Music / Reviews
Review: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Fiddlers
The Upsetter is 80. Lee Scratch Perry, the veteran pied piper of reggae, the dub magician, the crazy genius, ‘supreme creator’, orange-haired and festooned with trinkets, sea-shells and badges, mumbles into his feathered microphone…’I am the apeman’.
Super Ape and The Return of The Super Ape were two influential dub albums from Scratch’s canon of works from the ’70s of course, and this most revered of reggae producers and eccentrics still carries enormous clout as can be seen by the sell-out crowd here tonight.
You never quite know what you’re going to get with him these days, but entertainment is always on the cards. Words and phrases from past songs and myriad surreal points are randomly plucked from the air and scattered out to the crowd as Perry shuffles, joint in hand, shaking hands, offering blessings to the punters stage front and declaiming at random.
His influence is wide; his works many. Max Romeo’s classic Chase The Devil, which Perry produced, gets aired, as do his own Inspector Gadget and African Roots, but the lightness of touch by his band in these early numbers, the rambling of Perry himself, goes up several notches with the dubbed up version of Marley’s Crazy Baldheads which even morphs into a sparkling little jazz outro.
With dub firmly in the house by now, we bizarrely get Dylan’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door, or at least the encore repeated in another song, and Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves (yes, Scratch produced that as well) accompanied by a female dancer from the audience, before he returns with a ska encore and a floatingly ecstatic dubbed up Exodus, again from Marley, who he also produced back in the day.
And then the compact controller is gone…but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him yet. Somehow I think Lee Perry is immortal.
Photographs by Elfyn Griffith.
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