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.
