Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry: God’s messenger “to destroy the Queen”
The psychedelic frontiers that had been forged by the pioneers of the 1960s American West Coast found new homes in two unlikely countries. While the expansive sounds of the album era were curdling into prog-rock, it took the avant-garde grooves conjured in Germany and the sonic trips pumped out of Jamaica to realise psychedelia’s original visions. If Germany had Can, Neu!, and Faust leading the krautrock fore, reggae’s intrepid dub explorers were Osbourne ‘King Tubby’ Ruddock, Hopeton ‘Scientist’ Brown, and one Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.
Arguably the movement’s definitive figure, Perry— real name Rainford Hugh Perry—was an enthusiastic embracer of mythos and eccentric sleight-of-hand. His life and creative practice are smattered with pieces of lore that waver on fanciful, but an evident force of character always wards off any real doubt. From moving to Kingston from Jamaica’s southern Clarendon parish due to an interaction with ‘mythical stones’ to blowing ganja smoke into a studio microphone so that he could get “weed into the song”, Perry was an individual operating on a whole different plane in life as well as the studio.
“God sent me to destroy the Queen, the Duke, the Presidents, the governments, the police and the soldiers,” he revealed in 2019. “I am God lightning and God’s scientist, I do God magic and I do God miracles…”
Working miracles had been business as usual across his over 60-year career until his death in 2021. Born in rural Kendal in 1936, the Yoruba heritage passed through his mother’s side instilled a potent sense of spirituality in the young Perry after watching her perform the sacred Ettu dances—a supposed communion with the afterlife—in his small village. Eventually finding himself at Kingston’s Studio One at 20, Perry began cutting popular chart hits before adopting the production moniker ‘The Upsetter’ in 1966, a title that would follow him for the rest of his life.
Shortly after having collaborated with a young Bob Marley and his Wailers band, Perry’s developing dub sound was further defined with 1973’s Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle. It was a landmark release that established dub’s new and widescreen sonics afforded by the latest and relatively inexpensive hardware imported from Japan to the famous King Tubby recording studio.
Building his own studio, the Black Ark, behind his home, a steady rotation of keen dubnauts were eager to sign up for Perry’s mage-like production and engineering skills. It was the Black Ark which truly witnessed Perry’s wielding of the studio as an instrument just as The Beatles or The Beach Boys had done years prior, pushing the world of reggae to a deeply otherworldly realm.
Just as his career began to take off at the 1970s’ close—everybody from Paul McCartney, Gregory Isaacs and Robert Palmer seeking the Upsetter sound—dark clouds gathered over his beloved Black Ark. Surrounding political violence engulfing the country and the creeping presence of racketeering gangs in the area, Perry sought novel ways of protest by desecrating his studio with cryptic graffiti and driving around the city with a slab of rotten pork on his hood ornament. Finally washing his hands of the now-toxic studio spot, Perry set the site ablaze in 1983 and set off for London the following year.
Mired in a dry creative spell, it took post-punk dub producer and On-U Sound Records founder Adrian Sherwood and collaborations with Mad Professor to coax Perry out of his funk. Into the 1990s and beyond, Perry barely stopped working, touring regularly and recording so much material that posthumous albums were still dropped three years after his passing. Gifted with an imagination and an internal sonic interstellar map no one else had directions for, Perry’s dub legacy encompasses reggae from its inception and heralded its dub incarnation as one of psychedelia’s true successors.
