MISSED ALBUM REVIEW ::: LEE SCRATCH PERRY - TECHNO PARTY

Current mood: CONSIDERED..
Category: CONSIDERED.. Music

'This ol' man
Shoot down Satans Spaceship!!'

Few people who know his legacy, would question the importance and role of Lee 'Scratch' Perry in not just Reggae and Dub, but the wider scheme of the last 40s years sound development..

But an area on which the jury remains out, concerns the quality of Perrys later work - the stuff he's been knocking out for the past 10 or so years in particular..

Seen by many as an ageing and colourful madman (a reputation he doesn't seem bothered to deny) the last 5 or 6 LSP LPs have at best being tolerated, and at worst openly laughed at as bismerching his reputation - pissing on his grand legacy...

Well, I don't agree - indeed I find much of this later material to be as, or more interesting than the earlier...

My favourite later LP would be Techno Party,

When I first got this record, I felt it was right up there with Perrys best work and that it was one of the best LPs of 2000 - I still think that now. Techno Party has something else - an edge, an invicability, a sense of fun, an arrogance and power not present elsewhere...

Specifically:

It has a fucking brilliant cover...

Yes boss, if I'm pulling off this kind of colour and 'HAVIN IT!' enthusiasm in my 60s, I'll consider that I've won the game of life..

Then there's the deep, swinging and heavy Mad Professor production. Few producers get as full and thumpy a dub bass sound as does The Mad Professor, and this LP is a perfect illustration of that sound.

Lastly, I love Perry's stream of conscious toasting. It swings through the profound, the insulting, the flippant, the ridiculous. Perry is a proper one off. When most 60 years olds are thinking about their pensions and their friggin stair lifts, Perry's rapping about tackling 'Satans Spaceship' and doing his own take on 'My Name Is'...

It all merges together....

'Miserable heads in miserable beds,
And miserable heads and walks around in miserable heads
and dancing....'

'You gotta tinkle
And if you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe your, wipe your, wipe your seaty
And wipe your neaty
Are you loosing sweetie?'

'There is no crooks out there, in the business that I don't know..
I know you all
And what goes up must come down,
I am the open door..'

So: Techno Party: A great record and one that could well disappear out of circulation sharpish, so get it whilst you still can...

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