The human body has long been used in music as a form of percussion, and in popular music, the handclap is a regularly used element. So why not a /Tuesday Ten looking at songs that make great use of the handclap?

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The obvious choice this week would have been Kenickie’s much-loved early single Come Out 2Nite, but I used that back on /Tuesday Ten /512 – and nowadays, I don’t reuse songs (I have a database built to ensure I don’t!).

There were a great set of suggestions as usual, though, and so picking ten was tough – and avoiding The Rembrandts was easy. Thanks to all that got involved.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Hall & Oates
/Private Eyes
/Private Eyes

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The handclaps are used sparingly on this 1981 classic by blue-eyed soul duo Hall & Oates (one of their six US number one hits). A song about obsession that uses the metaphor of a private investigator tracking every detail of the protagonist in the song – and sees the band dressing up as classically noir detectives in the low-key, but surprisingly effective video. The handclaps come after each line of the chorus, and perhaps predictably, became a major audience participation moment in their live shows.

Sadly it appears that their working relationship – long on rocky ground, and culminating in a court battle over rights that was resolved recently – is beyond repair if John Oates’ comments on a Rock & Roll Highschool podcast recently are to be believed.

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/Cameo
/Word Up!
/Word Up!

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It’s amazing to think that by the time that Word Up! became a worldwide hit, Larry Blackmon and his band were about to release their thirteenth album, and it was the shift to the taut, stark funk of this track that kickstarted that success. Secondhandsongs records twenty-five covers of it, too, a number of which became significant, enduring hits in their own right.

The iconic video was probably just as important, with Blackmon’s red codpiece, a club going nuts and, better known for his role in Star Trek: Next Generation, Levar Burton starring as the cop trying to shut the band down.

As for the handclaps – as far as I can tell, they are part of the rhythm in the coda, although they may be synthesised handclaps alongside that ever-present slap-bass…

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/The Cure
/Close to Me
/The Head on the Door

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For all their reputation of doom and gloom, it is easy to forget that the Cure released a good number of (outwardly!) brighter song, particularly in the eighties, that made them a fixture of the pop charts and with regular appearances on Top of the Pops (they made no less than twenty-five appearances). Close To Me, from 1985, is one of those songs, a wild mix of styles that doesn’t really sound like anything else, with delicately picked synths, horns and handclaps all jostling for space in the mix.

It’s another song where the video is especially notable, too, as the band all fight for space in a wardrobe on the top of Beachy Head…

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/R.E.M
/Shiny Happy People
/Out of Time

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There are few songs quite so divisive as Shiny Happy People. One of the band’s biggest hits, whether they liked it or not, it is one of their most unabashed “pop” songs and features a scene-stealing backing vocal from Kate Pierson of the B-52s. But if it was meant as a satire of overly-happy pop music, it missed the mark somewhat as everyone took it at face value instead: and anyway, Out of Time features better pop songs anyway: Losing My Religion and Near Wild Heaven, the latter being one of the greatest songs the band ever wrote.

But whether you like it or not, if it comes on, you’ll end up singing and clapping along (the handclaps here are an integral part of the rhythm): it’s that kind of insidious pop song that became a pop standard almost instantly.

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/Queen
/We Will Rock You
/News of the World

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Queen were already a very well established band by 1985, and they hardly needed any more help. But somehow, they stole the whole damned show in twenty-one minutes at Live Aid, their innate understanding of what would work in such an environment – play the big hits, and the ones that will encourage crowd participation, but cut out the slow bits to maximise the effect – seeming so effortless.

Two of the songs featured in that set were both suggested for this thread. One of those is the soaring Radio Ga Ga, about the commercialisation and homogenization of radio play, complete with the handclaps in the chorus that at Live Aid becomes the entire stadium clapping along

But it’s We Will Rock You that is perhaps the daddy of them all when it comes to the clapping accompaniment to a song. Just two minutes long, the beat of the song is purely foot-stomps and hand-claps, with the only other instrumentation being Brian May’s epic guitar solo at the end. Needless to say, every bit of live footage of it I’ve ever seen is the band and audience “playing” the song as one massed band.

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/Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
/The Weeping Song
/The Good Son

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One of the singles from The Good Son – and one of four songs on the album whose title is The [x] song – that is a duet between Cave and Blixa Bargeld, as they continue a conversation between a father and son about the transitory nature of life, love and loss and the son observes weeping women (and men) in their home village, and seeks to understand why. Not as bleak a song as this suggests: “I won’t be weeping long” is the key line, as the father teaches the son that while we grieve, we move on and continue to live and love life.

While the clapping underpins the chorus on this song, for a time this took a life of it’s own at live shows, with entire crowds taking on the clapping element, which as I recall happened when saw them at the O2, at an extraordinary show in 2017…

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/Queens of the Stone Age
/Quick And To The Pointless
/Rated R

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Rated R blew up because it was a fucking great rock album, basically. That post-Millennium period was not a great one for rock music otherwise – the long tail of Britpop had produced some absolute dross, and the likes of The Strokes and The White Stripes were just around the corner from crashing the mainstream – so it kinda felt like Josh Homme, Nick Oliveri and their band of brothers were taking over the party for a while.

Songs involving drug and alcohol abuse make up much of the album’s subject matter, and the shortest song on the album is Quick And To The Pointless, a rampaging blast of cocaine-and-meth inspired hard rock that features handclaps on the beat and a general desert-fried feeling, reflected in Oliveri’s sand-blasted vocals after a heavy night…

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/Gary Numan
/We Are Glass
/Telekon

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While Numan returned to Telekon to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of it on tour last year, I’ve always had the feeling – rightly or wrongly – that this album was overlooked a bit in the aftermath of The Pleasure Principle, and every time I listen to songs from it, I am reminded how great they are. Such as the force of We Are Glass, seemingly about the fragility of youth and the tough exteriors put up, which features handclaps in the power surge of the chorus. Numan remains, somehow, an artist I’ve never seen live, and maybe one day I’ll right that.

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/Le Tigre
/Deceptacon
/Le Tigre

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A fixture of indie dancefloors for twenty-five years, Kathleen Hanna’s second post-Bikini Kill project (after the Julie Ruin) kept the same politics but was aimed squarely at dancing and having fun while putting the world to rights. Deceptacon remains their best-known and greatest song, that careers along like an out-of-control car, and uses references to nonsense pop songs of the past to drive forward a song that is questioning what happened to the innocent joy of enjoying music: there is a great Song Exploder on BBC Sounds about the song. The handclaps are only part of it, but an essential one.

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/Steve Reich
/Clapping Music

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We close out with US minimalist composing legend Steve Reich. Clapping Music is one of those deceptively complex pieces that Reich long-since mastered. Initially written for two people to perform – and reputedly inspired by a visit to a Flamenco show in Belgium (!) – it uses a phasing technique where one person claps out the same rhythm all the way through, while the other is doing a pattern that is one beat less – so they gradually go out of sync before returning together at the end (the YouTube video I’ve linked to in the playlist shows the score so that you can follow what’s happening). It’s the kind of rhythm that to this non-player (I write about and appreciate music, rather than play it) seems impossibly hard to play – maybe I should try it sometime, hopefully with someone more musically adept accompanying me!