W
hat is a percapella exactly?
The highlight of many a late
80s, early 90s 12" B-side,
it is, as you can imagine, a
stripped-down version of a
track using only the vocal
and percussion elements.
As percapella mixes, Billy
Joel’s The River Of Dreams
became a hand-clap hip-hop anthem.
Debbie Gibson’s Kisses 4 One, a hyper-
Madonna Erotica-style blipvert. And if
you thought Midnight Oil’s Beds Are
Burning was intense, take a listen to the
Percapella Kangaroo Mix. Distilling the
track down to its raw elements made it
10 times more powerful.
The percapella of ABC’s One Better
World makes a similar impact. You
can hear a lot more about the song,
rather than a lot less, in this form.
The first thing being how well Martin
Fry’s and Lorenza Johnson’s vocals stand
up in near-isolation. The next is how
Mark White’s shimmering percussion
track is a thing of beauty. There are
synths in this percapella, too. But does
that go against the brief? Not in my
view – One Better World’s synths are a
snappy, arpeggio’d percussion track all
their own.
That single was a highlight of what
I would call ABC’s ‘recordings phase’
(roughly 1983 to 1992, as opposed
to the concert phase which followed),
one of a number of experiments in
which their music was created both by
DJs (David Morales, Park & Pickering)
and for DJs (much of the Up album, The
Greatest Love Of All 12" and various
Bonus Beats mixes). The duo also
played with percapellas in their long-lost
production work for Lizzie Tear.If you were a club DJ in the late 80s,
the percapella of Taylor Dayne’s Tell It To
My Heart was a gift from the gods, and
split in two halves. In the first, a powerful
double-tracked vocal combined with little
more than a xylophone ping for a few
minutes. The sort of thing that could be
layered over any other instrumental to
make it sound like an instant anthem.
In the second half, the vocal makes wayfor a two-minute guide to how the whole
rhythm track was built and layered.
The percapella also sits at the heart of
Balearic beat, the very hard-to-define but
unique sub-sub-genre that bubbled up in
the late 80s in Ibiza. Balearic beat was
about beach DJs taking the mellowest
UK pop tracks and placing them in their
natural, sun-drenched environment.
A genre that worked so well and against
massive odds, given the records the
Balearic DJs picked were so varied.
The Liverpudlian whimsy of It’s Immaterial
on one hand. The machined, SAW-driven
songs of Mandy Smith on the other.
There were never percapella mixes of
either artists that I recall, although their
music both generally centres around
percussion and vocals. And if you ever
wanted to make a Balearic beat mixtape
in 2019, it would be easy: get as many
percapellas together as you can and
you’re good to go.
Aside from being club-friendly,
when you hear a percapella it’s like
becoming a fly on the wall in the
recording studio, with all that extra
space allowing you to hear so many
new aspects of a track. If this has
whetted (or reignited) your appetite,
I’d also recommend the percapellas
of Bananarama’s Nathan Jones, Holly
Johnson‘s Legendary Children (All Of
Them Queer) and Information Society’s
What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy).
How’s that for a style-hopping element of
classic pop?
And talking of classic pop, I think
we can say for certain that no other
magazine in the world has ever (or
probably will ever) devote a whole page
to percapellas. But that would be their
loss, wouldn’t it?IAN PEEL’S A TO Z
of
P IS FOR... PERCAPELLA
IT’S NOT IN THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY OR THE URBAN DICTIONARY.
BUT AS SOMETHING THAT EVERYONE FROM BILLY JOEL TO DEBBIE GIBSON HAVE
DABBLED IN, DOESN’T THE PERCAPELLA DESERVE A PLACE IN THE HISTORY BOOKS?“As percapella mixes,
Billy Joel’s The River Of Dreams
became a hand-clap hip-hop
anthem. Debbie Gibson’s
Kisses 4 One, a hyper-Madonna
Erotica-style blipvert.”