Where to begin? When dealing with Lee Perry it's usually best to
start from Scratch, however much has been written about the man,
from the recently published biography People Funny Boy:The
Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry, by David Katz, to websites such
as http://www.upsetter.net/
and http://www.levity.com/figment/dub.html.
For the purposes of this review I shall forgo the retelling of
his life story, because even in brief it would take too long to
mention even just the cream of the musical acts that have worked
with Mr. Perry over the last four decades.
I shall tell instead how I came to be such a fan of his work. Already
before I was familiar with the name Lee Scratch Perry, I was very
fond of various tunes he had produced "Kaya", "Small Axe", "Soul
Rebel" by The Wailers, and Junior Marvin's classic "Police And Thieves".
It wasn't until I heard English band The Fall in session on the
John Peel show in 1992 performing "Kimble", that the name of Lee
Scratch Perry entered my sphere of awareness.
"Kimble" inspired by the sixties TV series The Fugitive,
cast Perry as "Kimble the Nimble" who warned any would-be cheats
that he'd make them "trimble" and that anything he hit "always split"
illustrating this point with the sound of several glass bottles
being smashed throughout the track. There was something about the
simplicity in his straightforward but playful logic which really
delighted me.
The decisive moment for me regarding Perry's genius, came with
eighties album "Secret Laboratory", which pictured Perry on the
LP sleeve in full regal costume sitting on a throne in the Swiss
Alps, singing about the destruction of The IMF, The Mafia, The Queen
Of England, The Pope, vampires, witches and warlocks and various
governments, while proclaiming himself to be an alien from outer
space, Father Christmas, Criostos and even a mouse! This was my
kind of music with my kind of themes, and so began my personal quest
to discover as much of the back catalogue as I possibly could -
the fact that the Beastie Boys had begun championing his work was
a great help. Over the ensuing years I would read about Lee Perry
performing in England or on mainland Europe at the summer festivals,
but never an appearance in Ireland, so in 1998 I availed of an opportunity
to attend the Reading Festival where I got to see him in action
on a glorious August afternoon.
One of my past-times is to assist in a club run by some friends.
Each week they painstakingly assemble their sound system in the
cellar of a certain Dublin Bar and play a selection of their reggae
discs, sometimes bringing over English crews. The equipment is constantly
upgraded, and it currently enjoys a reputation as one of Dublin's
best clubs. The volume of sound which can vibrate a pint of beer
off a shelf is very easy to dance to, you can even feel your clothes
juddering in time to the bass. This full-on sound attracts reggae
enthusiasts from near and far.
Recently, Neal Fraser a.k.a. The Mad Professor was one such visitor
to the club, although I saw him mingling with the regulars I didn't
realise who he was. Afterwards people said he was talking about
returning to Dublin to do a show with none other than Scratch himself.
There was some development on the Scratch & Prof. rumours a
few weeks later, when a longhaired young man asked me a question
which I mistakenly heard, due to the noise of the sound system,
as "Is it okay if I throw a few flowers around?"
"Flowers?" I thought, that might not be a bad idea; after all,
the fragrance might help conceal the smell of stale beer in the
place… "What kind of flowers are they?" I enquired. "No, not flowers..
Fliers!" he corrected me, "For Lee Perry." Barely able to believe
my ears I told him he could throw around all the Lee Perry fliers
he wanted.
The following two weeks at the club saw the return of the same
guy with the fliers, he was Biggrevs of Biggrevs Promotions, I tried
to extract every last ounce of information from him concerning the
forthcoming Irish debut of The Upsetter and told him that it would
mean a lot to me if I could get a chance to meet him.
On the last Wednesday before the show Biggrevs and his girlfriend
Elaine dropped into the reggae club and he told me that the show
had sold out completely and he had been getting about thirty requests
a day for tickets from friends. He told me that Perry would be arriving
in town on the day of the gig at about five thirty in the evening
and would be staying at the Morrison Hotel, but he couldn't guarantee
that I would get to meet him.
Finally the scheduled date of the show arrived, it was a nice September
afternoon, and I left work early and headed down to The Morrison
Hotel with a disposable camera hoping to get some photos of The
Upsetter. As I got close to the hotel I could see some people at
the corner with instrument cases who looked like possible associates
of Perry's, my heart-rate doubled as I walked towards them. I noticed
a familiar face, Elaine, Biggrevs girlfriend.
"Hi!" she said, "These are Lee Perry's backing band, The Robotics,"
I shook hands with them and asked if they were the same backing
band I'd seen in Reading two years previously, and the keyboard
controller told me they were. I'd really liked their opening number
which was like a rocked-up version of The Six Million Dollar
Man theme tune. The keyboard player sang a bit of it while playing
"air-keyboard" and asked me if that was the tune I meant. I asked
Elaine if there was any sign of The Upsetter. "No," she told me
shaking her head, "No sign at all, so far."
I decided to wait in the cafe next door for him to make an appearance.
A stretch limo pulled up outside the hotel and Elaine and The Robotics
got in and away they went so I continued to wait. Eventually it
was closing time in the cafe, I decided to move outside to wait
just a little longer, I was starting to get fed up when suddenly
Biggrevs came hurtling around the corner looking very anxious speaking
to someone on a mobile phone. "How's it going Grevs ?" I asked.
"Not good," he told me, his brow knitted with worry. "He's missed
his flight from Zurich, the plane was about to take off, when two
customs guys boarded and brought him away to be searched. While
they searched him his plane took off, and now he has to wait for
the next flight which isn't until 8.30. He'll be going straight
from the airport to the stage, so there's no point hanging around
here."
I decided to go home, have something to eat and call into some
friends who were also going to the gig and eventually I headed down
to Vicar St.
Outside the venue, a lot of people without tickets had gathered.
I went into the venue just as Ambulance were completing their support
slot - they sounded good. There were two guys twiddling with banks
of machines, creating tape loops on the spot, building up electronic
rhythms through various analogue machines with another fellah "John
Of God" drumming along on a conventional drumkit, sounding similar
to some of Lee Perry's seventies dub-style recordings. Later on
they explained to me that they had gone for a more dub oriented
sound because of the nature of that night; normally their set would
be more influenced by electronic dance acts like Autechre.
There followed a long interval before the main act. Elaine and
Grevs were coming and going from the backstage area, Elaine gave
me regular progress reports: "He's not here!", "He's on his plane!",
"He's landed!", "He's in the country!", and finally "He's backstage
and will be ready to start in a few minutes."
At around this time the Mad Professor emerged from the backstage
door and started heading for the mixing desk. He was wearing a velvet
hat and cape, he looked like a funky version of Henry VIII.
The house lights went down and The Robotics entered the stage to
a warm round of applause, shouts and whistles. They were a three
piece of bass, drums and keyboards who also double as backing vocalists.
They began to play, the sound was loud and clear, I could feel the
sleeves of my jacket shaking to the beat, it was a familiar riff…
Bob Marley's "Exodus". People were starting to dance, the smell
of grass began to waft around the packed house and people roared
as Lee Scratch Perry arrived on the stage, he seemed to be in fine
fettle shouting out his "HALLO!"s to the audience. Then he started
to sing: "Come to my party! My reggae-techno party! Come to my
party! A crumble-wicked party." Withoutany break, "Exodus"
segued into "Techno Party", the title track of his first new album
of the millennium, jointly produced with The Mad Professor, reggae
rhythms infused with funky jungle, hip hop, break-beats and techno.
The way The Robotics were recreating the new material in a live
context was impressive. The Mad Professor was loading on the sound-fx,
echo reverb and delay on all the different instruments, vocoders
on the vocal mikes, sampling Lee Perry's live singing before mixing
the samples back into the songs as they were being played. The man
is a wizard at the controls.
The second number was "Introducing Myself " from the mid-eighties
LP Millionaire Liquidator. In this version he stated his
purpose as a legaliser of the ganja tree who sends all politicians
to Hell. He went along the front of the stage to shake hands with
the audience, some of them tried to pull him into the crowd, but
the feisty sexagenarian wriggled free from their grips. He obliged
a few people with autographs, kneeling down to sign pieces of paper
on the floor of the stage and then proceeded to sprinkle droplets
of water from his bottle of Evian onto the heads of the people along
the front row, thanking the crowd "for believing in Jah Rastafari
who is Love."
"Now I'm gonna do some techno hip hop" he announced and started
hopping around on one foot with one of his hands on his hip saying
"Hippy! Hoppy! Hippy! Hoppy!" before setting "Inspector Gadget"
in motion, a song inspired by the animated TV show of the same name.
Perry produced a musical cigarette lighter with flashing red and
green lights to relight a partially smoked joint someone had given
him. "I recharge the batteries for this with power from my Secret
Laboratory" and lo! The Robotics played "Secret Laboratory" with
distorted synthesised backing vocals: "Rocking and reeling and
having a ball / swinging and swaying strait jacket and all." With
The Upsetter, what you get on the record and what you get live are
completely different, he has a shamanic style, ranting and chanting,
touched by The Holy Spirit, very influenced by one of Jamaica's
Pentechostal churches, the Pocomaniacs. When he gets going, he really
gets going .
During "Jungle Safari" he offered to show the crowd how to dance,
and asked them all to jump. With limited success, he'd shout "Jump!"
then he'd jump. Some people, including me, jumped. "Wriggle on ya
belly! I wanna see ya wriggle on ya belly!" Unsurprisingly no one
obliged him with this strange request, so he jumped down onto his
belly and proceeded to wriggle from one side of the stage to the
other and then back again whilst shouting "rrR-RUB-A-DUB-A-DUB!"
and roaring like a lion, The Mad Professor duly sampled these and
other noises and played them back into the live mix.
And so the evening's entertainment rolled on. There was one song
I didn't recognise at all, more speeches about Jah Rastafari, Love
and Ganja - "the tree of life", there was an unexpected treat -
a version of "Curly Locks", one of the early Upsetter hits. "Curly
Locks, your father is a pork chop, and he don't like you dealin'
with me." Ithought it wasa short rendition,
obviously Perry did too as he jokingly scolded his backing band,
"Robotics! Why do you hate the fans? Why do you play so short?"
One of the highlights of the set for me was "Crooks In The Business
" from the current TechnO PARTY! album. The album version
is an attack on people in the music business who he feels have robbed
him, but live he decided instead to attack the crooks in the business
who are "selling hash too dear and selling herb too dear" - a very
relevant issue! "Crooks in the business! I know you all, big
& small I see you all, I can see through a nine inch wall!"
He received a superbly crafted joint from the crowd, which he
took several pulls on, before spinning around to exhale a downwardly
spiralling plume of smoke rendering him almost completely invisible.
He also gave an impressive display of the martial art he calls
"Fu Kung", kicking the air with a "Wap! Wap! Wap!" and chopping
the air with a "Zap! Zap! Zap!" The crowd-pleaser of the night was
"War Inna Babylon" a song written about the virtual civil war in
seventies Jamaica where rival political factions were shooting each
other in the streets. It was great to hear all the Dubliners, male
and female, singing along for this one, "War inna Babylon / tribal
war inna Babylon / it sipple out deh / it slide out deh " ("sipple
" is a variation of slippery in the Jamaican patois, in this instance
it means "treacherous"), and as usual Scratch took off on a typical
impromptu version, saying "War inna Ireland! Lee Scratch Perry
doesn't want no war inna Ireland ", this delighted the crowd
who all joined in singing "No more war inna Ireland ", this
was in contrast to the version I'd heard in 1998 where he started
listing all the countries that had been bombed by the U.S. that
month, including an accidental bombing of Pakistan who had just
become a nuclear power "War inna Sudan ,war in Afghanistan, war
inna Pakistan", no matter how crazy the man may seem, he still
manages to read the newspapers and keep himself well informed on
global events.
He did a version of The Staple Singers "I'll Take You There" which
he's renamed as "Come Go With Lee", where he urged his listeners
to "fly up in the sky like a butterfly," amongst other things. He
took a pint of Guinness from someone down the front of the crowd
and held it high over his head in a Statue Of Liberty pose, and
paraded the black beverage around the stage like a trophy, before
taking a hearty swig which saw half the pint vanish from the glass
in a single gulp, and handed the drink back to its original owner.
A proud moment for Guinness drinkers, but mostly he stuck to the
Evian, removing his CD festooned custom cap to shower his head with
mineral water and drying himself off with a big fluffy white towel.
He said "Thank you! Good night!" and left the stage, but after
almost ten minutes of the crowd calling out for more, stomping their
feet, clapping their hands, screaming and blowing whistles, the
house lights came on and the sound crew started dismantling the
gear on stage. The show was over. I went over to a much calmer looking
Grevs to try to work my way backstage but he told me that Scratch
had already left.
I got talking to the bassist of The Robotics later on, and I said
that it was great to have this once in a lifetime chance to see
such a show, and he said "Oh no, there'll be more shows here for
sure, he'll be back." And so will I.
Picture of a "hippy hoppy"
Lee Scratch P also by Cormac