Spaceship To Mars

We speak about the architect of dub in the present tense because the mystery and magic of his energy continues to surround us. It lives through an unbreakable legacy that has revolutionised music; a legacy originating from one of the most significant music creators of the last 100 years.

Without doubt, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is an orphic channeller, a superhero, a Black Ark Magician; he’s an oracle and a cosmic channeller projecting a fountain of disconnected oracular statements and streams of consciousness. He bedazzles and discombobulates; cackling at his own riddles; speaking from another realm. It reveals his inner anarchist in duality with an eccentricity laced with boundless humour.

Spaceship To Mars via Creation Youth Records, epitomises the spirit of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and how it lives through those of us who are obsessives of this mystery of a man – and who’s discography continues to be contested to this day. He is said to have made something in the region of 2000 albums. This album though, is one he started with Youth in the third dimension – and oversaw to completion from an unquantifiable one.

Each artist featured is as fervent about Scratch and his works as the next. The original backing tracks infused with his incantations are sprinkled with the vocals of these lyricists; creating a sublime tapestry harking back to 70s Scratch. The psychic rapport is evident. Youth calls it “Voodoo magic meets raiders of the lost ark.” It sums up the cosmic coming together of an album that’s been a good seven years in the making. With the energy of his voice, he turns a grainy black and white world into colour. And the artists on this album – Carroll Thompson, Blue Pearl, Zoe Devlin, RDF, Boy George, Hollie Cook – evidently feel this as lyricists and song writers in their own right who have synchronised so effortlessly with the sounds of Scratch.