BRENDAN PERRY, the co-founder of the world music/indie/ambient pop band Dead Can Dance will play the Róisín Dubh on Friday May 28 at 9pm.
Brendan was born in 1959 in London to an Irish mother and English father and grew up surrounded by music.
“One of my earliest musical recollections was of a music box,” he recalls. “It had a small ballerina that turned with the mechanism as it played. The music box has become fixed in my subconscious and often manifests itself in my music in some shape or form.”
His interest in music, melody, and the atmosphere it creates was also stimulated by singing hymns at school.
“Every morning we would sing religious hymns at assembly,” Brendan says. “It was basically a form of religious conversion through mantra but something to which I looked forward. Many of the hymns had beautiful melodies.”
In 1973 Brendan and his family emigrated to New Zealand where he attended a Roman Catholic Marist missionary brothers school. It was here he received his real musical education because at 14 he got a guitar.
“I remember playing acoustic guitar with the Maori and Polynesian fellas at school,” he says. “We would get together during breaks from lessons to share riffs that we had learnt from records. Sometimes there would be a circle of up to eight guys jamming away to ‘Hey Joe’ played with that distinctive ‘jingajik a jingajik’ Polynesian rhythm.
“Up until then I was what you would describe as a ‘bedroom guitarist’, someone whose sole audience usually comprised four walls and a bed. So the school sessions were a great source of inspiration for me both on a musical and social level.”
Such jam sessions and bedroom practices helped Brendan teach himself to play guitar. It was a formative experience as to this day he is essentially still a self-taught musician, preferring to work with a hands on approach towards music, employing his ear in preference to a written score.
Brendan’s next inspiration was the punk explosion of the late 1970s when he joined The Scavengers, who enjoyed appearances on New Zealand TV. However they relocated to Australia in 1978 and changed their name to The Marching Girls, but Brendan was becoming disillusioned with punk and sought a broader musical canvass to work on.
“I began to teach myself percussion and began to experiment with synthesis, tape loops, and electric guitar,” he says. “Listening to post-punk bands such as Public Image and Joy Division inspired me to create music that was shaped by an unfolding sense of psychological drama wherein sound is used to create tangible emotions and atmospheres. I wanted to paint soundscapes, to sculpt in sound, and create imaginary soundtracks for films that had never been made.”
Brendan became part of the Melbourne experimental music scene and in 1981, with some like minded souls - Simon Monroe (of The Marching Girls ), Paul Erikson, and Lisa Gerrard - he formed Dead Can Dance.
Dead Can Dance sought to combine European folk music, particularly from the Middle Ages and Renaissance era, with ambient pop and world music rhythms. As www.allmusic.com said: “Their songs are of lost beauty, regret and sorrow, inspiration and nobility, and of the everlasting human goal of attaining a meaningful existence.”
However Australia’s alternative music scene was too small to support such an act so Brendan and Lisa opted to move to Britain, where the distinguished indie label 4AD was delighted to sign them. Their eponymous debut album was released in 1983. The band went on to release nine albums, including a live concert video album, over the next 16 years to considerable public and critical acclaim.
Dead Can Dance called it a day in 1999, but reunited in 2005 for a farewell tour, accompanied by a 40 piece chamber orchestra conducted by Jeff Rona.
Two new songs were written especially for the tour - ‘Babylon’ a condemnation of US foreign politicly and militarism and ‘Crescent’ a life affirming ode to nature and the human spirit. Studio versions of these appeared on Brendan’s new album Ark which was released in February.
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
