by Peter Ulrich (781.66 Ulr)
After forming in Australia in the early 1980s, Dead Can Dance started to garner attention after relocating to London, and ultimately they became one of the most popular bands in the burgeoning “Ethereal Wave” genre. Their style, which included musical elements from all over the globe, helped to bring world music styles to the mainstream, and was a big influence on other bands that went on to combine world music and classical influences with pop, such as Enya and Enigma. The band’s early drummer Peter Ulrich has written a new book called Drumming With Dead Can Dance and Parallel Adventures, and you can now borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
I had high hopes for this book, as there hasn’t been much written about Dead Can Dance or the 4AD record label scene, but I started to get a little nervous just inside the front cover, where I had been excited to see “With Foreword by Lisa Gerrard,” displayed even above the book title. That foreword turned out to be a single sentence. As we’ll learn going through the book, though, perhaps that’s just right. Seated at the drum throne from the early days of the band’s cofounders Gerrard and Brendan Perry moving to the UK, Ulrich had a unique vantage point for learning about the unique differences between their working and thinking styles, and it’s their complimentary opposites that ultimately gave the band its artistic range. Interestingly, it’s really just a matter of coincidence that Ulrich ended up working them, too, which he starts to describe at the very beginning of the book: He simply answered a phone call from Perry asking if he’d be interested in auditioning, and the call happened to come on the day he discovered he was losing his job. It turned out that he lived in the same neighborhood as Perry and Gerrard, and though he wasn’t immediately playing fluently in the style they were looking for, the had him continue coming to rehearsals and he found himself “absorbed,” as he puts it, into the band over the coming few weeks.
For Chapter Two, Ulrich backtracks into his own musical upbringing. After the usual childhood piano lessons, he eventually found his way to the drum kit and the guitar as a teenager, and was immersed in a pretty wide range of popular music in his youth, including folk, rock, reggae, and punk music. He drummed in bar bands and continued listening to new trends in music, becoming enamored with post-punk and gothic rock bands. This part of his musical interests turned out to be especially useful playing with Dead Can Dance. Quickly returning to the early DCD narrative at roughly the 3-month mark into his working with the band, he was finding Gerrard and Perry to be extraordinary, talented musicians with almost opposite tendencies: Perry was deliberate, detail-oriented and organized, while Gerrard was spontaneous and more of a big-picture thinker. While they were opposites in many ways, both were highly opinionated, and rarely saw middle ground—they either loved what was happening in rehearsals or completely hated it. But songs started to come together, and after circulating a demo tape to record labels that seemed like a good fit, the 4AD label started expressing interest, at first helping the band to get their first opening slots at UK shows, and ultimately agreeing to sign the band.
These early chapters give a fantastic inside look at the early days of Dead Can Dance, going through the same kinds of trials and tribulations so many young bands experience. Early shows are plagued with sound issues, their first record has to be done on a very small budget and short schedule, early mixes sound awful and need to be re-done, and band members quitting just as the band started to gain momentum. But they persisted, and quickly started to gain critical and popular notice. Ulrich has an additional unique perspective besides being their drummer in these formative years, too—because he had worked in offices and had some administrative experience, he became their early tour manager. This probably helped to cement additional memories of early tours in his mind that are the kind of thing that drives managers crazy, like vehicle breakdowns that result in breach of contract fines for missing shows, or venues that didn’t seem to be located where they should be on maps. There is a particularly wild story about an early gig in Paris that went terribly awry, leaving the band to defend themselves against the audience and then the bouncers for the club!
To roughly its halfway point, the book primarily follows the career of Dead Can Dance, with some side tracks into Ulrich’s work with another 4AD band, This Mortal Coil. Then the 90s proved to be less kind to the whole scene: Dead Can Dance broke up, many other 4AD bands were breaking up or near the end of their careers, and even their couple who ran the label broke up. Then we enter the “parallel adventures” referenced in the book’s title. Ultimately, Dead Can Dance has reunited several times in the ensuing decades, sometimes for tours and sometimes to produce new records. Members have also embarked on solo careers and collaborated with other groups over time. And the influence of Dead Can Dance continued to grow, even during times where the band was dormant. During these more recent iterations of Dead Can Dance, Ulrich has continued to follow the band, but it no longer participating directly. That said, he has remained in touch with his former bandmates, and reports both their careers and his own in recent years.
One thing I was hoping this book would discuss in more depth was simply how the wide-ranging influences behind Dead Can Dance all came together in the music. Ultimately there isn’t a breakdown of this—perhaps that would have to come from a book written by Lisa Gerrard or Brendan Perry. From the early days recounted in the book, it seems like the process was a gradual one that simply involved listening to lots of records and having an open mind to learn more about music. While the band is largely self-taught, they absorbed influences from musical traditions around the world, as well as folk music and earlier eras of European classical music, and made a new kind of music out of these influences that seems to speak from every place and era all at once. Although we don’t won’t find a particular method here behind this, there is an excellent appendix in which Ulrich presents what he calls “An introductory guide to world music.” He provides a list of recommended recordings here that’s divided into two rough groups: music captured as field recordings, generally reflecting what world music traditions most likely have sounded like historically, and music produced by groups all around the world that has taken on some cross-cultural influences of its own. In their own way, Dead Can Dance arguably fall into the latter category, and there are some additional fantastic recordings referenced here.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Silenced by Sound by Ian Brennan or England’s Hidden Reverse by David Keenan.)
( publisher’s official Peter Ulrich page )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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