Ten records to start with
Not the ten best, and not the ten rarest. Ten that will teach you the most about how roots and dub work, in an order that makes sense.
Lee "Scratch" Perry
Producer
- Kendal, Jamaica
- 1960s to 2021
Lee Perry worked for Coxsone Dodd and Joe Gibbs before setting up on his own, and in 1973 he built the Black Ark in the yard behind his house in Washington Gardens, Kingston. It was a modest four track room, and Perry treated its limitations as instruments: layering, bouncing tracks down, running everything through tape delay until the mix took on a thick, smoky character nobody else could reproduce.
The run of records that came out of that room between 1975 and 1978 is one of the great streaks in recorded music. Max Romeo’s War Ina Babylon, Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves, and Heart of the Congos all carry the same underwater warmth.
The Black Ark burned down in the early 1980s. Perry kept working, kept talking, and kept confounding interviewers until his death in 2021.