Dead Can Dance

Dead Can Dance is an Australian musical project formed in 1981 in Melbourne by Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. The band relocated to London, England, in May 1982. Australian music historian Ian McFarlane described Dead Can Dance's style as "constructed soundscapes of mesmerising grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern mantras, and art rock."


Having disbanded in 1998, they reunited briefly in 2005 for a world tour and reformed in 2011, releasing a new album (Anastasis) and embarking on several tours.

Formation and early years
Dead Can Dance formed in Melbourne, Australia in August 1981 with Paul Erikson on bass guitar, Lisa Gerrard (ex-Microfilm) on vocals, Simon Monroe (Marching Girls) on drums and Brendan Perry (also of Marching Girls) on vocals and guitar.[1] Gerrard and Perry were a couple who met as members of Melbourne's little band scene. In May 1982, the band left Monroe in Australia and moved to London, England, where they signed with alternative rock label 4AD.[2] With the duo, the initial United Kingdom line-up were Paul Erikson and Peter Ulrich.

The group's debut album, Dead Can Dance, was released in February 1984.[3] The artwork, which depicts a ritual mask from New Guinea, "provide[s] a visual reinterpretation of the meaning of the name Dead Can Dance", set in a faux Greek typeface. The album featured "drum-driven, ambient guitar music with chanting, singing and howling",[1] and fit in with the ethereal wave style of label mates Cocteau Twins. They followed with a four-track extended play, Garden of the Arcane Delights in August.[1] AllMusic described their early work as "as goth as it gets"[6] (despite the group themselves rejecting the label), while the EP saw them "plunging into a wider range of music and style".

For their second album, Spleen and Ideal, the group comprised the core duo of Gerrard and Perry with cello, trombone and tympani added in by session musicians.[1] Released in November 1985, it was co-produced by the duo and John A. Rivers.[3] Raggett describes it as "a consciously medieval European sound [...] like it was recorded in an immense cathedral".[8] The group built a following in Europe, and the album reached No. 2 on the UK indie charts.[9] By 1989, Gerrard and Perry had separated domestically – Gerrard returned to Australia and Perry moved to Ireland – but they still wrote, recorded and performed together as Dead Can Dance.

Wider availability
Dead Can Dance's albums were not widely available in the United States until the early 1990s, when 4AD made a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records. Later, 4AD allied itself with the Beggars Banquet Records Group, which included that eponymous label and XL Recordings in the US, but the band's recordings remained distributed through Warner Bros. Subsequent releases, however, were licensed to Rhino/Atlantic Records, a sister label within Warner Music. Its 1991 compilation A Passage in Time remains with 4AD independently of the Rhino and Warner Bros. deals; it was initially only released in the US.

The duo's sixth studio album, Into the Labyrinth, was issued in September 1993 and dispensed with guest musicians entirely; it sold 500,000 copies worldwide and appeared in the Billboard 200.[10] The band became 4AD's highest-selling act.[1] They followed with a world tour in 1994 and recorded a live performance in California which was released as Toward the Within, with video versions on Laserdisc and VHS (later on DVD). Many unofficial bootlegs of concerts spanning its career exist, containing several rare songs that were only performed live. Toward the Within is the duo's first official live album, which reached the Billboard 200 and was followed by In Concert 19 years later.[10] Gerrard released her debut solo recording, The Mirror Pool, and reunited with Perry on the Dead Can Dance studio album Spiritchaser in 1996.[1] The album also charted on Billboard 200 and reached No. 1 on the Top World Music Albums Chart.

Studio albums

Dead Can Dance (1984)
Spleen and Ideal (1985)
Within the Realm of a Dying Sun (1987)
The Serpent's Egg (1988)
Aion (1990)
Into the Labyrinth (1993)
Spiritchaser (1996)
Anastasis (2012)
Dionysus (2018)