The maverick former Public Image Ltd bassist takes us on a typically picaresque journey through his ‘Kafka-esque’ days at Transport for London, being named by Sid Vicious and his spiritual learnings
Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. “They’ll say: ‘Are you Jah Wobble?’” recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he’s working on anything. “And I like to say: ‘Yes, I’m recording an album. I’m doing it right now.’”
In the 2020s, the 68-year-old bassist and bandleader has been revisiting the city of his birth and youth, composing and producing albums including the cosmic dub of The Bus Routes of South London, or the celestial electronica of Thames Symphony, while traversing London on public transport.
Having a public bus as a studio is standard offbeat practice for Wobble. As a teenager, he masterminded Public Image Ltd with John Lydon, his transcendently thuggish bass kickstarting the post-punk era with some of the most powerful – and influential – experimental rock music ever recorded. Quitting the band at the peak of their powers, he fell into addiction, then worked for Transport for London as a station staff member before an unlikely major label deal spurred his 1990s renaissance. He has collaborated with Sinéad O’Connor, Brian Eno and Pharoah Sanders, is a committed Buddhist and is the embodiment of a defiantly working-class polymath, having worked variously as a Goldsmiths university lecturer, broadsheet book critic, exhibited painter and non-league football commentator.
Quite apart from his bus recordings, this month Wobble is releasing a Beatles covers album. “When She Loves You came out, I just thought: this is quite shit,” he remembers. “But then 67 came around. Gurus, smoking dope, Yoko Ono’s on board. I heard Strawberry Fields Forever and it just melted me.”
But for all his creativity and spiritual questing, his reputation is as forbidding as his basslines. Wobble’s 2009 autobiography Memoirs of a Geezer is merciless about the music industry and those who crossed him, even detailing a 1990s incident in which he punched the late comedian Sean Hughes backstage at the BBC. “When I first tried to get in touch with him, people warned me off,” admits collaborator Richard Russell, the musician and co-founder of the label XL Recordings, who has worked with Wobble on a new EP. “What bollocks. Everyone loves playing with him. His playing is kind of machine-like while being very human. He’s clearly been on a massive journey.”
A lifelong city walker, Wobble’s own favoured journey along the Thames, from Chelsea to Putney, brings on the “spaced-out, beautiful and profound” state of mind to create music on the bus ride home. We’re doing one of those walks later today.
I meet him at a gently bohemian Chelsea members’ club. He gives the impression – despite his untrendy shorts and T-shirt – that he owns the place. One minute he’s slapping a waiter on the back, joshing about Tottenham FC, the next consoling a diner whose mother recently died. He adores human contact, but apparently he’s upgrading.
“I talk to AI more than human beings,” he says cheerily as we sit down to a meal, adding that he uses AI “when I want to clarify what I think about ultimate reality”. He and the Claude AI model joust about “emptiness, the Buddha nature, the supreme self. It’s daft, but I do fist-bump emojis to him.” He gestures theatrically to his body. “I run stuff past him: what I’m going to eat. I’ve lost 13.5 kilos this year.”
Wobble’s transport albums sprang from visits to London from his current home of Stockport to run a grassroots jam session for Merton council. Tuned In with Jah Wobble began in 2019 and is aimed at “older, isolated blokes” in the south London borough. On an average night, he might be jamming in Wimbledon library in knotty time signatures with a Greek bouzouki player, a Polish guitarist and a Mancunian trumpeter. “I’ve always felt that aching loneliness,” he says. “And I wanted to do something. People that are maybe socially isolated, drinking too much, got divorced … issues I know really well and identify with.” He has been sober for 40 years but knows that “blokes tend not to ask for help”.
Wobble orders two puddings for himself, Claude be damned. He explains that the new Beatles-inspired album, Mystic Liverpool, was a family affair recorded with his sons John T and Charlie. Performing as Tian Qiyi, they’d had a schooling in traditional Chinese instrumentation – their mum, and Wobble’s wife, is the concert harpist Zi Lan Liao, who directs Liverpool’s Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra – that teases out the eastern resonances in the Beatles’ psychedelic period.
Wobble has been magnetically drawn to other cultures since his teens. He brings up the debate around cultural appropriation. “I have taken from Jamaican culture,” he says proudly. “I am partly Jamaican by choice. Try and take it away from me.” It’s the wilful, playful provocation of the original punk era, but he’s self-aware. “I’m old,” he sighs. “And the old have got too much sway.”
We leave the restaurant, emerging into plush west London streets a far cry from the Stepney slums where, in 1958, Jah Wobble was born John Wardle to a secretary mother and postman father. The latter, a veteran of the El Alamein front in Egypt, “was very traumatised by the war”, he explains. This produced a “destructive, disturbed kid”, albeit one with an early bent for high-concept thinking. On school sports day, he says, he persuaded his classmates to revolt and all run at the same speed.
The Wardles, including sister Catherine, were rehoused on a Whitechapel council estate, where John became spellbound by ska and bluebeat records as their sound sifted from market stalls, then staying with Black music through reggae, Philly soul and Stevie Wonder. “Even now, I’m very snobbish about the rock scene,” he says, and the deep low-end of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett stirred in him a desire to learn bass.
At Kingsway college in 1976, he befriended an older kid with green hair whose favourite word was “dismal”. It was John Lydon. “In the canteen, he told me: ‘I’m in a band,’” says Wobble. Lydon invited him to watch the Sex Pistols rehearse. “I thought: ‘This is going to be so bad it’s embarrassing.’ But it was really good.” Sid Vicious, another Kingsway alumnus, gave Wardle his enduring stage name, mispronouncing his name when drunk.