“When people get Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry records, they are getting education from the past, education from the present, and education from the future.” There’s a webpage that just lists quotes from Lee Perry interviews — most of them given in the decades when he’d effectively retired, and just went round the world playing gigs and recording the occasional album.

Many will know Perry more as an eccentric old dude who appeared at festivals rather than the producer who created literally hundreds, possibly thousands of brilliant records in Jamaica during the 1960s and 1970s, but that quote pins down a lot about Perry. His records could combine time periods in one side of a 7″ single, ancient, futuristic, and contemporary, inspired by the Bible, outer space, and what was going on at that moment outside in the street (another quote: “I believe in the Bible, because I live in the Bible”).

Perry contained multitudes — rural and futuristic, a science fiction traveler, a Biblical literalist, a postcolonial prophet, and a bawdy, cheesy comedian, often on the same record — but a lot of what made him so remarkable was an ability to make apparently impossible things work.