PEDAL POWER
DARREN PERCIVAL, the man known as MR.PERCIVAL, tells ALICE BODY that with music comes responsibility.

Mr. Percival sounds relaxed, and so he should: he’s talking to me from bed in Rose Bay, Sydney. Happy to catch a few days off to relax with his young family in the midst of a busy touring schedule, he nonetheless sounds so emotionally invested in his work that it’s difficult to refer to him by his real name, Darren Percival, or even just Percival. Clearly he has a life offstage, but (a little effort here)…Darren Percival is so Mr. Percival; that genial, almost guru-like character creating rich choral atmosphere using only his voice and a little technology, abducting his audiences into a holistic vision of a better world if it were more like Woodford Folk Festival, enthusing about community spirit and advocating being the change that you want to see in the world.

"If members of the community are coming together,” Mr. Percival is saying vehemently a little later in our conversation, “then the person who brought them there has a responsibility to do something”.

At this point of the conversation, however, he is speaking in almost paternal terms about a vocal pedal, Danish company TC-Helicon’s Voicelive Touch, the world’s first vocal processor and looper that is integrated into the microphone stand. “The pedals that I have been using have been guitar pedals,” Mr. Percival explains, “so every night, when I pull them out of the bag and put them on the stage, I’m tricking them into thinking my voice is a guitar. It’s not like you can go up with a microphone and plug it into the back of it an – bang – it’s working. This company started making vocal processors for singers, in the studio but also live, where vocalists want to get more involved with the process of what their voice is doing. Whether it’s doing harmonies or doing doubling, there are these effects on it…It’s part of the performance.”

Although the Voicelive Touch may be a tool through which Mr. Percival transmits his music to an audience, there’s clearly a spiritual side to his art that he attributes greatly to Indigenous culture. “I work in Arnhem Land four times a year with the community, teaching singing’” Mr. Percival says. “In Indigenous culture there was a connection of storytelling and the drum and singing. So from that basis, me working with the community in Arnhem Land I see it as a great honour because of the people I get to meet and from what I’m learning from them. It’s an oral tradition up there and it’s very powerful, and as Australians we forget as we catch the tram and we’re on our way to work and we’re ding our thing that all over this country are songlines and they do exist and they are real and they were the pathways to every different mob in Australia..”

Admittedly, it’s an alien concept for this writer, but it sounds like Mr.Percival’s concept of singing extends further than the ol’ belt-out-a-tune idea. “If you can open the channel.” He explains, “then you can tap into the songlines. There’s so much music here. There’s so much music happening around us because there were people here before white Australians arrived. They were here for so long beforehand. And their culture is based on singing.”

If singing is all that to one man, what does that mean for Mr.Percival’s audience, inevitably sucked in to sing along? “People say audience participation is cheesy, it’s not cool. I believe audience participation is unity for the community. The powers that be don’t want us to come together because if we’re too happy then we don’t buy shit. If people come to one of my shows and sing for ten minutes together they will be transported to a place of peace filled with freedom and then I feel my work is done.


For more information, images and interviews, please contact -
Sue Camilleri
08 89 412 512
0408 412 512
soozcam@bigpond.net.au

Discography - available through MGM Distribution
2003 Falling Around The Sun
2006 Out of The Loop
2009 Microphones