Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard were and are Dead Can Dance. Their highly successful 2005 live reunion makes it even less appropriate to speak of Dead Can Dance in the past tense, but their music has lived on in such a palpable way since their partnership was initially dissolved in the mid-1990s that it's always felt strange to consign them to a purely historical status.
Brendan and Lisa made collages out of musical lineages, lost tribes and cultures long since forgotten - and by giving new life to so much from the past, they created a genuinely timeless body of work. They may or may not go on to make more music together but, whatever the future holds, the music that they have already made remains very much alive.
They shared vocal responsibilities, and while Perry was certainly capable of haunting subtleties and real sonority as a singer, it was more often Gerrard's rhapsodic vocalising that drew the attention of critics and fans. In a sense, Gerrard didn't simply sing for Dead Can Dance: she made sounds with her voice, and turned that experience into something much larger and more far-ranging than mere singing. It's difficult to avoid sounding pretentious when attempting to write about such a unique talent, but it's true to say that, for Lisa, her voice became a way of exploring her inner world, her relationship to the physical environment, and to the world beyond, real or imagined.
Perry's soundscapes blur distinctions between organic and sampled, old and new; they draw on disparate traditions (neo–classical, choral, baroque, troubadour); they weave together influences from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and beyond. Somehow Dead Can Dance managed to create a world of profound artistic integrity while simultaneously appealing to fans of what was termed 'alternative rock' music. And in so doing Dead Can Dance became - over the course of their career - 4AD's most internationally successful artists.
Both of Anglo-Irish descent, Gerrard and Perry met in Melbourne, Australia in 1980. It was the height of the punk era. "Brendan was listening to things like The New York Dolls, but I recognised he was brilliant as soon as I saw him play", remembers Gerrard. She was more interested in avant-garde music, and intent on exploring her own personal vision, that recognition - that she had found a real partner in her musical quest - helped Gerrard see beyond those surface-level differences between Perry's approach and her own.
While in Melbourne, the duo worked in a Lebanese restaurant together, washing dishes to save money to go to London. "It definitely influenced the work," Gerrard says of her exposure to the mix of Greek, Italian, Turkish, Irish and Arab people in the Melbourne neighbourhood of East Prahran, where she grew up. "The combination of that palette of colours with Brendan's understanding of musical structure began to create a unique colour."
"The first piece we improvised together was called "Frontier". Something really magical happened that day. We realised that what we had done separately was nothing like what took place in that piece. It unlocked something that neither of us were aware of. And we had to do it again, so we started to write together."