The Druid Abides

Leaving Belturbet, the road to Quivvy becomes progressively narrower. A boreen, grass sprouting along the middle, carries you deep into the forested lakelands of County Cavan. We turn a corner and there, overlooking a lake, stands Quivvy Church, converted by Brendan Perry in the early 1990s into one of the world's most beautiful recording studios.

I'm bombarded by surround-sound birdsong on opening the car door. Perry emerges from the church to greet us. He's busy doing final rehearsals with his band. In a few days, they will take off for the Continent (volcanic ash allowing) for the first-ever live airings of songs from his new solo album, Ark.
The interior of Quivvy Church -– celestial, vaulted, secularly sacred – is of a piece with the music of Brendan Perry and Dead Can Dance. A place of worship up until 1986, the mid-19th century church now houses banks of technology and an extraordinary array of instruments, especially of the percussive variety.
What a joy it must have been for Perry, whose mother originated from County Cavan, to have discovered and finally settled in this sanctuary. Perry, after all, has had a peripatetic life. Born in London in 1959, he emigrated with his family when he was a teenager to Auckland, New Zealand. By his late teens he was playing in the well-known Kiwi punk band, The Scavengers. Perry's experience of the punk scene soon became tainted, however. The press sentationalised its unsavoury aspects, resulting in closed venues. In a tragic incident outside one of their gigs, a fan was thrown from a bridge and permanently paralysed.
"Gangs were starting to earmark punks for regular beatings," says Perry, "and heroin had become the fashionable drug of the moment, consigning friends to prison or premature graves. It became obvious to me it was time to quit Auckland or drown in the negativity of it all."
Perry relocated to Melbourne, Australia, where he founded Dead Can Dead with Simon Monroe, Paul Erikson and Lisa Gerrard in 1981. A year later the band moved to London, where they were taken under the nurturing wing of avant-pop label, 4AD. Over their 16 year life-span, Dead Can Dance attracted an international cult following. During the writing of what was to become their ninth studio album, Spiritchaser, relations between Perry and Gerrard (who had once been romantically involved) became strained, and they decided to go their separate ways. A couple of years later, in 1999, Perry released his first solo album, Eye Of The Hunter.
"Eye Of The Hunter was a folk/blues/rock exploration. Everything was written by guitar in the singer-songwriter style," Perry recalls. "It was a derivation from the music that I'd normally do. My new album Ark is a return to my usual work. I've gone back to the way I'd write for Dead Can Dance, which is mainly sequential, with a lot of samplers and synthesisers. It's a return to things that turn me on, like Oriental music, and bringing in different aspects of exotic music."
Comprising eight exceptionally powerful tracks that range in their emotional make-up from deep menace to exultation, Ark was composed, performed and recorded by Perry alone.
"The only thing that was recorded with a microphone acoustically on the album was my voice," says Perry. "Everything else was a sample."
Two of Ark's songs, 'Babylon' and 'Crescent', were actually written by Perry for the Dead Can Dance reunion tour of 2005.
"They became cornerstone pieces for Ark," adds the musician. "At the time it was written, 'Babylon' was about the Iraqi conflict and Afghanistan. What transpires is that it's still a contemporary issue, and it's likely to be for a number of years. And 'Crescent' is a song about the wonder of the universe, the beauty of nature and the cosmos. Those became the opening and closing aspects of the album. What comes in between – songs like 'Wintersun' and 'Inferno' – are based on what I've seen in the world over the last four years or so. My growing frustration and anger at the way things are going on an ecological level as well as on this neo-milataristic-colonial level. And the apathy – the apathy about it makes me angry.
"The world today is a far less safe place than when I was growing up. And there's certainly a point where we're not going to be able to turn the clock back very easily, where Mother Nature is concerned. Ark expresses my concerns about all that. It's a warning call from my point of view. I don't want to appear to be too alarmist. At the same time I'm really concerned, not just for myself but for my 13-year-old daughter and the world she's going to inherit, and all other succeeding generations."
One of my favourite tracks on Ark is 'The Bogus Man', which seethes with the danger and slime of political corruption, both musically and lyrically. Here Perry is highly creative with his contemptuous epithets for politicians.
"It's like a litany," he says. "Generally speaking I find that a lot of the politicians go in with good intentions, but then they realise that they can't change or buck the system too much, or else they won't be in power. They nearly all change their tunes, making these pre-election promises and never ever keeping them."
To keep his anger in check, Perry immerses himself in simple rural living. In particular, he's a fan of archery, a sport he describes as meditative.
"I think of myself as an observer from a hill," he smiles. "I'm outside of it to an extent. I like that autonomy, that separateness. Although inevitably it sucks everyone in; everyone is affected. In terms of social commentary, and myself as an artist, it's very much in a situation of observation. And I'm outside the music industry. I tend to do things on my terms. I have that luxury because all the work with Dead Can Dance means that I can be my own boss to a certain extent.
"I think the punk/agitprop years really taught me independence. When punk happened, it was part-art, part-fashion, but a large part of it for me was railing against the establishment. I've maintained that and kept it throughout. Going to England and living there during Thatcher's time just increased that, because there was a lot of revolt and rebellion from the youth through that period.
"I'm completely anti-dogma, especially religious dogma. I abhor it. It's been so retrogressive; it's held us back from true progression. It's not even spiritual. It's just a lie. I believe in spirituality, but not in a dogmatic sense. I believe in the spirit of nature; I'd be Gaian in my outlook. I think the mystery of the cosmos is a wonderful thing."
By the side of a lake in a church in a forest in a remote part of an island on the fringes of mainland Europe – it seems that Brendan Perry's found a relatively safe place to drop anchor.