LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

poor. We never received royalties from 4AD until the end of the Eighties.’

      Contrary to the behaviour of typical record executives, Ivo had passed on 4AD’s two biggest money-spinners Bauhaus and Modern English. Discussions regarding promo videos, choice of singles and chart strategies were not how he wished to spend his day. That didn’t mean Ivo didn’t try and help his bands do their best, and to have a chance to realise commercial as well as creative ambitions. His attention turned back to Colourbox, though this was going to be a tricky project as the trio was determined not to play live. ‘I didn’t think we could carry it off,’ Martyn Young admits. ‘Nowadays, people sequence all the music, but at the time, we’d have felt a fraud.’

      Young admits that Colourbox was suffering from songwriter’s block, both in general and to suit Lorita Grahame’s voice. ‘I really like songs, I just don’t think I’m good at it,’ Young shrugs. ‘We were more concerned with production and messing around in the studio, so we began to consider cover versions.’

      After enjoying U-Roy’s lilting ‘Say You’ on one of Ivo’s reggae compilations, Colourbox recorded a version at Palladium for a single, where Jon Turner’s watchful approach allowed Martyn, like Robin Guthrie before him, to gain valuable production experience. This new ‘Say You’, minus fiddly edits, added clarity and a bounce to Colourbox’s rhythmic stash, and was the band’s first UK independent top 10 hit and helped secure a second BBC Radio 1 session for the Kid Jensen evening show that preceded John Peel’s slot.

      The paucity of songwriting was laid bare: all four Jensen session tracks were covers of pop legends, such as Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look Of Love’ and a horrible throwaway version of Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’ sung like a pub entertainer by manager Ray Conroy. By this point, Young admits, he and Ian Robbins were working separately instead of as a team, and when Robbins chose to take a holiday over recording the session, he was out for good.

      As Cocteau Twins had found, a reduced core unit helped to focus creativity. Three months later, the A-side of new seven-inch single showed a change of tack. ‘Punch’ was Colourbox’s first direct, upbeat pop song, though the track only reached 15 in the independent charts; it was as if Colourbox fans – and 4AD collectors – didn’t want anything remotely cheery. There was little to celebrate either in the B-side support: ‘Keep On Pushing’ made another appearance and ‘Shadows In The Room’ was a drum track in search of a song. Altogether, it seemed a waste of Lorita Grahame. The soul/funk root of ‘Punch’ was also spoilt by the kind of production bluster that typified the Eighties, for which Martyn Young blames producer Bob Carter: ‘He wanted to play everything himself, so it wasn’t a nice experience. We didn’t even like what he did and the samples were clichéd. But we had to release it as money had been spent.’

      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),

Скачать книгу