Burning down a music studio in 1979 was the greatest thing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry ever did
Every era must come to an end eventually, but back in 1979, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry brought one of the greatest eras in the history of reggae to a particularly violent conclusion when he deliberately set fire to his iconic Black Ark Studios, leaving Jamaica’s reggae scene to pick through the ashes looking for anything salvageable.
Throughout his existence, going back to his very early days as a record seller for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, Perry lived by his own rulebook. A flick through the producer’s biography throws up a plethora of bizarre, unbelievable circumstances that could only truly be explained by the man himself, making his passing back in 2021 all the more tragic. Perhaps his most contentious decision, however, was to burn down his very own recording studio in 1979.
Originally built in 1973, on the grounds of Perry’s family home in Kingston, Black Ark Studios certainly wasn’t cutting edge, by the global standards of the early 1970s. Its equipment was in varying states of disrepair, and even the elements that worked were vastly outdated when compared to the equipment found in most American studios at that time.
Nevertheless, with Perry behind the mixing desk, Black Ark churned out a litany of the greatest reggae albums of all time, striking upon its own distinctive sound and attracting the likes of Bob Marley, Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, Gregory Isaacs, and countless other bona fide reggae icons.
Those legendary recordings which emerged from Black Ark were also the product of a particularly erratic, eccentric period in the life of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Becoming obsessed with the idea of evil spirits plaguing the studio, Perry took to blessing the tapes recorded at Black Ark by blowing marijuana smoke onto the tapes and, in some cases, spraying alcohol, blood, or even urine onto them.
Eventually, the prevalence of those evil spirits at Black Ark, coupled with what could be described as a deterioration in Perry’s mental state, caused the producer to view fire and brimstone as the only logical option. After destroying all the equipment inside, Perry burnt the studio to the ground and, years later, told The Talks, “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done! How else could I escape if I did not do that?”
In the mind of the producer, fire was the only way to kill the demonic spirits within the studio. “I would be under the spell of demons forever, they would have killed me if I didn’t do that,” he declared.
“So that was God’s way, just to burn it and let it kill them. It was my saviour”.
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
“If I never burned down the studio, I would have died because the devil was jealous of me, and jealousy is dangerous,” he added. “The devil would ask where I get so much power from and I tell him, from the rain water, from thunder, from lightning, from the stars of heaven.”
An alternate explanation for Perry’s obsession with those demonic spirits was that, by the late 1970s, Black Ark had become plagued by local gangsters and criminals, all eager to take a cut of the money made from its musical masterpieces.
During a slightly more cognitive interview with Clash in 2009, he explained, “Too much stress in Jamaica, all the time. Everybody want money, everybody want paid. Everyone got problem and want me to solve their problem. Nobody gave me anything, people just took everything.” In the end, the stress became so great that destroying the studio was the only way out.
Regardless of exactly why Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry destroyed his magnificent recording studio in 1979, the aftermath was troubling enough to cause the producer to leave Jamaica entirely, moving to London and eventually settling in Switzerland, far away from the dark spirits that derailed the golden age of reggae production.
