The man’s reputation precedes him. Put his name on a poster, billed next to some of Glasgow’s most innovative Techno-tinkerers, and it’s his name that fills the famous Glasgow Barrowlands.

Whether the crowd were familiar with Lee Perry’s music is doubtful. Most people came to see a living legend - ‘The Upsetter’, the man who built the Black Ark Studio, the man who burnt it down again, the man who gave wings to Marley and made the Wailers wail, the Godfather of Reggae. It’s probably just as well the folk didn’t come for the music, for when the curtain came down the impression left wasn’t one of having our boots filled with sweet music, but of a true eccentric barfing some sort of lyrical-soup onto the stage then dancing around in it.

Don’t ask me what he was singing about, what song it was, what his message was; we challenge the world’s brightest linguists to interpret Lee Perry’s psycho-babble - without taking a one-way train to loco-land in the process. The man cantankerously defies all attempts at categorisation. You may assume that you’re going to a Reggae concert, that you’re going to hook up to the energy with which Marley moved the world, but Lee Perry wouldn’t thank you for either of those associations. He sees both as tainted, and won’t bar his own road to heaven by tainting himself with what he now calls ‘cocaine reggae’.

So, his music 'aint Reggae these days. The backing band certainly sounded as if they were playing Reggae though.

His self-proclaimed aim is to spiritually heal, to imitate Jesus - and you can believe he believes it. His chants and mantras may be indecipherable to us, but, if he had gone downstairs to the Barras’ bar, I’m sure he wouldn’t have understood a thing the good-and-whisky-quickened people of Glasgow were saying either - the saving grace is that we were all very adamant about whatever it was we were all talking about.

Scratch stood on the stage - looking ancient, as if chiselled from a rock, unshakeable in his musical mission - whatever that may have been. And, whatever your view of this man, he has something that is very rare, especially in the music business - he has integrity, and it’s bigger than all the evil machinations of the money-driven music industry.

The support came in the form of local live-débutantes, Mount Florida, and they definitely deserve a mention. They produced truly original, underground sounds: some kind of bastard, test-tube son of a Ambient-Techno-Dub menage a trois. Their performance was topped by the appearance of some nutter wearing one of my dad’s suits from the seventies, a kind of Techno-fried John Cleese - a singer of sorts, spouting some psycho-babble about the Germans. If you like comedy with your Techno, this would’ve tickled you pink.

Overall, it was a night of unexpected musical pleasures - with enough tasty lashings of psycho-babble to give the whole show a pleasant tint of the bizarre and a few enduring memories.