Lee Perry - 'I Am The Upsetter' (Trojan/Santuary Records) Release 21/02/05

Lee “Scratch” Perry, the legend, the genius, the music, the fruitcake…

There’s something about the man and his music that forces you to flex those facial muscles, crease your skin and form a smile bigger and brighter than the Jamaican sun. The music isn’t cabaret, though there’s an undeniable humour to the sounds and lyrics used. It isn’t expressly comical, so what is it that forces us to smile? Always stretching beyond the rigid conformities of Reggae and Dub music, Perry wouldn’t approach writing or producing a song like his contemporaries; it wasn’t about capturing the precise sound, it was about capturing the right feeling. A man who was constantly battling his own inner demons, he could see and feel things that others just couldn’t grasp, and with this sixth sense he created some of the most influential and beautiful music on this planet.

Perry’s influence on Jamaican music is impossible to ignore, his fingerprints are clear for all to see within the works of King Tubby, Bob Marley, Prince Buster etc. But what about his own music? His own personal expressions and ideas would be forever changing and shifting, whether it be the private musings of his solo work, or the constantly mutating sounds he accomplished with The Upsetters. With the freedom and time his Black Ark Studio’s afforded him, he could indulge all of his own fantasies, follow an idea for as long as it would take to satisfy his urges. He worked with the best musicians, used equipment barely released on the market and followed his every whim musically. The only reason he could accomplish so much and do this was because he feared nothing. There were no restrictions to stop him, he saw no walls in his way, there were no rules he couldn’t break, just a blank canvas he could exorcise all of his demons upon. Sometimes the final product would be messy, intangible and impossible to understand, but you knew the feeling he was trying to put across had been captured perfectly.

The moments of unbridled joy are in abundance, whether it be the glorious 'Stay Dread' by Perry himself, or the unerring distillation of that warm melancholic glow you get when the sun sets at the end of one of your holiday evenings, in musical form (Dave Barker & The Wailers 'Don’t let the sun catch you crying'). The best moments though come when the music takes a darker and more sinister edge. It often becomes suffocating when the intensity rises to it’s critical peak, bordering on unbearable. It’s hard to imagine a genre which is formed upon an aesthetic that no matter how dark the message is, the music should be big, bouncy and bright can be this scary. It’s these moments which give us a better vantage point to look and study the psyche of it’s creator. It’s like the age old theory that comedians are generally riddled with depression. Yet from the darkest of places Perry could still come back with a song so sublime and full of pure majestic bliss that those same old creases would come back time after time to our cheeks.

A perfect example that the gap between genius and madness is a lot smaller than we thought!