Facing the Other Way

by Martin Aston

  Colourbox’s presence on 4AD is always wheeled out as proof that Ivo wasn’t only driven to release music that fitted compilations entitled Dark Paths – what Bradford Cox, of current 4AD signing Deerhunter, calls, ‘hyper-ethereal, borderline-goth’. But as Ivo’s first signing in over a year showed, he also wasn’t to be deterred from proceeding down the path if the music inspired. And the band’s name alone, Dead Can Dance, seemed like the very last word in goth.

  Anyone who knows the work of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry can vouch for the group’s dedication to rhythm, but a club was not the place you were destined to hear Dead Can Dance; a church, perhaps, or a grand hall in a stately home, 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: ‘It was Lisa’s voice that initially did it, which is odd because of how much I love Brendan’s voice too. Live, they were really powerful and tight, and Lisa was at her most raw. She sang in a non-lyrical way, using her voice almost like a weapon.’

  Ray Conroy remembers meeting Gerrard and Perry in the pub across from the 4AD office: ‘This weird hermit-like bloke with a pointy beard and the willowy, ghostly, porcelain figure that was Lisa. She really had something.’

  ‘Ivo,’ Perry recalls, ‘had a little ponytail, but about seven or eight inches long. I thought he was Buddhist or Krishna.’ Gerrard feels that Ivo was a figure of divine intervention. ‘He provided a way for artists to express themselves in ways they’d never otherwise be able to, and to reach their potential – which is what This Mortal Coil was about. Bands didn’t feel that they were absolutely brilliant, so there was no real conflict or threat. He attracted that kind of energy, of quite shy people, like he was looking for musicians hidden under stones, making this fragile music. Without Ivo, I don’t think I’d have developed my own voice – given our circumstances, I don’t know if I’d have had the strength to keep going. We were so driven to reach our own idea, this passionate purity about the work, and if we’d been confronted by anyone who put us under pressure to do otherwise, we’d have buckled.’

  By November 1983, Dead Can Dance had recorded a John Peel session and a debut album, Dead Can Dance, recorded with new musicians – James Pinker, the band’s New Zealand programmer (and live soundman) and English bassist Scott Rodger (though the departing Paul Erikson was also on the record). Dead Can Dance was instantly gripping, leading with a re-recording of the instrumental ‘The Fatal Impact’ (the title alluded to the colonial invasion of Aboriginal territory), with haunting chants taped off a TV broadcast of the 1964 film Zulu. The equally revamped ‘Frontier’ was an aural equivalent of the New Guinea tribal mask on the album cover, the idea of ‘dead’ wood being brought back to life by the carver representing the spirit behind the band’s name rather than the goth label tied around Dead Can Dance’s neck.

  Of course there was a clear gothic element to Dead Can Dance. Not long after they’d arrived in Britain, Gerrard and Perry had gone on a cycling tour of Gothic cathedrals and their sound was tailor-made for such spaces. But just as much, Perry agrees, the album bore the influence of life from a fourteenth-floor eyrie: ‘Sparseness, darkness, shadows,’ he says. And Joy Division was gothic too, a music debt that the duo paid by the album homage ‘Threshold’.

  The only disappointing aspect of Dead Can Dance was the production, which managed to come through as both dense and thin. Following a now familiar path, Dead Can Dance had been designated John Fryer and Blackwing: ‘Every day a different band or a different album every week, no one had money and we’d turn things round very fast,’ Fryer recalls. However, though Fryer was (unusually for an engineer, says Ivo) willing to give artists room to experiment, Brendan Perry already had years of experience, and they immediately clashed.

  ‘We fell out with John from day one,’ says Perry. ‘We only had two weeks for the entire album, which was really hard work. He thought he knew more about the recording process than we did, and came over arrogant and unhelpful when he should have been a bridge for us to get down what was inside our heads. We told Ivo it wasn’t working, but we couldn’t change it, so as a result, the production was really poor.’ Fryer says he didn’t like Perry’s domination of Gerrard in the studio, and, ‘how we had to replicate what he had played on the demos, but without any of their personality’.

  Without Fryer’s involvement, Dead Can Dance made a sizeable leap with the EP that followed. Garden Of The Arcane Delights (named after Garden Of Earthly Delights by the medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch) had a much clearer, warmer sound. It was the first clear sign of two distinct styles: ‘Carnival Of Lights’ and ‘Flowers Of The Sea’ profiled Gerrard’s ecstatic vocal and yang ch’in, while Perry responded with the ballads ‘Arcane’ and a magnificent ‘In Power We Entrust The Love Advocated’.

  Like Fryer, Vaughan Oliver had discovered Brendan Perry wasn’t happy to cede control. Perry had chosen the album cover, but for the EP he had supplied his own ink drawing inspired by the artist William Blake, laden with biblical metaphors. ‘It was absolutely dreadful, like something a kid would do,’ says Oliver. ‘My role was to protect against something like that, by gently persuading the artist that something else might work better, in design and typography. Hopefully it doesn’t sound pompous and pretentious, but I was trying to educate.’

  Perry: ‘There was a big argument, but we stuck to our guns and said if they didn’t like it, we’d call it a day. We always had great self-belief and we weren’t prepared to throw it all away for someone else’s impression of what our music looked like. They eventually admired us for that and we had greater freedom than many other artists on 4AD.’*

  Buoyed by the confidence gained from over five years of live performance in both former bands and their present incarnation, Dead Can Dance toured Europe with Cocteau Twins and easily held their own. Surface comparisons between the bands were obvious: on the same label, with ethereal identities, formed by two couples; the two female singers preferred emotional impact over bold lyrical statements, and both male counterparts were perfectionist and controlling. It made sense to join forces, to form a spearhead for a sound that was unique in the UK, and across the globe.

  But it was a made-up press concoction that the bands were enemies, or deadly rivals – the fact that Perry and Guthrie toured together in 2011 says as much. ‘Dead Can Dance was fucking brilliant when they first arrived, just their energy live, and this huge sound,’ Robin Guthrie recalls. ‘They blew me away.’

  Guthrie helped mix ‘The Fatal Impact’ before giving Perry the guitar he’d used on Garlands. ‘It was really sweet of Robin,’ says Perry. ‘And I still have it. They helped in various ways. But we didn’t hang out with Cocteau Twins, or any 4AD band. Everyone else lived in west London, and we were in east London, and miles from the nearest tube station, which we couldn’t afford anyway. But there was mutual respect, and we felt part of an extended family. If there was competition, it was healthy, not backstabbing jealousy. The concept Ivo had for This Mortal Coil couldn’t have existed otherwise. We all wanted to be part of a factory enterprise, a co-operative.’

  But of course sparks could fly. Ray Conroy recalls one event, at the Trojan Horse in The Hague, Holland: ‘Dead Can Dance had finished their set, blowing everyone away. They came backstage, uncharacteristically giving it a load of, “Let them follow that!” But they didn’t realise that the dressing rooms didn’t have ceilings, and the Cocteaus next door heard it all. Liz and Robin were really fucked off. They were probably thinking, they’re stamping on our turf, we’re the ethereal ones here!’

  Perry confirms the incident, but says, ‘It was the other members of Dead Can Dance, not Lisa or me. We’d got an encore that night, our first ever, and we were on a real high. The sad thing was, it really affected Liz and Robin. They sounded fantastic but they overdid the dry ice at the start so you could hardly see them. When the smoke cleared, all you saw was them and the wheels turning round on the tape recorder playing the drums and bass, and I think the audience was a bit shocked and disappointed. Liz broke down and came off stage and they cancelled the rest of the tour. She was fragile at the best of times.’

  Mindful of the shortcomings of operating as a duo, Cocteau Twi
ns decided on a new bassist. ‘I wanted a balance playing live, and to expand our sound,’ Guthrie explains. ‘Simon brought a lot in terms of melody and piano and what we could do musically.’

  In the kitchen of his house in Twickenham, not far from Wandsworth’s Alma Road, Simon Raymonde sits surrounded by cabinets of not just crockery but twelve- and seven-inch vinyl. A Neil Young album plays on the newly installed turntable. A grand piano stands in the next room. Raymonde still makes music, under the alias of Snowbird, but his main job is to run Bella Union, the label that he and Guthrie co-founded in 1996 for the purposes of Cocteau Twins that then developed into an internationally acclaimed independent label, showing the same attention to artists as 4AD had done.

  Music also dominated Raymonde’s youth. His father was the late Ivor Raymonde, a major figure in Sixties British pop as the arranger for classic hits by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and The Walker Brothers. ‘The house was filled with music, but I wasn’t starry-eyed about it,’ Raymonde recalls. ‘But I do remember Scott Walker coming for tea. I didn’t know who he was but I knew it was significant.’

  Born and raised in south London, Raymonde and his family had moved further south to the tended lawns of Surrey by the time the legendary Walker came to visit. Raymonde says he loved glam rock icons such as Marc Bolan but says he wasn’t much interested in music ‘until punk, and I became completely obsessed. I’d tape Peel’s show every night.’ At Charterhouse boarding school (where the members of Genesis had met), Raymonde survived the abusive regime run by the school’s prefects: ‘Anything bucking the system was attractive to a small rebellious minority. We’d wear bondage trousers, spike our hair and hang out on the Kings Road at weekends.’