Lee Perry

 Lee Perry

by Pete Clemons

Lee Perry was many things apparently. He was described as genius and an eccentric. But he was also a visionary. Long before he built his home studio, before he began producing for 1970s reggae artists Lee Perry was predicting that Ska, a guitar expression apparently, was going to be the biggest thing in popular music. Whether it happened in quite the way he expected or envisaged is another thing.

And Lee was proved to be right. Toward the end of 1969 there were no fewer than five Ska records in the charts. Record companies and dealers were caught completely on the hop. But any ballroom disc jockey could have predicted the trend months earlier. So too could Lee Perry. 'But the music had to grow up' said Dave Hadfield of Maximum Sound Studios. 'Before the chart explosion too many of the lyrics were seen as 'banal rubbish'. It was also mentioned that too many of the Ska productions were back street jobs.

The records which were making the charts in 1969 were by artists such as The Pioneers, Harry J and the All Stars, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker and Lee's own band The Upsetters. After years of using cheap studios and the minimum of musicians, Ska was becoming sophisticated and polished.

The Ska scene, up until that time, had been dominated by small, independent record companies and a bewildering number of labels with such names as Upsetter, Coxon Crab, Songbird, Harry J, Pama, Revolution, Unity, Trojan, Gas and Pyramid, most of them run by by West Indians who knew the music inside out.

Every time a major company had tried to break into the scene its fingers had got burned. EMI tried it with a special Columbia Blue Beat series run by Ziggy Jackson, a man with vast experience in the field, but failed miserably, other companies have had sporadic bursts of Ska releases but mostly without success.

'You cant cater for a specialist music unless everyone in the organisation is geared up to the product' says Harry Palmer who within a 12 period built up Pama Records from a struggling little company into one of the more bigger and well known Ska labels.

Harry also had the advantage of owning his own retail shops enabling him to gauge public reaction. 'I thought of Ska as puerile, boring music but now it has taken on a whole new direction. There are some very exciting records being turned out. Take the Upsetters and Return of Django for instance, that has got sax work to match the old rock magic for its guts and excitement'.

Graeme Goodall, a man who has worked and struggled for years to get Ska off the ground over here was at last seeing success. His Pyramid label could now claim a long string of hits thanks mainly to the remarkable Desmond Dekker who has scored no fewer than 40 number 1's in his native Jamaica.

Britain's pop scene was already being conquered and it is no longer just the settled West Indians who were buying the records. Ska was also breaking big in America too, thanks to the pioneering work of Johnny Nash and the success of Dekker's single 'Israelites'.

'There is something unique about West Indian music' said Nash, a man who had already made a big impact on soul music. 'I commute between New York and Jamaica where I do most of my recording'. Johnny provided a link in Ska coming to maturity. As a young man he was greatly influenced by the late Sam Cooke. 'The Ska of the past may have had room for improvement but now the music is ready to be taken seriously' said Johnny.