Wednesday, 5 May 2010
I’d photographed Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry once before in Willesden in the early ‘80s and I thought at the time he was barking mad. I suppose I was encouraged to think this because of his reputation. And when he had me photograph him standing on his head in a puddle at the side of the road, that sort of confirmed things .
Until I came to do this shoot for Loaded. If you look in his home studio (seen in this previously unpublished photo) it’s still a cacophony of recording equipment, junk, weird constructions and his home spun philosophy - which he tends to write on any available flat surface. But the rest of his large house, overlooking Lake Geneva, is spotless and totally normal. Almost like a “footballers wives” type house in fact – clean and white with a lot of glass and polished metal. So whilst I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m thinking maybe Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is not quite as crazy as he likes to make out.