Black Ark

Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio behind his home at Washington Gardens, Kingston, built in 1973 and running until its destruction by fire in 1979. Working with modest four-track equipment, Perry produced a sound nobody has convincingly reproduced — layered, saturated, drenched in echo and unexpected noise — on records for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Congos and The Heptones, and on his own productions.

The Black Ark years are the strongest argument that the studio itself, and not only the players, is an instrument in Jamaican music. The studio's 1979-80 destruction followed a period of personal crisis for Perry: his wife Pauline left him, taking their children, and he began covering the walls with dense, handwritten graffiti before eventually trashing and burning the building.

People who knew him at the time attributed the breakdown to accumulating strain, extortion, drink and drug excess, and an open-door policy that let hangers-on take over the yard. Twenty years later, Perry gave Bradley a different, more deliberate explanation directly: that he had come to believe everyone around him, family, friends, peers, his record company, was stealing his music, and that destroying the means of making it was the only way to stop them.