Lisa Gerrard
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Lisa is unique. There is only one Lisa Gerrard. Either as a person or as a singer. Lisa is truly eccentric, but in the most beautiful way. Heart of gold. An extraordinary gift. She's a woman of deep faith, and I think that her faith provides her a spiritual framework and a license to do what she does.
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She sings in a language, (which in sort of the world of faith practice would be called speaking in tongues); and she feels that that is the spirit moving through her when she's singing in that language. I feel that it is her truth when I'm working with her. I feel quite moved by it. I'm not of that persuasion, but I feel it very strongly. I feel the integrity of it. I feel the authenticity of it. That's a very rare thing. She takes me to a place. I don't experience anything else like it, in any other project that I do.
She had never even vaguely considered doing anything like the Immortal Diamond project before. She had to overcome her own initial skepticism of it. So, it was sort of the opposite of working with Paul Kelly. Paul came to the party very open minded and really ready to create a project. Lisa was very much unconvinced. She needed to see how it was going to work.
Lisa arrived at my place for the first rehearsal, all flustered and uncertain. I'd transcribed a bunch of her tunes to work through, mainly pieces from Dead Can Dance, but also a couple of things from her soundtrack work. She sort of arrived and said, ‘well, let's just play something’. I started to play. And then she started to sing. And we just improvised. And then at the end of it, she said, ‘Oh, this will be fine. This will be fine’. That was it. That was the beginning of our relationship.
Together we have to create this sort of space for her voice. An important ingredient is her vocal production. Her sound tech Simon creates this virtual room sound for her that deeply embeds her voice in a quiet, cavernous reverb. When I first heard it, I said, ‘well, there's no way that it makes any sense for the piano just to sound like a piano and the vocal to sound like that. You're going to have to make the piano sound like that’. So we created this reverberant sound for the piano so both of our instruments could sit in this space together. I had to get used to that whole idea.
People flew in from all over the place to see our shows at UKARIA. Her fans, they're diehard fans. They flew in from Hong Kong and Japan, all over. Then, when I took on the artist in residence gig with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, I thought one of the things I'd love to do is create an orchestral work featuring Lisa. So that's how Immortal Diamond came to be. I was able to pay homage in my own way to her faith predispositions through basing the work around a poem called Heraclitian Fire, by the extraordinary 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was a priest who worked in the dirt-poor parts of Liverpool and wrote these completely ecstatic, extreme poems, completely messing with the English language in a certain way. His images are mind blowing. Kind of coming out of the William Blake era, but even like William Blake on acid. You know, it's really full on. And this one poem that Immortal Diamond is based on, But the Heraclitian Fire, is amazing. So none of that would have occurred to me at all had it not been for Lisa.