Lisa Gerrard

Lisa Gerrard (born April 12, 1961) is an Irish-Australian musician, singer and composer who gained international renown as part of the music group Dead Can Dance together with Brendan Perry. Her career spans from 1981 to the present, and she has been involved in a wide range of projects. Gerrard received a Golden Globe award and her score for the 2000 film Gladiator received an Academy Award nomination. She both sings and is instrumentalist for much of her work, most prolifically using the yangqin (a Chinese hammered dulcimer).

Born 12 April 1961 in Melbourne, Australia, Lisa Gerrard grew up in the suburb of Prahran with her Irish immigrant parents. On her upbringing, she has said she grew up with “Mediterranean music blaring out of the houses,” and that this influenced her music, particularly on later Dead Can Dance albums and in her solo and collaborative works. Gerrard’s first foray into forming bands and creative music-making was the highly experimental Little Band scene. It was at one of these little band events that she first met Dead Can Dance cofounder Brendan Perry.

Perry recalls, “It never occurred to me that we would one day collaborate musically together because at the time I thought her music was too avant garde. I particularly remember one song that she sang about finding a man in the park and asking her mother if she could bring him home to keep in her wardrobe as she attacked this chinese dulcimer with two bamboo sticks.”