Lee Scratch Perry & Youth: Spaceship To Mars – interview & review

Lee Scratch Perry & Youth: Spaceship To Mars

(Creation Youth)

Out September 13th

Pre-order HERE

DL/LP/CD/Cassette 

On Spaceship to Mars, the new collaborative album by Lee Scratch Perry and Youth, we are led to believe, and eventually allowed to discover for ourselves, that it’s in the transitory specks of residue of what we assume to gospel that we witness Dub’s true capabilities as a joyous antagonist of the running order of the world around us. Interview and review by Ryan Walker.

”New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear the sounds we are changed: we are no longer the same’’ – Karl Stockhausen, 1972.

”How music can teleport across different contexts and still remain this powerful voodoo and still connect the listener in their own way and be the one thing they want to hear at that time. That’s the magic of it” – Youth, 2024.

An album straight from the streets of the third dimension. The third mind.

But so much more than merely an album. Dub interface. For when engaging with any piece of work involving Youth or Lee Scratch Perry; what we’re dealing with is an exercise in how this century’s finest sonic shamans dabble with the dark art of dub.

The album soundtracks a typical (typically extraordinary) journey throughout the third-dimensional strip, all Lee and Youth see together upon this bustling dub adventure sprinkled with transportive moods of psychedelia and random spikes of dysfunctional electronics. An adventure whereby both the boundaries of the body are surpassed thanks to a telephone box on the corner of one’s road that makes contact with the cosmos, yet also possesses an earthy, insurmountable dub-rumble, one of dustbowls, one of landscapes.

”I hadn’t actually met him until 2014. I’d been around and in his wake here and there. The first album I ever heard was a Lee Perry album. I’d heard so many myths and legends about him from people I knew. Mad Professor. Vivian Goldman. The closest I got was the Orb feat. Lee Perry album that I played bass on. Although I wasn’t in the room with Lee. When he turned up to the sessions there was no bass guitar, it was all electronic bass. He said ‘where’s Youth’s bass’? Which I thought was remarkable’’ Youth tells me. ”I got a hurried call from Alex. They were in Zurich. I was in London. Lee had gone over but he wouldn’t come back until it had my bass on it”.

A flux from the utopian margins to the throng of an industrial metropolis, Scratch was recorded by Youth in the field and then resurrected in the mix upon his bodily departure. Seemingly at the rhythmic heart, pulsing brain and in the beating walls of everything: nowhere and everywhere, was always an inch away from making eye contact before evaporating into clouds of aromatic smoke, an ‘on-the-off-chance’ alignment of certain stars was the only means of making some sort of recording a feasable prospect. This means Youth’s work with him and eventual album is a vector of the ephemeral rather than a tribute album to not just a dub or reggae or electronic pioneer – but a musical pioneer generally that stretched perceptions of what electronic music can do.

It was after the very first encounter with Scratch when Youth was interviewing him for the Idler (and recording him of course: always record), where Scratch seemed to know everything about what had happened, and what will happen, the recordings were preceded by Scratch showing Youth his future. ”The first thing he did was take his hat off and tell me to pick a tarot card from a deck under his hat. So my very first encounter with him was tarot. That seemed to bode well”.

The cards selected were the Fool, whose journey Youth is following. Cards as part of this mystical arcana represent the various stages of that journey. They included the Magician, a positive force allowing us to have an impact on the world through a concentrated shot of individual will and power. The World card – a card of having aligned and assimilated all the disparate parts of what has been learned, reaching a new status of fulfilment, and becoming involved once the integrated pieces are rendered whole. The fool card itself – a card of beginnings, of spontaneity, ready to embrace whatever may come his way with his arms parted, yet also unaware of the cliff edge before him – a zero card, the start of it all, in the middle of his own individual universe, beyond the deck. ”As soon as he saw the cards we immediately connected. When you’re working with artists in that sense, there’s a suspension of normality and order and procedure. You have to really read between the lines and go with the flow where it leads’’ Youth adds. ”Stay positive. Scratch didn’t disappoint’’.

Youth the Fool – having encountered many Magicians (and less positive High Priestesses) along the way, uses dub to combine his experiences of the world in a happier, enlightened state of being. An experiential cut-up experiment in perpetual states of propulsion with each project (Fireman/Killing Joke/Orb/Brilliant) as a composite arrangement of that cut-up.

Butterfly Sky feat. Hollie Cook is a chemical lullaby of melting electronics, glistening keys and skeletal guitar licks, all riding on the same rhythmic reggae vibrations. It feels eternal. A loop of no end. As wide as a rainbow with Lee’s ‘fly in the sky’ refrain constantly being whistled, hummed, sung – to both everybody and nobody, but the image of him pottering around in the garden, talking to the earth, where we all come from and eventually crumble into is a sweet one. This is an album about the roots. About the return.

Love is War feat. Abbey ups the growl and drips with all kinds of dark charms and enchanting talismans reflecting in the sun beaming through one’s window. Lee’s vocal is both a whisper and commanding psalm, strengthened when Abbey sparkles below it, a caramelised chorale of unification and infectious euphoria that is hard, perhaps impossible to negate, but the voice is equally as forceful when left exposed and bare-boned: there is no need for anything more, or less than ‘love is war’ to lead this procession of exploding kegs amplified to their extreme, creaking nicotine-stained keys and feral, radioactive guitars that glide all over it to an intoxicating, prismatic trance. These hallucinatory, industrial vibes are furthered, again featuring Abbey on Dr. Love. An industrial odyssey of possessed electronic experiments, ash flicked onto stripped circuit boards, smoke billowing through something hollow, enriching it into something deeper and bigger, you can see Youth challenging the desk, an instrument, a foundation, a fundamental piece of machinery manipulating its mechanical composition until it feels things like a sentient creature, pushing the dials into the red with a smile on his face the more time appears stretched, before snapping back against itself with no real recollection of what waking dream has been endured: ‘It takes focus to love’ Scratch speaks whilst breaking through a trippy tapestry of cacophonous drops laden with tandems of clamorous atmospherics, and thunderstorm claps.

An album predominantly in a roots-rockers style encouraged by The Orb’s Michael Rendall, but also magic brandished by a master, somehow pressed onto tape, the initial meeting (although one could argue the initial meeting was way back when Youth became severely engrossed in the universe of Dub along with other grandfathers of the Dub philosophy ala King Tubby, Striker Lee and Linval Thompson) was what sparked Youth’s idea to collaborate and adhere to the legacy of Lee. His process is palpable throughout, his spirit manifest, for Lee was absent during the recordings, ever a wayfaring, nomadic soul swept up with the moment, impossible to pin into one place, the dub ghost of everywhere. ”I’d be in the studio when he’d left the day before or something. I’d heard a lot about his process of blowing smoke on the tapes or putting razor blades in between the keys for the keyboard player. But we didn’t actually get him in the studio for this album. The recordings I’ve got of him were done in situ. In rooms or backstage. I worked closely with Volker, the director of the Vision of Paradise film. Between Volker and Mireille, Scratch’s wife, we managed to get hold of some private recordings of him to reverse engineer. That’s because he died,” Youth says of the recording process. ‘’The thing with Lee – it wasn’t the singing I wanted, it’s the vibe”.

More obsessed about capturing the energy of the never-static man, moving through planes, here one minute, then gone the next, the recordings of Lee were all done in the moment, akin to sand spilling through one’s fingers: anything that you got, that you might rush to grab, you were lucky to have. Artists are like that – they flutter between the levels of society, some of which are damn difficult to see. But in spite of death – the artist perseveres to push against boundaries. ”If he didn’t die, I don’t know if it would make much difference. Scratch operated on so many levels and dimensions” Youth confirms.

Youth, the Artist, like Scratch, the Artist, trailblazers together on the same creative journey, is the perfect conduit, the right counterpoint to harness Lee’s energy – to remake his presence as more than just a manifestation of his voice, his words – but an almost-tangible, palpable force pulsing through the spirits and shaking the soil of the record. They both follow and are guided by, a relentless need to create. Youth has a spare set of keys cut that enables him to routinely tap into those various layers levels and dimensions that Scratch was (and still is) a primary advocate for the exploration of, as well as freely distributing the knowledge of what has been learned upon the peaks and troughs of those travels (accused of being crazy, studios being burned down, more the results of shamanic practices crafted on the stage and in the studio as sacred spaces to unleash the potentials of).

Both children of dub, inimitable advocates for the rerouting of what surrounds us. And only the children of such a way of working, of perceiving the world would intentionally chase the devil. Tease him. Mock him. They do so to these tumbling incantations and rhythmic spills. Electronic bubbles boil over from the lonesome ghost of an old rotating shaft, bleeding over into one ear, but then barely there the next moment as though they have dissolved completely (only to reappear in the neighbouring ear again). They share a carriage on this vessel because they are both children of Dub. They can admire the different views and see the same thing. They can admire the same view and see different things because of how harmonious, and discordant, they recognise the world as being in all its tantalising stasis.

”I’m a child of dub. But then I think Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor and lots of other people that work with him very successfully are too. When I was in Jamaica a few years ago recording the compilation Red, Gold, Green and Blue with many Jamaican legends, Lee was over in Negril with Sherwood doing some recording. I reached out and tried to get him over to where I was but it didn’t happen. It’s mercurial and elemental. Almost impossible to catch in a bottle’’ Youth says. ”How we’ve done it, the bits I’ve crafted, it’s done in a very magical way. We’d arrange his vocals and music totally to add his magical vibe. It’s become a little Lee Perry Magical Black Ark’’.

An expanse partly shattered thanks to the heat hanging above, yet lysergic and squelchy enough you can almost smell the stench seeping through the airwaves, Boy George lends his vocal talents to The Lizard. A tune that moves with the same sense of pounce, precision, menace, and beauty as the reptilian creature. His croon, husk and low, a force of warm light from the back of his throat, as much as the base of his heart, recites the verses into the void: ‘I took a bullet for your generation’, as samples of Lee’s vocals: some constant gibberish, warming up, something dormant working within his being and the spliff-stained, smoke-choked, wise ol’ laugh of someone who can (who has) seen thing that no other person (other than perhaps Youth) has seen unfold in their lifetime. The black ark might well sink, the devil may well be the image reflected back to us in the mirror, and doors may well open yet only lead to another door waiting to be opened behind them, but Youth and Lee, helped here by George, some new wave soul-sage perched upon the jazz clubs of the horizon, harnesses the magic.

Scratch’s voice isn’t alone. Out there, in here, it haunts and inhabits everything. From Carol Thompson to Don Letts, Hollie Cook to Blue Pearl, George is one of many carnival members and vocal collaborators – giving Scratch’s voice time away from the spotlight, but their companionship feels utterly real – as though a booth was shared. A glance that causes the air to glisten. This gorgeous mosaic of vocalists, comrades of new wave pop and punk and post-punk and reggae help contribute to that extra flurry of sparks and drama and magic to the tunes, a vigorous litany stampeding through the streets of our imaginary islands. It’s a psychic rapport. ”I think the idea of getting other singers involved for me, was that if it was just Lee Perry MCing or singing or speaking over tracks, that becomes fatiguing to the listener, to me, after a while. I didn’t want that. Lee’s a famous writer as well. Police and Thieves, Sun Is Shining. I wanted to get some melodic song content in there. That came about by serendipity really. I’d been working with George on some other things. I thought he might be seen as the joker of the pack, really. But not that it isn’t appropriate” Youth states. ”His own legacy with Culture Club is seeped in reggae and dub to a certain extent. He’s a great writer and a bit of a maverick shaman himself. That’s how those came about. There wasn’t a great master plan. I did experiment with different versions and styles until it became apparent that the best way to do it was this root’s rockers vibe, 70s vibe. With a little, and a pinch of psychedelic-electronica in there”.

Although a pinch, that cosmic, psychedelic energy, that electronic swagger creates a hypnotic stench as the tracks shuffle and strut from one piece of the patchwork to the next. But it’s hardly entrenched in electronica. There’s a finely tuned balance at play between the wires and the vines, the human and the machine, whereby the record loves to roam around on the streets, feet firmly planted into the dirt, but there’s also the idea of transportation involved, the idea that you could fall through the streets. No truer is the realm of psychedelic electronica apparent than on the counterpart to the main album – each track given the full-on dub mix by Youth. The dub mix of Love Is War seems to move in a new way compared to its twin on the album. It oozes liquid chrome, shuffles with spectral, electroshocked rhythms rattling at the edges, a reel of skeleton organs and desert mirage keys and Scratch’s pious chant hovering above the charge. Likewise, evolving as though unstoppable before evaporating completely into dust particles, the dub mix of Love Sunshine Peace makes use of an overlapping tornado of Carol Thompson’s vocals, twisting around each other like barbed tendrils of seduction entering through the cracks of one’s mind.

Dr Love Revelation rides his Spaceship to Mars. The former burning up with a heaving, haunted, hallucinatory fairground mischief, all spectral organs, Rhodes honk, chug and dazzle – Chris Bowsher’s delayed ‘hello’ vocals fading out from a lonesome radio transmitter perched on a bartop in a nearby galaxy, flickering between the spaces behind us, and inside us. The latter alluding to Uptown Top Ranking’s jrickety bounce and the circus-tent fever of Everybody In The Place, adding to the potency of the psychedelic spell. Elsewhere, Bulldozer Dub taps into something extraordinary. Glass shatters, mosaics of space desert assemble then crumble to the floor, Lee rasps and waxes lyrical in the style of a beat poet pondering all things botanical and interconnected, a vortex in gardens garlanded by sound effects with side effects.

It’s a chaotic world. Dub can be chaotic too. A kind of chaos. Is dub another word for remix? One could argue the remix acknowledges the chaos – dub makes sense of it. It is the needed hit of Dionysus to the Appolanarian regiment. A way to reconfigure what has been applied to our sense of self thanks to decades of conditioning each other as a species. ”The early dubs were essentially remix versions. There’s a little more abstraction with the dub” muses Youth. ”I also agree that dub culture, dub sensibility, makes sense of the chaos. Both can coexist. You need the straight version to do the dub. That in itself creates an interesting dynamic. I think it’s more akin to our nature in that how we process and think and address things has these abstract tangents to it. Even our perception of reality, although viewed through a conditioned lens, can become very abstract”.

And here comes the fascination with being a lifelong disciple to the following of the artistic path again…

”And of course, it’s great artists and poets and painters that illustrate that for us. One of the functionalities of art is to reflect, and inform, the process we’re going through in existence. That’s definitely guided by our conditioning’’ he says. ”16th-century argument of a people having everything of strict government comes from an old biblical idea of a rational god, in the 18th century that became the idea of a merciful god, so public flogging and hanging and slavery abolished, abstracted from what they were, to where we are now: a scientific and godless world, a Nietzchian world”.

Concerned with the transitional periods between those worlds- slipping knots, untethered from various realities and netherregions, Youth’s methods replicate those of Scratch’s albeit in a contemporary setting. I’d blow smoke on the hard drive’’ Youth says. But not wanting to let the setting interfere with the practices of producing something dealing with myth and legend, magic in a modern moment, ‘’I’d go into a ritual, ceremonial space to do it’’ he adds.

Despite what some might think about working with disembodied voices as being no more than a matter of dumping them on top of a tune, say a drum ‘n’ bass track, the process must abide by a particular ritualistic balance between lawlessness and professionalism. Otherwise – it sounds too little like the voice, too much like the producer having a whale of a time, the remix taking precedence over the ambition to accomplish the encapsulation of a magical strand that, if too indulgent in fanciful (or disingenuous) desk habits, may snap and fissure into nothing but a flickering light, the possible potency of which, is sadly never realised. ”My philosophy is Lee Perry. If I was producing Lee right here in the room or in the studio, it wouldn’t have ended up like that, it would have gone somewhere else, it might not have ended up as good. The way I’ve done it has allowed me to do it in my utopian, idealistic way. True to the vision. Reverse engineering people who are gone, or absent, or not – isn’t easy” Youth explains. ”It’s fraught with a vibe that isn’t there. I wanted it to sound like it could’ve been a lost album from 1974/75. So it’s got this weird magic to it”.

Youth tells me about his time visiting SARM Studios to visit Trevor Horn, again – pushing the possibilities of the remix AS THE mix to its farthest point as an early pioneer of, now bear with me: a specific kind of revolutionary dance music that, like Scratch, remarkably harnessed the studio as an instrument, as a living being, a brain, to ignite the imaginative beacons, create havoc, birth life, raise the dead. Some of that energy infected Youth’s imagination upon visiting with his partner, Alex Patterson of The Orb which, a lot like this writer’s greater fascination with the Youth mixes than the primary bodies of music often promoted before or alongside them, actually became more influential than the megahit that was Relax. ”We were more interested in those than the seven-inch version. That became a template for what we were then to go on and do with the Orb. That came together as a collage. Now that’s the norm in society. Remix culture is everywhere. I don’t know if people have that sort of childlike, jaw-dropping awe as I did when I first discovered it then. I find it mind-bendingly beautiful when I hear it’’.

Youth however, Youth the Artist, a Child of Dub, a curious sculptor with the human voice as his clay, shares the shamanic sensibilities that Lee lived his life by, meaning he approached the job less from the perspective of dropping a vocal take over a bassline and, despite the agreement that it does keep those no longer with us alive, in some kind of memorable, aural capacity:‘hey presto’, for this unfortunate wretch of an album would represent the vitality of the source as nothing more than a novelty tribute, a prized decorative sample and seal repeatedly forced to perform with a voice treated like icing sugar above a chunk of sponge -it might sell, but the auratic essence of the work is limited in terms of its integrity, it lacks impact, it lacks the authoritative bite of the spirit.

Rather, Youth’s absence of Scratch enabled more room to play with – more investigative and innovative dub incantations to be boiled. His approach to the work of summoning up Scratch’s spirit and feeding it through the tracks that gyrate and glide and glisten around the various whispers and cackles and positive, mantric aphorisms works so well because it creates something around Scratch, whilst also enabling Scratch to surround everything else. An interchangeable cyclone that the dub mix album in particular helps to discern.

His narrative, his lyrics, his whispers, his laugh – the laugh of wisdom, the laugh of someone who has seen many strange things, are all encapsulated in this record. The tunes are a testament to the artistic drive, to offset all that is orderly, all that upkeeps our world wrapped up in a blanket of warm opioids and lies. ”You hope for that. But you’re often disappointed with how normal artists can be sometimes” Youth states. ”But that’s my role as the producer. To provide some abstraction, some more artistic counterpoints to where they’re coming from with it. For me, that’s just about getting the best out of people. Getting a great record”.

When dealing with the absence of an artist, but not letting the transient nature of the body interrupt the tangibility of the work – one could argue that dub is the only genre (philosophy) to execute something of such weight. To use and manipulate the spirit of someone else, to create something new, true to their artistic ethos to keep on pushing through. ”That’s a good question. I don’t think dub is the only way of doing it. Dub as its own thing is an abstraction. A sort of destruction/abstraction. Lee Perry was very famous for doing dozens of different versions of rhythms with different artists. What I grew up with, and hip-hop and post-punk is really informed by that” Youth ponders. ”Mark Stewart would recycle his lyrics many times. It’s very poetic. I think as far as the artist is concerned, wherever they wanna go, is their decision. I can only help facilitate that”.

So much of modern culture is saturated in dub. Even pop. Scratch was as important to pop culture as Andy Warhol, Martin Hannett, Tristan Tzara, Bowie, Beatles, Kevin Richard Martin and Massive Attack, for all he did to bring those worlds together. Even if those pop artists, those giants of pop culture weren’t aware of his position (like we aren’t aware of their hijacking of pop culture that came along and switched it on) as a zap of electricity and contradiction that liked to raise hell, to see to the cohabitation of opposites in their most distilled, reality-altering, mind-expanding dub form is a zap we cannot help but be a zapped by. The line Scratch dragged, the connective particles he was able to draw between post-punk (Pop Group, Killing Joke) and dub, in thinking about it as a firm feature of contemporary culture, as a consistent part of the forever changing contextual furniture, as impactful as four lads from Liverpool, as Acid House, as sampling, as the Summers of Love, is an impact impossible to ignore, an impression impossible to refer to anything but indelible in its eternal legacy. ”Paul McCartney told me about when he went to Black Ark studios because Linda had recorded there. I had many conversations with Paul and the Fireman project I did with him is essentially deconstructed dub, totally in the spirit of Perry, the first two albums especially. For anyone of the twentieth century to influence someone like Paul McCartney is a huge thing. That puts Perry on the level of Monet influencing Picasso”.

Behind Youth is a massive, framed silkscreen print of God Save The Queen by Jamie Reid – a piece of artwork that totally epitomises what we are talking about about the dismantling of culture and creating a new experience in its place – the pin through Queen Elizabeth’s nose, the Sex Pistols as the music behind the movement, ensuring that culture is cut up, that the pin’s tip rips through not just the nose, but society itself, and something else moves into the scar. ”Perfect. Interestingly and not ironically – the first punk club, the Roxy, the DJ was Don Letts playing dub. Punk and dub absolutely go hand in hand”.

The same can be said for Reid’s other notable works with the notorious group. In addition to his work with the Suburban Press magazine he co-founded with Viviene Westwood – difficult to penetrate, his punk montage designs had a Situationist edge. They arrived like firearms, slogans to unsettle the establishment as the community beneath the heat of free market urban planning condemned those communities to death below their bureaucratic monoliths: ‘the voice of the individual is lost’ one issue reads. Indeed – a monster was born that Reid helped to expose to people thanks to his dubbing of culture that sliced open and saw straight through, the pickle brine of contemporary 70s life. One could see Lee spitting slogans similar to the ones crammed and blasted into the pages of Suburban Press, but maybe it would be too dark, too dystopian. But still – dub pervades.

Empty space is the dub’s playground. So is history. It cuts it up. Collects and devours and mutates. ”Dub culture isn’t just in music – it’s in the whole mashup of all the crazy things we see young people doing. It’s all mashed up like a dub record. Lee Perry is a big part of that. Dub starts on the fringes of society, then it gets absorbed and becomes the centre of society. That’s what happened with Lee Perry. He needs to be celebrated and acknowledged. It’s a better world because of that. And because the Beatles made Sgt. Peppers, the Summer of Love, and Acid House – all those things make our world a better place. We need that more than ever”.

Does the circle ever close? Does the child ever grow old?

”I’ve had a few full circles. It’s a big deal for me. One of the best records I’ve made I think. I go the other way frequently. My remit is unbridled artistic freedom. Even though I try not to be too fickle with it. My last album was a sort of folk album. My next one is a bit more bluesy and jazzy, things I’ve avoided for a long time. If you wanna know where the roots of dub are – it’s in jazz. Anything that’s happened within the dub has happened many times before” Youth says. ”You never listen to the same piece of music twice because the context is always changing. The context of the room – who you’re with, how you’re emotionally feeling. 40 perfect of your experience isn’t just the record, it combines with everything else in your life at that time. That’s why some happy songs can become infidelity sad. What we’re trying to do as record producers is define all that liquidity into solid wax. Once it’s out there it’s nothing to do with you. How people respond to it and react to it is way beyond your remit. Every artist knows there’s a futility and emptiness there. It’s always going to be tainted because of the nature of reality. A beautiful thing”.

Lessons in Dub, for everyone: don’t borrow it, steal it.

~

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Lee Perry images by Maria Saragarodschi ©

Words by Ryan Walker