapes you. We worked every day and we got to the point where we thought, “Well, this seems to be a really lovely journey, a lovely message. So let’s leave it there for now.”

With ‘Return of the She-King’, especially the beginning of it, I felt like I was hearing some of the influence of the scores and soundtrack work you’ve done over the years.
Well, you’ve got to expect those kinds of things. As you grow as an artistic soul, it’s like you enter the material world and you gather together the things that come to you through the material. That’s your bag of apprenticeship kind of properties that you draw upon to make the poetry that you make in music. You can’t deny the fact that, in the last 20 years, there’s been those influences. But I think that’s always been there. That’s why I ended up doing movies in the first place, because that was there. It’s just that it’s evolved and developed more, that’s all.

There’s that similar kind of scope.
I never really think about anything like that. It just happens. You go along with things and you do them as they come, because that’s the journey. The threads that you pick up on the way are, hopefully, connected to the absolute that truthfully drove you in the first place to be inspired to do this work. You’re not making soup. These things grow up from absolutes, from the poetry of whom or what you embrace in this work. In the bald, horrible reality of starting from nothing. And that’s what happens with every single piece of music. I’m sure you experience that when you write: you start with a blank page and it’s terrifying. And it’s not until the work is done that you look back and think, “Oh, now I see how that seems to be connected to that.”

But it’s an afterthought. It’s always an afterthought. It’s never calculated. It’s not that easy to sit down and get your T-square out and have your architect’s mount and go over the last 20 buildings that have been built in the last 20 years and draw upon their plans so that you know how to go forward. It’s not like that. You know it isn’t. It’s like being thrown from a building. That’s how this work is. I mean, I work in film all the time. I contributed some singing this week to something [Hans Zimmer is] working on at the moment, and same thing. The horrible reality of having to complete something never changes.

“We’ve been given a task and we have to pick it up and complete the works that we do, and it’s not about us.”

Yeah, I’ve been writing for half my life and it only gets harder. And you get harder on yourself about it.
I know. It’s an affliction. It’s awful. Everyone says to me, “Why can’t you stop working? Just stop.” It’s not that easy, as you know. We have to do it. We are the nurses of the universe: that’s what we do. We’ve been given a task and we have to pick it up and complete the works that we do, and it’s not about us. It’s about being about to share … well, yes, of course we want to be acknowledged. Sometimes, I’ve often said to people when we’re recording with them, “Just look at him like you love him and he’ll be able to do anything you want.” I mean, that’s really all it is. That’s why being in the studio is so much harder than being on stage: because you don’t have anyone looking at you like they love you in the studio. But on stage you’ve got 5000 people a day. There’s nothing like the stage to make you work properly, because they look at you like they love you.

How wide a cast of players are on the album?
It’s only Brendan and I. I know, how boring is that?

That’s really interesting, because there’s so much different instrumentation.
I know, we’ve used a lot of live instruments, but we also used a lot of samples. I mean, we live in the modern world. We don’t live outside of it. We’re going to be using samples if we’ve got them.

What’s your method of finding samples?
[Lists options, from CD-ROMs and music libraries to “banditry”] [When] a musician comes over and you work, sometimes the only exchange of payment you have for each other is to share each other’s files. So you all end up with something. But I always find that I have a top 20 that I go to. I know they’re my old reliables; I know that those drum sounds are really good. I find it really hard to go through all of the sounds we have in our libraries, because there just isn’t time. And there’s something that you connect with certain things. You get an artist that might use this particular canvas. It’s the same as working with music: you have your colour and your palettes. I find that I work mostly with the voice. Not so much on that album, but with the other works that I do, I build lots and lots of choirs and abstract kinds of things with voice. A lot of it comes from there.

With you two doing everything yourselves, how do you approach it live?
Well, we have to get other people to learn the parts.

Will it be quite a lot of people on stage?
We’ve got six musicians on stage. They’re really great musicians. And of course, it doesn’t matter that you’ve written the parts. It matters that the person who comes to execute those parts makes them their own. There is no ownership in this work; these things are lent to you. And you get to embrace them or address them, but I don’t think Brendan and I are any more in ownership than the people who are standing on that stage at that particular moment in time. Everyone has to commit, regardless.

“They’ll always sound a little bit different. Y’know, we’re not there in cast iron, walking up on stage in concrete.”

Do you think that mentality is partly informed by using samples and taking influence from a lot of music of different countries and cultures?
Yeah, possibly. I don’t know. It’s what you love. You sit around at night, friends come over, you go through your favourite CDs and you play things and you embrace things and that influences you. Y’know, it’s not a university degree. It’s things that have come up because of a love of music. The paintbrushes are broad and wide, because you could broaden your interest by virtual things like iTunes.

Back in the day we didn’t have that. We had the BBC Radio, which had the most fantastic documentaries on world music. Extraordinary. And we used to make tape recordings of them. It really helped Brendan with a lot of his percussion. He explored a lot of different areas through Islamic and Middle Eastern music to get him closer to really understanding how to make drums speak. And I grew up in a Greek/Turkish area in East Prahran [in Melbourne], and I sometimes think the way I sing [in her own unique language] is probably because of that. We don’t question it, we just take it. It’s a gift: don’t question, nurture it.

When you do songs from your previous albums on tour, do you reinterpret them much?
They’ll always sound a little bit different. Y’know, we’re not there in cast iron, walking up on stage in concrete. Things will take on new meanings, and the energies will have folded into a different area of space and time. But ultimately, you’ll know that that’s that song. It’s not that we’ve suddenly become bored with it. It’s just that there’s a certain reverence for the new musicians that have come to the stage, and their energy is a massive input and alters things in the abstract significantly. You just have to accept that. That’s the beauty of the work: it’s organic. It’s alive.

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‘Anastasis’ is out now through [PIAS]/Liberator. Tour dates below.

Sun, Feb 3 – Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW [sold out]
Mon, Feb 4 – Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW
Wed, Feb 6 – The Palais, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, Feb 9 – Perth Concert Hall, Perth, WA