Dead Can Dance’s ‘Into the Labyrinth’ turns 33 on 13 September
4AD released Dead Can Dance’s “Into the Labyrinth” on 13 September 1993, recorded at Quivvy Church in Ireland. The 11-track album turns 33 this year.
Dead Can Dance "Into the Labyrinth" (4AD, 1993) album cover
Dead Can Dance, the British-Australian neoclassical darkwave duo formed in Melbourne, released “Into the Labyrinth” on 13 September 1993 through 4AD. The album turns 33 this year. It was their sixth studio album, the first they recorded without any guest musicians, and the first to get a major-label release in the United States, through 4AD’s distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records. It went on to sell more than 500,000 copies worldwide and made the duo 4AD’s highest-selling act.
Recording ‘Into the Labyrinth’ at Quivvy Church
Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had separated domestically in 1989. Perry was living in County Cavan, Ireland, Gerrard in Australia, and the two wrote their material apart. Gerrard then travelled to Perry’s studio, a converted church at Quivvy, where they merged the songs and recorded the album across three months. Perry engineered and produced it there.
Every instrument on the record is played by the two of them, including bongos, sitar and tabla. Gerrard sings in English on tracks 2 to 4, 8 and 11, and uses her wordless vocal technique on tracks 1, 5 to 7, 9 and 10. Tracks 3 and 10 were performed a cappella.
Two of the eleven tracks are not the duo’s own writing. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is a late 18th-century Irish ballad with words and music by Robert Dwyer Joyce, arranged by the band. Gerrard explained in the album’s press kit why she wanted to record it: “it was meant to be a rallying song, but it has such an intense sadness that it becomes an anti-war song”.
The closing “How Fortunate the Man With None” sets four stanzas of Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 poem “Die Ballade von den Prominenten”, in John Willett’s English translation, to music Perry wrote for a Temenos Academy production of the play. It was only the second time the Brecht estate had granted such permission, the first being in 1963.
Perry described “The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove”, the album’s single, as his alter ego, “the abstract relationship of myself and woman”. The title comes from a 1965 episode of the TV series “Danger Man”. 4AD assembled a video for “Yulunga (Spirit Dance)” using footage from the film “Baraka”.
The eleven tracks run “Yulunga (Spirit Dance)”, “The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove”, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”, “The Carnival Is Over”, “Ariadne”, “Saldek”, “Towards the Within”, “Tell Me About the Forest (You Once Called Home)”, “The Spider’s Stratagem”, “Emmeleia” and “How Fortunate the Man With None”. In the UK the CD arrived alongside a limited double vinyl LP that added “Bird” and “Spirit”, the two bonus tracks from the 1991 compilation “A Passage in Time”.
Touhami Ennadre supplied the cover photograph, “Hands of the World”; Chris Bigg designed the sleeve with Perry, and Ken Kavanagh shot the booklet images. The US release followed on 14 September 1993.
About Dead Can Dance
Dead Can Dance formed in Melbourne in August 1981 as a trio, with Brendan Perry on vocals and guitar, Paul Erikson on bass and Simon Monroe on drums. Lisa Gerrard, previously of Microfilm, joined on vocals and percussion. Perry and Gerrard had met through Melbourne’s Little Band scene. Their first official recording, a home version of “Fatal Impact”, appeared on the December 1981 issue of the cassette magazine Fast Forward. After a farewell show at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom in May 1982 the pair moved to London and signed to 4AD, with Erikson and Peter Ulrich completing the first UK line-up.
The self-titled debut arrived in February 1984, its sleeve built around a New Guinea ritual mask, and sat close to the ethereal wave of labelmates Cocteau Twins. The EP “Garden of the Arcane Delights” followed in August.
From “Spleen and Ideal” (November 1985), co-produced with John A. Rivers and scored for cello, trombone and timpani, the duo turned towards the medieval and Renaissance material that became their signature; the album reached number 2 on the UK indie chart. Dead Can Dance’s ‘Within the Realm of a Dying Sun’ came in 1987, “The Serpent’s Egg” in 1988 and “Aion” in 1990, before “Into the Labyrinth” brought the ethnic instrumentation to the front of the arrangements.
A world tour in 1994 produced the live album and film “Toward the Within”, recorded in California. Gerrard issued her solo debut “The Mirror Pool” in 1995, then reunited with Perry for “Spiritchaser” in 1996, which topped Billboard’s Top World Music Albums chart. Sessions for a follow-up broke down in 1998 and the duo separated, with one track from those tapes, “The Lotus Eaters”, surfacing on the box set “Dead Can Dance (1981-1998)” and on “Wake” in 2003. Gerrard recorded “Duality” with Pieter Bourke; Perry released “Eye of the Hunter” in 1999.
They reunited for a 2005 European and North American tour, documented across a series of limited live releases, then returned to the studio for Dead Can Dance’s ‘Anastasis’ on 13 August 2012. Perry sold the Quivvy Church studio in 2015.
“Dionysus”, mastered at Abbey Road, followed on 2 November 2018, and the duo toured Europe in 2022. In 2025 Perry said he was working on a sequel called “Apollo”, with himself as the only musician. New material has since appeared on Bandcamp through the band’s own Holy Tongue Records: “Our Day Will Come” on 20 March 2026, “Death Cults” in April, and Dead Can Dance release ‘The Cicadas’ single via Bandcamp in July.
Thirty-three years on, “Into the Labyrinth” remains the record that took the duo from the 4AD roster to the Billboard 200.
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