LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY AND THE SPIRITUAL

It’s the future. The children dem were created for my music. They are the energy. No - not energy: INergy ... because the world EN is the end, but the word IN is the beginning.

It’s the future. The children dem were created for my music. They are the energy. No - not energy: INergy ... because the world EN is the end, but the word IN is the beginning.

These are the words of Jamaican Reggae and Dub legend Lee “Scratch” Perry. At 80 years old, Perry is still performing his spiritual music internationally. It seems out of some divine afflatus that the producer, poet, musician, singer and artist manifests his other-worldly inspiration. Lee’s eccentricity of character and arcane mystery of speech have alienated some who term him ‘madman’ and enticed others to give him the appellation of ‘genius’. I am of the latter school of thought and went to see him at the Fiddler’s Bristol, as an ancient traveller may seek an oracle – to hear truth through the channel of this seer.

In many ways the venue, located on Willway Street, metamorphosed into a sanctuary of deep, dreamy dub meditation. On the stage sits what seems to be a shrine; three bananas pierced with incense sticks sit in front of a suitcase adorned with an exuberance of emblems and images. Lee himself looks somewhat like an intergalactic Poseidon, wearing leggings that resemble the milky-way and adorned with patches, beads and crystals. His beard and hair are dyed fuchsia and there are mirrors on his hat.

Perry’s band plays his most iconic tracks: Disco Devil, Zion’s Blood and People Funny Boy. These provide a musical backdrop for a rhyming overflow of his stream of consciousness – surrealist spoken word poetry if you will. Political statements of anti-monarchy: “Burn down Buckingham Palace / burn down the challis” blended with the more comic “take off your cap / and start to hop” [to which he precedes to hop about on one leg] and denouncements of the obstacles to healthy spiritual enlightenment: “no cocaine / no coke/ no coke / no joke”.

Lee, with childlike spontaneity, swings and ambles about the stage “you needed me and I needed you” he chants – and indeed after the conflagration of his studio in Jamaica, the Black Ark, Lee moved to London where his musical career was reinvigorated by British musicians (such as The Clash and Paul McCartney) and a British fan base. Scratch is fixated by the purifying power of the elements. It was he, in fact, that burned down his studio to purify it of bad intention from pseudo-Rastafari and evil spirits. He invited me backstage, and to the question “what do you believe in?” I was given the answer “I believe in rocks, and ice, and water”. Handling his crystal neckwear Perry tells me “these are made from ice”. In the 2008 documentary movie “The Upsetter” Lee says that heard music in rocks and boulders; he was working as a builder and through the clashing and clanging of these raw materials Dub and Reggae were conceived in the mind.

The silent but omnipotent energy of the natural is the essential core of Perry’s spirituality– and he is the mouthpiece of this hidden knowledge.