Echo Chamber Odysseys

'Mick Jagger, you are a vampire!' The voice casting the curse is eerie, strained and instantly recognisable. The latest victim of Lee Perry's historically documented vendetta seems ironically appropriate. In 1968, while the Rolling Stones were indulging radicalism with director Jean Luc Goddard for the One Plus One film , Perry was working in music's shadows, beginning his explorations into the outer limits of sound that would have a more profound effect on the next 25 years of popular music's development than any number of cosmopolitan pub rock updates.

Having served his apprenticeship ion the 60s studios of Coxsone Dodd and Hoe Gibbs, produced Bob Marley 's first recordings, influenced King Tubby and informed Adrian Sherwood's chaotic methodology, Lee 'Scratch' Perry has acted as reggae's sprit guide and its industry's perpetual thorn in the side for over three decades.

Throughout that time, he has adopted a number of cunning, pseudonymous personalities which have served as both self-protection devices and recyclable commodities in a notoriously shark infested economy. The Upsetter, Piperock Jaxxon, The Duppy Conqueror: Perry has constructed a personal mythology that, in contemporary black music, in rivalled only by that of Sun Ra.

Born Rainford Hugh Perry, details of his date and place of birth remain obscure (although the place might me Hanover or St Mary). A country boy who removed to Kingston's urban sprawl, his childhood exposure to the Bible and the supernatural continues to haunt his music. One part seer, one part info-scrambler, Perry has produced some of dub's most disorientating moments, mostly working from his legendary Kingston studio, Black Ark. Open to influences as diverse as James Brown, Motown Ennio Morricone and The Beatles, Perry filters infinite info through the studio's hyperreality, filing dub's open spaces with primitive sound effects, animal noises and, most prophetically, TV soundbites on such revolutionary albums as Dub Revolution and Super Ape.

Perry now lives in the Babylonian heartland of Zurich. I met with him in March at London's Ariwa studios, where he was recording a new album with Neil 'Mad Professor' Fraser. Clutching a block of hash the size of a large pocket encyclopaedia, sitting next to his personal inflatable globe which was reflected in the mirrors on his boots, his speech, like his music, was littered with revelatory observations, drop-dead one-liners and hallucinatory conjunctions...

KM: When you first got involved with Studio One, was it because it had been your earliest musical connection?

LP: In those days you have to be a fluffy, and to make it you had to me monster tuff. In those days Duke Reid [producer and owner of the legendary 60s Jamaican studio, Treasure Isle] and all those people were the tuffest guys. It was like those guys were making was all the time cause they wanted power . SO Coxsone [Dodd, owner of Studio One] wasn't so tuff like Duke Reid, so he would give some time in the studio, to get in and listen for as laugh. If you start something with a laugh it will and as laugh; if you start something with death it will end with death.