Had Hot Press been invited to the home of Brendan Perry in 1984 when he and Lisa Gerrard released their first album together as Dead Can Dance it would have meant trudging to a flat on the 13th floor of a block of council flats on the Isle Of Dogs, east London.
Today, however, it involves a scenic drive to a paradisical abode in Cavan s lake district, where Perry owns 40 acres of unspoiled countryside, each a different shade of green. Such is the measure of Perry s success, yet despite album sales in excess of three million and world tours which took in ancient Greek amphitheatres as well as well as sell-out gigs in Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Turkey, Dead Can Dance were always perceived, on this side of the world at least, as strictly a cult entity.
And Perry s own public profile is generally so low, you re not sure whether to check the music mags or Missing Persons for news of his comings and goings. Indeed, Dead Can Dance never made a video nor did their album sleeves contain band photos. For them, it was never about the singer and always about the song. But now that the band have split up, Perry has released his first solo album under his own name, titled Eye Of The Hunter on 4AD.

The first thing that hits you when you arrive chez Perry are the dogs. But it s impolite to hit them back. What s more, one of the bitches is actually bigger than me a gigantic Irish wolfhound called Niamh. She gave me paws for thought. But this really is the house of the 100,000 welcomes you get roughly one welcome per dog. Which makes up for the cats all of whom appear to be asleep. In the midst of the madding canine throng stands my host, who outwardly appears a little intimidating with his shaved head and goatee beard but whose actions and manner are those of a perfect gentleman. His soft English accent has resonances of Glenn Hoddle, albeit with hints of an Australasian twang.
He shows me and Cathal Dawson, champion photographer and chauffeur, around the house and we are, to put it mildly, impressed. There is a spiral staircase in the kitchen; one doesn t quite know whether to sit on the couch or stand back and admire it; and even the teapot in which Perry makes us tea is an antique. Upstairs, one has a view of rolling hills and a peaceful lake. So this is why he moved to Cavan.
I needed somewhere where I could see the sky uninhibited, he explains. I needed somewhere with birds and wildlife and creatures around me. I think I ve an inherent claustrophobia. It felt like the walls were closing in. I needed somewhere with clean air, with vibrations that weren t from mechanical devices and man-made machines. In many ways, I felt that one of the loneliest places in the world was London; you have all these people going mad in the city.
And Cavan was familiar territory for me. I came here on summer holidays and occasional Christmases since I was a baby. I always had really good memories. My first memories of the countryside and rural environments were here . . . catching frogs with the neighbours kids.
He also owns a church in nearby Belturbet that he converted into a recording studio a number of years ago, thereby allowing him to work free from the usual financial and social constraints. And Cavan is his ancestral home. Indeed, both Perry and Lisa Gerrard are of Anglo-Irish extraction her father, Perry tells me, came from Co. Meath their families having emigrated to the Antipodes in search of a better standard of living. Perry, though, grew up in Whitechapel, east London, and it wasn t till he was 14 that his parents opted for the Southern hemisphere.
It was a culture shock for me to go to New Zealand because it was, to all intents and purposes, a colony of ex-pats and old English colonels, he recalls. It was a very conservative country when I arrived there. You could have been going back to England in the early 60s. They re always about 10 or 15 years out of sync in New Zealand. But it was really interesting from a musical perspective because the kind of music that they were listening to came from the 60s; a lot of bands were playing this underground psychedelic music: doing songs by the Electric Prunes and The Seeds.
Where I lived was in a Volcanic mountain range. It felt like the countryside. It was only half an hour from the city centre but they had things like roadhouses. There were guys there with long hair playing Deep Purple. You had to pinch yourself to realise that this actually was 1975, not 1967. But that was the frame of mind there. They were disconnected from current trends and modes.
Perry recalls miming to Beatles records when he was 5 years of age but his first meaningful association with music came when he persuaded his parents to buy him a classical guitar, which he learned to play to counter the cabin fever induced by the six-week boat trip that was the Southampton to Auckland ferry. Pride of place went to his treasured David Bowie songbook. Next, Perry had to feel his way around the real world for a while.
I left home when I was 17, he remembers. I had a number of jobs: I was a contact lens technician. I was a photo engraver for a newspaper: the Auckland Star. I did a lot of dish-washing jobs. I worked on building sites. I helped put the heating and ventilation system into the new Auckland city morgue! That s where I pulled my back and could never do heavy labour again .
The construction industry s loss was music s gain, though it would take a while before this became apparent.
I joined a punk band in 1977 called The Scavengers, recalls Perry. I was a bedroom guitarist at that time. I met The Scavengers at a party: the bass player was leaving. They asked me to play bass. I didn t have much success getting into bands because I wasn t up to the standard of The Eagles Hotel California . But music was like that at the time. It was about high proficiency; endless solos and show-offs. It was so refreshing to hear music that got back to primal energies. I lied to them and said, yeah, I can play bass . It was great fun at 17. We were doing a lot of Iggy & The Stooges, MC5, New York Dolls. We d throw in a few Sex Pistols and Damned numbers and then we d graft our own songs in.

Brendan Perry s punk rock past will come as something of a shock to dyed-in-the-wool Dead Can Dance fans, who know him as the classically-inclined architect of some of the most otherworldly, grandiose music of our times. But for Perry, anything goes as long as it s got passion and soul in it and at the time, these qualities were to be found in no greater quantity than in the burgeoning punk scene. He resumes his star-crossed saga.
The Scavengers moved over to Australia and we changed our name to The Marching Girls because we couldn t get any work there was an element of notoriety that attached itself to the group. The gutter press were always drawing attention to the fact that there was violence and drugs at our concerts. We were in court a few times. We got beaten up. Our drummer had his arm broken.
In Auckland, it was different to the way it was in Europe. In Europe, punk went beyond the class system. It was the working class and the middle class combined. In Auckland, you were another gang. It was very similar to modern day Los Angeles gang culture: each area had its own quarters. You had your Samoan gangs and your Maori gangs: the Mongrels versus Headhunters versus The King Cobras. Then you d have the Grim Reapers they were a gang of bikers. Punks had a real hard time. You had to be pretty brave to be one.
It sounds like it was all getting a bit out of hand.
It was very heavy, says Perry. The thing that complicated things was that New Zealand was like a sorting post for the heroin that came out of the triangle of south-east Asia. Then it would go on from New Zealand to America. So it was heroin of the purest quality. It was freely available in the streets. It was really easy to get hold of in New Zealand. There was so many overdoses from it; it was the fashionable drug not just in punk but right across the board.
Did you dabble in it yourself?
I did, yeah, admits Perry. My girlfriend was a prostitute at the time. I lived in a house of prostitutes. They were like call girls. They did tricks for business men. They got $1,000 a time so it was high quality prostitution. They made a load of money so they used to throw quite a lot of heroin parties.
You d see your friends dropping dead around you. It got really messy, you know people being carted off to jail for being serial offenders. On the violence side of it, we couldn t get any more gigs. So all the punk bands on the scene got together and instigated a club called Disco Diora, which later we moved to a place which had originally been a 19th century police barracks. It was a really good venue for a while. It was like a real home for all the disparate lost souls of Auckland, where they could go and just be themselves, be wild without any hang-ups.
Were you ever in danger of becoming addicted to heroin yourself?
No. I ve got a pretty good tolerance to drugs. I can take them or leave them . . . apart from alcohol and cigarettes, he laughs, glancing at the glass of beer in his left hand and the fag in his right, . . . probably the most addictive substances known to mankind!
But how did the transformation from three-chord punk rock bassist to eclectic, accomplished multi-instrumentalist come about?
I left the band over the usual artistic differences, says Perry. I experimented for a year: tape machines, tape loops. I started getting into African music and the music of Can, Public Image, Joy Division... all the post-punk stuff. With those influences, I formed an idea of the music that I wanted to make and formed Dead Can Dance as a three-piece initially, without Lisa. There was a drummer and a bass player. We played six or seven dates. I d met Lisa and invited her to play with us.
How did you discover her?
I don t know if I discovered her. She discovered me! She was in a few bands, playing avant-garde music. In Melbourne at that time there was a music scene called the Little Bands Movement, which consisted of the Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party. They were essentially non-musical people who didn t have a background in playing musical instruments well. They would share the instruments and amplifiers and percussion. You d have seven groups playing in one evening.
But the thing that was remarkable about them was that because they weren t schooled or trained to play in a traditional manner, they would use these instruments in really unorthodox ways and therefore produce strange soundscapes, mixed with sound poetry.
Among these bands was the fledgling Go-Betweens, whom Perry remembers appearing on the same bill at around the time that they were offering Lee Remick to the world. As for the aforementionted Birthday Party, Perry would, curiously enough, soon find his band sharing a label with Nick Cave s art-punk mob in the now legendary English indie, 4AD. Cave also had a fling with Gerrard in their Melbourne days but it was with Perry that she would form a long-term relationship, moving to that council flat in London for seven years, and this would prove to be the basis for an astonishingly productive creative partnership that only came to an end last November although the romantic side of things had unwound some years earlier. Both have since married and had children.

Dead Can Dance recorded eight remarkable albums, beginning with their eponymous debut in 1984 and ending with Spiritchaser in 1996; each is refreshingly different, but all are stamped with Gerrard s extraordinary voice, which seems to emanate from the deepest recesses of her being it s almost as if she is a medium through which her melodramatic tones are transported. Perry wrote the music around this phenomenon, although his own vocals are powerful too, falling between the deep baritone of Scott Walker and the whooping highs of Tim Buckley.
During the photo shoot, Perry allowed me to browse through his almighty record collection. Stored within six large jukeboxes that hang inside a cabinet, there are folders cataloguing his love of folk, rock, psychedelia, world, blues, classical and all points in between. His catholic tastes are apparent in the breadth of musical styles apparent in his own records: medieval renaissance music on Aion and The Serpent s Egg; Baroque classical music on Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun; old Irish ballads on Into The Labyrinth; North African polyrhythms on Spiritchaser . . .
There s always been a wilful drive towards experimentalism in our music, he says, and also just to keep ourselves interested, I suppose, we went on this voyage of discovery of different musics and of different instruments: what made up their properties, how to coax certain energies from them.
The first real exploration away from rock music, which is my foundation and the thing I knew best, came when I realised that the sounds I heard in my head I couldn t produce with an electric guitar. So therefore I taught myself how to score for strings. So instead of an electric bass line, it then became a double contra bass being bowed. If you follow that line of choices, you end up using instruments from all around the world, each with their own qualities. So I ended up marrying the nuances of the sounds in my head to the particular instrument that would do that sound justice. If I have any criticisms of Dead Can Dance s music it s that it was a little bit long-winded.
Indeed, you can find everything from yang ch ins Chinese dulcimers to didgeridoos on Dead Can Dance records but Perry s own solo album, Eye Of The Hunter, operates within the more conventional boundaries of the folk/blues idiom in particular the likes of Fred Neil and Tim Buckley. One of the highlights of the new album is Perry s cover of the latter s I Must Have Been Blind , and in concert, he does an astonishing take on Song To The Siren .
For me, Tim Buckley encapsulates a lot of qualities which I admire, he says. He can really open his soul up. He s not frightened to talk about personal things. He s also intrigued by the nature of what love is the dark side and the light side. He has a lot of colour and sun in his music as well as darkness. There s lots of shades. His voice explores such a wide vocal range. You can really hear multiple personalities within him. He s one of the most complete artists I ve ever come across.
All of the above could be said to apply to Perry himself. But if one particular hue stands out on Eye Of The Hunter, blue is the colour. Its author feels there s more to it, though, than just melancholia.
It s like having one foot in the past, one foot in the present and an eye cocked to the future, explains Perry. For instance, Sloth talks about the past and youth; my teenage years. Now I ve turned 40 and so it s a period of refection. It s about how there s no point in carrying that baggage with you. Just let it go. That s why the music takes over and becomes an almost futuristic feeling of lightness. Of moving on.
The album s closing track, Archangel , seems to broach the subject of child abuse?
Yes, that subject makes me really angry. I use the image of the archangel because the Archangel Gabriel is someone who comes down with a sword and is vengeful. I ve often felt like that. I d like to castrate as many priests as I can get my hands on. I know they re not all like that but the dogmatic systematisation of religion in this country has produced everything that they always railed against the sodomites, the buggerers, the paedophiles . . . they ve all been created in their own back garden.

Brendan Perry is glad to be touring again with this album after the cancellation of the last proposed Dead Can Dance tour. They had been planning to record one more album together but Perry says that it quickly became apparent to both of them that they no longer shared the same musical vision, and neither of them could stomach the idea of compromise. So they decided to call it quits and concentrate on their own solo projects. That they live in different hemispheres was also a contributory factor!: Gerrard is back in Australia now.
But Perry does not rule out the possibility of them working together again in the future; at one point he described the music they made together as the child we never had .
For now, though, he has a 25-date tour of America lined up, having just swept through Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Munich, and Brussells. He promises a more comprehensive European itinerary next March or April; to include 15 dates in France, 10 in Germany, and some shows back in Ireland. Indeed, Perry is even big in Poland!
Dead Can Dance were No. 1 in Poland, he states. We were asked to do a tour of ice hockey stadiums there! It would have been really good to do it for the craic. But their currency, the zloty, was practically worthless outside of Poland. We could have done it if we were clever. We could have bought loads of marble or fur coats and then exported them and made money that way but (laughs) I didn t want to get into that, you know. It was a bit demeaning.
Eventually, we conclude the interview, and we look for Cathal, who it transpires has followed the cats lead and fallen asleep on the living room couch. Even Niamh the Wolfhound is getting a bit of shut-eye at this stage, ensuring my escape is considerably less eventful than my entrance. Perry s wife, Frangoise, and their 3-year-old daughter, Emma, surface as it s now time to make evening dinner. It s a long way from the New Zealand punk scene, that s for sure, but it s been a fascinating and exhilarating journey all the while. n
Eye Of The Hunter is out now on 4AD.