Brendan Perry, known best as the founding member of much loved musical collective, Dead Can Dance alongside his counterpart Lisa Gerrard has released his brand new solo album entitled: Songs of Disenchantment – Music From The Greek Underground.
The record signals the first release under Perry’s own label, Holy Tongue Records.
The album is also a world first, a record of ten traditional Greek folk-songs, best known under the titles Rebetiko or Rembetiko where Perry has translated and sung all tracks in English. “The fact that there has been virtually no recorded versions of Rebetiko songs sung in English was also a great surprise to me and was ultimately the prime motivator for me to share these songs with an English speaking audience as well as pique the curiosity of the die hard traditionalist.” Perry explains.
Some could say the album was a few decades coming and without it perhaps Perry’s journey as a musician may have taken an alternate course, as he explains:
“I first heard, what only many years later I finally came to know as Rebetiko music, in the Greek cafes and tavernas of suburban Melbourne in the late seventies. These places were predominantly the local social hubs of Greek migrants who had been coming in successive waves to Australia since the late 19th century and during the day were often populated by groups of old men playing backgammon and sipping ouzo whilst listening to laika and rebetiko music.
As it happens I too had been a migrant to these southern climes from England some years earlier and as good fortune would have it our means of conveyance for the six week long voyage was an old Greek ship called the ‘Ellinis’. It was on board this ship that my own personal musical odyssey began when I first learnt to play the guitar.”
