Henry Barnes 

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Vision of Paradise review – kaleidoscopic tour of a certifiable original

Dub pioneer Perry has so many sides in this overview, from ‘space traveller’ to ‘madman’, and the film-makers take a confused and formless tour of them all
  
  

Kaleidoscopic world … Lee Scratch Perry.
Kaleidoscopic world … Lee Scratch Perry. Photograph: MFN musicfilmnetwork

The tagline runs: “The one movie to explain it all.” But how could it? Lee “Scratch” Perry, the dub pioneer who produced Bob Marley, is described here variously as “a space traveller”, “a madman” and “a fish”, but that barely covers it. Perry has so many sides. The film-makers are on all of them. Taking their cue from the artist, they don’t intellectualise. Instead, we’re given a kaleidoscopic tour of Perry’s world, taking in his thoughts on Haile Selassie (“the black messiah”), vegetarianism (“human beings are cannibals”) and the Pope (“a fake and a fraud”). Inevitably, the doc is formless and confusing, a bit too much in love with the myth. But be he space traveller, madman and/or fish, Perry (and the film) are certifiably original.

 

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