Lee Scratch Perry Live @ Munich 2016 Photo: © pitpony.photography / CC-BY-SA-3.0
It’s hard to overstate the legacy of Lee "Scratch" Perry, one of the best-known and most prolific pioneers of Jamaican dub. Following an explosion of creativity in the 1970s, he became known for his eccentricity and flamboyance in later life, moving from behind the mixing desk to grace other musician’s compositions with his voice, gifting them boatloads of credibility in the process.
Perry died in 2021, but in the year prior, during the COVID pandemic, he’d been working on an album that dabbled outside his usual comfort zone, and it’s just been released. It sadly pales in comparison to much of his work, but it’s still nice to hear him one more time.
In 2014, Perry teamed up with British producer Daniel Boyle for an album called Back on the Controls. Boyle recreated the mixing chain from Perry’s famous Black Ark studio, the cover featuring some blown out tubes to indicate the authenticity of analogue gear. The album harks back to the warm, ‘70s sound of a pre-digital world.
This album goes in the other direction. Boyle and Perry had continued to work together over the years, and the legendary musician, in his early 80s, had expressed an interest in wanting to do something different. During the start of the pandemic the pair traded ideas exploring various electronic genres.
During the process multiple guest performers were added, including unlikely ones like Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, who lends relatively unhinged vocals to ‘Green Banana’.
Reviews have noted that Perry’s voice is somewhat buried in the mix on some of these tracks, and I might ungenerously say he and Ryder feel a bit superfluous there. It’s a pleasant enough track if slightly uninspired.
Joining Boyle on production for several cuts is Bristol icon Tricky, adding trademark menace to ‘Future of my Music’. But it’s notable how Perry’s aged voice is the most exciting thing here.
King Perry is a decidedly mixed bag, and I gravitate toward more traditional dub tracks like ‘I Am a Dubby’. There are familiar comforts like thick, repetitive synth bass, and a kick thumping like a heartbeat.
Other genres colour the margins of this release, mostly in certain icily digital production touches. I do like the audacity of Lee "Scratch" Perry’s final album being one that sees him exploring new terrain, and the cheek of naming a song ‘Future of my Music’. It’s a reasonable boast though; his body of work, accumulated over six decades, will live on, as well as influence countless younger artists.
In the end the album feels more like a footnote in that career than a notable entry. There are also reasonable questions to be asked about his involvement, this coming three years since his death. I'm sure Daniel Boyle had the best of intentions though; his decade long working relationship with Perry shows the utmost respect for the man, and his work outside that a fidelity to dub music in general.
The final track on the album is one of the entries here you could call a ballad; it’s also apparently the last thing Perry ever recorded. The fact that it’s called ‘Goodbye’ feels too good to be true. The song’s last word being the same even more so.
It’s also appropriate for an artist who was always larger than life; special in ways that extended beyond his creative output.
