I’ve heard that story about 20 times in the last couple of days. An urban myth I’d say.
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Maybe the chief celebrity spotter on the mainland might hit a purple patch and run or cycle into Jagger.
He could then bate the truth out of him. I’d nearly award an interaction with Jagger as a spot. Would you d’ya think?
I think I might?
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
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The Birmingham striker?
One of the greats. Saw him live about 5 years ago. Thanks be to God.
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RIP
On production duties here.
The Congos - Fisherman
Rodney Rice, his weekend radio show was essential listening back in the day, it was always on in our gaff anyway
One of my favourite of his recent works. Went looking for the record in the house yesterday. I must have had a premonition.
Ed Asner, RIP
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Less than 2 weeks ago
@Fagan_ODowd from the Torygraph this week
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry was a truly bizarre man – but a musical titan
The reggae pioneer, who has died aged 85, was highly influential and idiosyncratic. Neil McCormick’s meeting with him was unforgettable
MUSIC CRITIC
30 August 2021 • 12:35pm
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, who has died aged 85, performing in Amsterdam in 1992 CREDIT: Frans Schellekens
Lee “Scratch” Perry has departed this earthly vale. It was announced yesterday that the great producer, songwriter, vocalist and reggae and dub pioneer passed away in a hospital in Jamaica at the handsome age of 85. However, I prefer to accept his own oft-stated view that death is not the end, and that he has merely shuffled off this mortal coil to return to his home planet of Krypton to resume his ministrations as an interstellar ambassador of reggae.
Perry was a genius, and I don’t bandy that word about lightly. Perry was one of the most essential figures in the history of modern music, a prime mover in the development of reggae and the inventor of dub recording techniques that revolutionised music studios and provided the blueprint for modern trends in remixing whose sound innovations still reverberate through pop culture.
I had seen him on stage many times and often listened to the weird and wonderful music that poured out of his Black Ark studio in Kingston, Jamaica before I met him in 1997. But I still wasn’t quite prepared for the impact of Perry in full flow. He arrived for our interview at Island Records in north London looking like a witch doctor on the loose: a heavy-lidded, wiry old man dressed in a purple crushed-velvet jacket, skin-tight leggings, a gold crown on his cropped, dyed-blonde hair and covered from head to toe in home-made jewellery featuring an array of personal religious icons, including Jesus, Haile Selassie, Superman and George V.
He was carrying a suitcase, from which multi-coloured feathers could be seen sticking out. Opening this up in the basement of the record company, he proceeded to build a shrine from its contents, until he was seated in the middle of a circle of fairy lights, candles, foil wrapped chocolates and a variety of children’s action figures, including superheroes, apes and dinosaurs. All the while, he chuckled and mumbled under his breath, singing little ditties like ‘I call to Master Merlin / To return to Lee Perry all his sterling’. Then he lit up a joint so improbably enormous it seemed to defy physics and peered at me through a cloud of marijuana smoke.
“I am flame, flames of fire, Scratch on the wire,” he informed me. “I am on top of the music, walking on top of the music, it is under my feet. I wrap up all the angels, wrap them up under a rock with my c–k. I rap under rock with pop, blues, jazz, disco, funky special. I put reggae out of my feet and who love reggae shall have reggae. And who don’t respect my s–t, I send seven years of famine, seven years of hardship and a long sentence to the Phantom Zone, suffer sickness and disease in all directions. Who can pass the test, let them take the test. Who can pass the test, them will be the best.”
Perry spoke in the rhyming cadences of a natural toaster, and addressed all my questions seriously, although perhaps not with the clarity I may have hoped for. In response to a query about his recording plans, he informed me he only worked with angels and extraterrestrials these days, before continuing: “I don’t wanna drink the Devil’s soup, neither wanna wear the Devil’s suit, neither do I wanna wear the Devil’s boot, neither do I wanna have anything to do with the devil youth. Nothing. I await the return of the God, the return of the truth and the return of the King.”
The king in question was, indeed, George V, whose visage featured on a coin that Perry had made into a ring. Our current Queen, he informed me, was an imposter who should be put in jail for sacrilege. This was something he planned to get round to, as soon as he had finished dispensing earthquakes upon the Japanese for killing dolphins.
It was well known that Perry was more than a little eccentric. Yet over a lifetime in the music business, he created a body of work second to none. Born Rainford Hugh Perry in 1936, he started working as a record seller aged 15, before embarking on cutting discs of his own. His nickname “Scratch” came from his first recorded song, ‘Chicken Scratch’. He scored local and international hits in the 1960s, bringing a fresh softness and slackness to the choppy rocksteady music flourishing on the island, his bass-heavy mixes and psychedelic flourishes facilitating a transformation from ska to reggae.
Perry, rarely without marijuana to hand, at a studio in London in 1984 CREDIT: David Corio
Sought after for his unique perspectives on sound, he produced the Pioneers single Long Shot in 1967, which is often credited as being the first reggae record. Perry co-wrote and produced such classics as War Ina Babylon for Max Romeo, and Police and Thieves for Junior Murvin. He discovered Bob Marley and The Wailers and set them on the path to international superstardom. And he made innumerable recordings both solo and with his group, The Upsetters, including Return of Django, which reached number 5 in the UK in 1969.
Perry became a reliable if unconventional hitmaker and star, whose shamanistic character had a profound influence on Marley, guiding his shift from parochial pop star to spiritually oriented singer-songwriter. They later fell out, however – as Perry seemed to do with everyone. In our interview, he referred to Marley as “Judas, the white belly rat” and to Island supremo Chris Blackwell as a vampire who needed Perry’s blood to survive. (I think he meant it literally.)
His most profound achievements came in an astonishing period between 1975 and 1979 when he presided over his own Black Ark studios. With only rudimentary four-track equipment, he created a spacious, multi-layered sound that has influenced every dance genre since. “It was only four tracks written on the machines,” he once claimed, “but I was picking up 20 from the extraterrestrial squad.”
His dub records are the musical equivalent of outsider art, so individual in character they belong in a genre of their own. This particular period of creativity came to an end, however, when Perry experienced a complete breakdown. After walking around Kingston backwards for two days, striking the ground with a hammer, he burned down his studio. Journalists found him in his garden, eating money and worshipping bananas.
Yet this was not the end of his career. Perry continued to perform live and release albums for decades, supported by devoted acolytes and collaborators, in thrall to his genius and prepared to work around his peculiarities. From the 1980s on, his records were substantially mediated by such sympathetic producers as Adrian Sherwood, The Orb and Bill Laswell, with Perry performing more as lyricist and vocalist than as sonic mastermind.
British dub producer Neil Fraser, aka The Mad Professor, made six albums with Perry and once told me: “Perry can be the easiest man to work with or the most difficult, depending on his mood. He knows what he wants to hear. It might be mad, but it is very entertaining.” (Perry was less complimentary to me about his collaborator, referring to him as “The Deaf Professor”.)
In 1991, Perry married his third wife, Mireille, a Swiss businesswoman and reggae enthusiast who was his greatest supporter. She attended upon him during our interview and appeared perpetually amused by his antics, laughing indulgently at his outrageous proclamations. Spouse, manager, nurse and disciple rolled into one, she acted as a kind of buffer between his delusions and harsh reality. The couple had two children and remained together for the rest of his life.
Perry performs in London in 2017 CREDIT: Robin Little
I often think about my encounter with Perry, and how he created such extraordinary art. I listen to his music a lot, and I hear its echoes and reverberations throughout modern pop, in a remix culture where the song is just the beginning of the sonic journey, to be distorted and distended at will. What he achieved with four-track equipment seems like magic, but there was a science to it, too: he assembled songs by recording instruments on three tracks, then transferring or “bouncing” everything to one remaining track, before repeating the process, potentially ad infinitum, all the while making crucial decisions about how each element might affect everything else. When I asked where his studio was, he tapped his cranium, and there was truth in that.
Perry, of course, had his own theories about his continued success. “My insides are my outsides,” he told me, exhaling a cloud of smoke from his mammoth joint. “See, I take my insides and I put them outside for my fans, and all the people who love my music. For I give them the light. I’m Mr Lee Perry. Ha ha ha! I am the President, the Upsetter, Death’s conqueror, I am everything. I am Buddha and I am the Devil, the negative and positive. I am creation.”
You can’t really argue with that.
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Sarah Harding 39
Ah fuck. Poor girl
RIP
Jesus. Didn’t know she was unwell.
Girls Aloud had some great tunes.
RIP
She was a lovely looking lady.
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