By 1973, Lee Scratch Perry was comfortably established as one of Jamaican music’s leading players, having produced a series of sizeable hits for his Upsetter, Spinning Wheel and Justice League imprints. But for all his success, he remained unfulfilled creatively, unable to fully develop his ideas because of the restrictions of studio time. So it was that he arranged for construction work to begin on a studio of his own, situated behind his house in Cardiff Crescent in Washington Gardens. Once the building was complete, he began installing the best affordable recording equipment available and by the close of the year, the newly named ‘Black Ark’ studio had been furnished with a four-track quarter-inch TEAC 3340 tape machine, a silver Alice board mixing desk, a Grantham spring reverb and tape echo unit, a Marantz amplifier and a collection of assorted instruments.

As the Seventies wore on, Scratch’s behaviour became progressively erratic. Increasingly distracted from his work by his excessive lifestyle and disillusioned by both the music business and his life in Jamaica, he spelt prolonged periods away from his studio and as 1978 drew to a close, his output had diminished to little more than a trickle. Others noted how the Ark itself had become a reflection of his troubled state of mind, its walls covered in graffiti, which became progressively more illegible as the producer painted ‘x’s over his scrawls. Eventually, the studio had ceased operations and while subsequent spells in Holland and England helped clear his mind of the fog that had increasingly clouded his thoughts, once he was back in Kingston, Scratch fell back into old ways and resumed the gradual destruction of his once beloved studio.