On this day 40 years ago: Dead Can Dance released their iconic debut album

Lisa Gerrard:

We were immigrants. My father was born in Co. Meath. He actually played for the Co. Meath football team. My parents came out on a ten-pound ticket on a ship. The street that we lived on, in east Prahran [in Melbourne], was predominantly Irish and Middle Eastern families – and I can definitely hear that influence in my music.

I was brought up in a house where there was sean-nós singing and poetry. Every Sunday during my childhood, we got up and went to Mass, and then everyone came home and had Sunday lunch – and then there was poetry and singing and everyone got drunk and sometimes had a bit of a punch-up! And then everyone went home, rebooted, and did the exact same thing the next week. That was it, for my whole childhood!

We didn’t have any money when we were children, so we didn’t go and buy singles and stuff. Music came to us through the direct connection of our community, or through school, or through the families.

I heard all this language being sung around me, and I didn’t know what it meant. I just knew that it felt really powerful, and really moving. As a child, that’s what you pick up.

I remember people used to say to my father, ‘What’s she singing, John?’ And he’d say, ‘Leave her alone, she knows what she’s singing! You don’t need to know – just as long as she knows!’

Being in an Irish home was also huge in terms of my ability to grow in my confidence. I don’t know how it is these days, but when we were children, I don’t think you could have grown up anywhere where children were celebrated more.

On Dead Can Dance's early years:

I was recently showing a friend this piece of footage on YouTube – a Bedford concert, when Brendan and I were extremely young. We’d just been living in London for a little while, and we were quite literally starving. When you look at us on stage in that footage, we just looked so ill!

I look back, and it seems like a long, long time ago – but I remember it as though it was yesterday. The one thing I feel really sure about, is the fact that we both believed in what we were doing – so much so that we were in that situation, and we were blinded by our love for music. We didn’t see anything else. Even though we were living in the most low income areas – very unattractive aesthetically – it was of no consequence. Because we had this treasure chest of pieces of music and songs that we could visit and disappear into.

(Originally published in May, 2021. Read the full interview here.)

Revisit Dead Can Dance below: