![]() “But the roots reggae from Jamaica, the really ‘conscious’ music as they call it. “Not the commercial super-clean reggae,” he points out. But he had always harboured a particular passion for reggae. “So I join him to help him manifest his request.” Teach Yourself Dubĭaniel Boyle cut his teeth as an engineer and producer working at Purple Studios, a residential facility in Norfolk where he oversaw recordings ranging from punk to funk. “He was the one who come up with the idea,” Perry says of Boyle. What would happen if you plugged the Black Ark equipment into a modern day studio? What would that sound like?” Not completely recreating Black Ark, but I suppose referencing it. I’d spoken to him about a couple of pieces of kit and I had an idea of building some pieces of music using that sound. “That was the idea that I had for the album,” he explains, “and it happened before I linked with Lee officially. ![]() Remarkably, Boyle managed to reassemble much of the original studio equipment that had been used in Black Ark. It’s also firm proof of his claim to want to support those with a passion for his murky, hallucinatory dub style, since it was mainly recorded in Rolling Lion, the home studio of producer/engineer and long-time Perry fan, Daniel Boyle, in Crouch End, London. Photo: Richard EcclestonePerry’s latest, Grammy-nominated album, Back On The Controls, is a remarkable return to form which harks back to his 1970s heyday and sees him once again involved in production. But I discover my part I have to play is to help the people who believe in my type of music.”ĭaniel Boyle at his Rolling Lion studio, now relocated to Suffolk. I mean, I put a lot of energy in the music business. “There’s nothing much coming from the record company, so it gives you less feeling to doing it. “See, the money from the royalties are not coming in,” he says. Since then, particularly in latter years, he has been far busier as a performer than producer, a state of affairs he puts down to dwindling incomes in the recording industry. In the aftermath of the destruction of Black Ark, Perry moved to London and began working mainly as an artist, putting himself in the hands of producers such as Mad Professor and On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood. There was nothing much coming from it because everywhere you go there’s a Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry tape.” “I didn’t think there was going to be a big legacy. Greed, something like that.” At the time, he had no idea that people would still be listening to the music he made 40 years later. “Yeah I miss it,” he says, “but it was people in Jamaica who cause the trouble. Nevertheless, Perry admits he misses Black Ark - where, equipped with a TEAC four-track tape machine and Soundcraft desk, he created some of the most enduring records in reggae history. ![]() “They started stealing, so me get mad and burn the studio because me couldn’t take it any more.” “I was trying to make something to go into the future and something different,” he says today. In 1979, crazed by the pressures, studio rivalries and gangster involvement in the Jamaican scene, where his music was widely bootlegged, Perry burned Black Ark to the ground. Mind-boggling tales from the time include Perry blowing marijuana smoke into the master tapes or spraying them with blood and urine to achieve a certain inexplicable ‘effect’, not to mention recording the thump of a palm tree (with microphones buried around it) to create a bass drum sound. The former opinion is generally held by those who are enthralled by his innovative, kaleidoscopic productions for the likes of Bob Marley, Junior Murvin and Max Romeo, while the latter is a product of his notoriously unhinged behaviour, particularly in his Black Ark studio in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s. He is also a man of wild eccentricities, typically viewed either as genius or a madman. Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is a legend of reggae music, and has been one of the pioneers of dub mixing techniques from the late ’60s on. Reggae fan Daniel Boyle painstakingly researched the equipment Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry used in his groundbreaking Black Ark studio - then made an album with the dub legend himself. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |