Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer of dub music, died on Sunday at the age of 85 years old. In a career which spanned more than six decades, Perry worked alongside artists from Bob Marley, Junior Murvin, and the Congos to Beastie Boys and The Clash, expanding the sound palette of popular music and stretching the loping rhythms of Jamaica to fill every corner of the map.
Born in the northwestern town of Kendal to parents who were labourers, through his mother the young Rainford Hugh Perry could claim Yoruba ancestry, which manifested at the time in Ettu, an ode to ancestors in the form of a celebratory dance. Compelled to move to Kingston, by 1961 he was working for the sound system of the producer Coxsone Dodd, first as a record seller then as an engineer, producer, and talent scout.
Perry would produce almost thirty recordings for Studio One, including the theme song ‘Chicken Scratch’, before a dispute with Dodd led him to Joe Gibbs at Amalgamated Records. In early 1968 he released ‘I Am The Upsetter’, a complaint record aimed squarely at Dodd, and when he also fell out with Gibbs later that year, he formed his own record label called Upsetter Records. Perry soon scored his first hit, as ‘People Funny Boy’, sampling a crying baby and skewering his time with Gibbs, sold 60,000 copies on its first pressing in Jamaica.
Perry began to record with his studio band, which became known as the Upsetters. With a steady grounding in the walking basslines and offbeat rhythms of ska and rocksteady, having already made the acquaintance of bands like the Heptones and the Wailers, now Perry was well positioned to capitalise on the fledgling sounds of reggae. His first albums with the Upsetters also seized on the popularity of Spaghetti Westerns with titles like Return of Django and Clint Eastwood, while Perry encouraged Bob Marley to tackle spiritual and political themes as he produced the early Wailers albums Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution.
As Bob Marley and the Wailers embraced roots themes, the band also incorporated members of the Upsetters, with Aston and Carlton Barrett leaving to form a new rhythm section. In 1973, the next phase in the life of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry commenced upon the construction of the Black Ark in the backyard of his home in the Washington Gardens neighbourhood of Kingston. Named after the Ark of the Covenant, utilising basic four-track recording equipment, the studio became the hub for Perry’s rapidly evolving blend of reggae, makeshift sound effects, and experimental electronics.
Perry applied thick swathes of echo and reverb after stripping down popular reggae recordings to harness the sound of dub, with its wobbling bass rhythms and cavernous atmospherics. He buried microphones at the base of palm trees to produce walloping drums, shot pistols and broke glass, and developed the spooky sound replete with ghastly wheezes and sighs which had made its first appearance on the Wailers record ‘Mr. Brown’. And with the aid of just a Mu-Tron Phasor and Roland Space Echo, he filled his four-track with multiple overdubs, a freeform kinescope of reggae riddims, tape hiss, and music and film samples. Of the Black Ark studio, Perry said:
‘The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs, or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you send into it and live.’
The seventies brought a slew of classic albums from Lee Perry and the Upsetters, including the Blackboard Jungle Dub mixed alongside King Tubby, Revolution Dub, and Super Ape. In 1976 he produced the smash single ‘Police and Thieves’ by Junior Murvin, which was swiftly covered by The Clash in a style they called punk reggae. Together with War Ina Babylon by Max Romeo and Party Time by the Heptones, the album Police and Thieves by Murvin is often considered part of the ‘holy trinity’ of Perry’s production work at Black Ark in the mid-seventies.
But a distribution deal with Island Records proved short-lived, as external pressures and excessive alcohol and marijuana consumption took a toll on his health. By 1983, the Black Ark studio had burned to the ground, with Perry claiming responsibility for excising unholy spirits as the artist showed his penchant for mythmaking. Perry subsequently moved to London, and in 1989 he married the record store owner Mireille Rüegg, with the couple basing themselves for the next thirty years in Switzerland.
In the late eighties, Perry featured on the song ‘Dr. Lee, PhD’ as Beastie Boys paid tribute to one of their idols. He began a series of fruitful collaborations with Mad Professor, and his music remained in the spotlight as he was sampled by hip hop artists and the burgeoning field of electronica. In 2003 he received the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album for Jamaican E.T., and by the end of the decade he had settled in alongside stars young and old, as he released albums with Andrew W.K., George Clinton, and Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones guitarist described him as ‘the Salvador Dalí of music. He’s a mystery. The world is his instrument. You just have to listen’.
The staggered rhythms and deep chasms of space conjured by his music echoed his cosmic aura and celestial pronouncements, as Perry cut a figure in robes and prints, bedazzled jewellery, neon-dyed hair and richly emblazoned hats. One of the most revered and inimitable producers on wax, there is scarcely a genre of music which his style has not touched, as his early recordings helped to lay the foundations for hip hop, dancehall, and contemporary R&B while instigating the course of techno, trip hop, and so many other off-kilter movements in dance and electronics.
In 2011, the documentary feature The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry was released, with narration by Benicio Del Toro. There were collaborations with Bill Laswell and The Orb, and Perry began to exhibit his art in the form of sculptures, collages, and scrawls of text at galleries from California and New York to Zurich and Schaffhausen. In the meantime his music reached a new generation of fans through the radio stations of the video game Grand Theft Auto.
Anniversary tours and album reissues did nothing to halt the steady flow of new music. His death in the coastal town of Lucea in northern Jamaica was announced by local media, with the prime minister Andrew Holness sending his condolences as colleagues and admirers lined up to pay tribute.
