Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is one of the godfathers of our culture. One of the key players during the rise of sound system culture in Jamaica, Perry was one of the handful of top producers regularly putting out tracks, cutting acetates to hand to the hot selectors to play out at the big dances of the day. A pioneer of dub production techniques – which inform DJing as we know it today – and avowed madhead, it’s practically impossible to overemphasise how much influence he has had on dance music. Mad Professor comes with a mighty heritage as well, renowned for his innovations to the dub canon in the early 80s, as samplers and electronic instruments started appearing.

Last Thursday these two legends played at Home in Cockle Bay, which was functioning in gig mode for the evening. Anxious to witness Perry (this was being touted as his final tour of Australia) and curious to see what Home was like as a venue for shows like this, we arrived early to the sounds of local band The Bird, in downtempo mode. I’ve seen The Bird a billion times now, and they’re pretty much the same as they always have been – Ben Walsh’s big grin and charisma lifting the crowd while he precociously plays dub rhythm patterns live – complete with echo and delay, all done by himself being clever with repeat fills and suchlike while Simon Durrington quite anonymously lays down suitable synth beds. The much-older-and-hairier-than-normal crowd was swelling, dancing a little, while the band played on, seated on a fairly low stage that was occupying maybe a quarter of the dancefloor, against the wall where the DJ booth used to be when Home first opened.

The much-heralded million-dollar soundsystem was sounding warm, helped out by some distinctly lo-fi components in the signal path, no doubt brought along by a passionate sound man to help nice up the bass ahead of the main attraction. As The Bird finished and the Dub Activ-8 selectors dropped suitable filler, people hit the bar for one more before the Mad Professor showed up, switched on his DAT machine and started working the controls, fucking us up immediately with bass freqencies so low they were inaudible, but so big they made fillings come loose, shoelaces undo themselves and rapturous pandemonium broke out. The requisite sickly sweet smell of you-know-what filled the air and everybody started moving all slow-like, wiggling sensually (to varying degrees of success) and nodding their heads along. Ah yes, it was proper nice dub and everybody liked it muchly. The Professor worked his mixer all the time, adding live vocals on top when he felt like it and teasing us for a good thirty minutes with the promise that Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry “Soon come…”

The wait was sort of worth it, as the genius himself pranced on stage, all 69 years of him with his hat covered in bits of mirrors and microphone covered in bizarre bling and impish expression that was beatific and utterly threatening at the same time. The man has been described as quite mad on many occasions and he did nothing on the night to even remotely challenge that opinion. From his declaration early on that he was a fish – subsequently follwed by a watery benediction of the crowd – to his lamenting pleas that we don’t eat meat (lest we get AIDS), don’t sex with diseased women (lest we get AIDS) and don’t smoke (no reason given for this one), to his toasting incoherent nonsense to the tune of ‘Knick Knack Paddywack’ over some brutal riddims courtesy of the Professor, the man was indeed quite mad. So mad, in fact, that at times he ran the risk of losing the crowd, but always somehow managed to get them back on side just before the lynching would begin. Whether it’s an act or not I’m not entirely sure – and neither, I suspect, is Perry himself. It seems somewhat fitting that one of the men most responsible for our love of going out and dancing to people playing records is – at the age of 69 (older if you listen to him, as he says his real name is Elijah and he’s the oldest man in the world) – still running around and causing mayhem.

The evening can only be described as bizarre. It’s a given that Perry himself was out there, but to go and see all this nonsense at Home, while surrounded by a bunch of pot-smoking heads whose mean age would probably be mid-30s just compounded the weirdness. I’m glad I got to see the man himself in the flesh, but I don’t know if it was the greatest night music-wise. A hell of a show, for sure, but I was left wanting something better of Mad Professor.