dead can dance - the early stuff

A recent encounter with some very early Dead Can Dance material prompted these thoughts -

Now I love Dead Can Dance, their music has sondtracked much of my life, but quite honestly the early demos and early John Peel sessions are pretty rubbish. In fact, apart from a couple of songs the demos are atrocious, and I’ve no idea why I’ve kept them. I think that these will be deleted from the iPod fairly soon… The Peel sessions are better, though, like the debut album, they are the sound of a band struggling to find an identity. The spectre of Joy Division – the same sort of heavy bass and frantic drumming, plus an identical guitar sound - hangs heavy over many of these tracks, particularly Brendan Perry’s.

But then you get Lisa Gerrard’s pieces. Her songs are similarly naïve and unstructured, and occasionally veer very close to early Cocteau Twins (especially stuff from the Garlands album). Lisa’s voice is sometimes uncomfortably close to Elizabeth Fraser’s too, so you can see why Ivo Watts-Russell was so keen to sign them to 4AD. But then, just occasionally, Lisa does something miraculous with her voice which lifts the song from a not terribly good second rate indie goth rip off into… what? Something magical and out of this world.

From the Peel sessions and also from the first album it’s impossible to tell which way DCD were heading, (even the later Garden Of Arcane Delights EP doesn’t really offer hints, though it is at least a step away from rubbish indie drumming and incessantly throbbing bass). I can’t imagine that anyone would have guessed that the majesty that is Spleen And Ideal would have followed just a year later. It’s another one of those bafflingly massive quantum leaps forward that occasionally happen. Spleen And Ideal lays the foundation for virtually everything that DCD would subsequently do and ignores virtually everything that came previously. Where this huge leap of imagination came from is anyone’s guess, but how fantastic that it happened.