Search - Various Artists, Lee Perry :: People Funny Boy

EARLY RECORDINGS

kaysixone | Manchester, UK | 04/09/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is an interesting selection of Lee Perry's earliest productions for his own Upsetter label, and the music on these formative sides ably demonstrates that the craziness and trickery we associate with "Scratch" was there from the very beginning.

The first two tracks on the cd (both sides of Burt Walters' single "Honey love") illustrate this to perfection. The A side is a charmingly crooned version of a song made popular by the Drifters; its B side (titled "Evol Yenoh") features the same rhythm track as the A side but with the vocal track played backwards! How many other producers would have tried something like that back in 1968?

Some of the other material is also fairly eccentric in nature, including a lovely rocksteady version of Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the shore" (retitled as "Popeye on the shore") by Val Bennett and a rather amusing take on Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the wind", also by Burt Walters, featuring some appropriately windy sound effects from Perry. The album features a mixture of instrumentals and vocal cuts by various artists and a nice blend of cover versions and originals. Some of the best tracks feature Perry's own vocals, including the well-known title song and the excellent "You crummy". The sound is that of rocksteady and soulful early reggae and a far cry from the mind-expanding experiments that were to emerge from the Black Ark studio a few years later, but everybody's got to start somewhere. Highly recommended!"