The maverick former Public Image Ltd bassist takes us on a typically picaresque journey through his \u2018Kafka-esque\u2019 days at Transport for London, being named by Sid Vicious and his spiritual learnings<\/p>\n
Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. \u201cThey\u2019ll say: \u2018Are you Jah Wobble?\u2019\u201d recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he\u2019s working on anything. \u201cAnd I like to say: \u2018Yes, I\u2019m recording an album. I\u2019m doing it right now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and influential \u2013 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 Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor, 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.<\/p>\n
Quite apart from his bus recordings, this month Wobble is releasing a Beatles covers album. \u201cWhen She Loves You came out, I just thought: this is quite shit,\u201d he remembers. \u201cBut then 67 came around. Gurus, smoking dope, Yoko Ono\u2019s on board. I heard Strawberry Fields Forever and it just melted me.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for all his creativity and spiritual questing, his reputation is as forbidding as his basslines. Wobble\u2019s 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. \u201cWhen I first tried to get in touch with him, people warned me off,\u201d admits collaborator Richard Russell, the musician and co-founder of the label XL Recordings, who has worked with Wobble on a new EP. \u201cWhat bollocks. Everyone loves playing with him. His playing is kind of machine-like while being very human. He\u2019s clearly been on a massive journey.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lifelong city walker, Wobble\u2019s own favoured journey along the Thames, from Chelsea to Putney, brings on the \u201cspaced-out, beautiful and profound\u201d state of mind to create music on the bus ride home. We\u2019re doing one of those walks later today.<\/p>\n
I meet him at a gently bohemian Chelsea members\u2019 club. He gives the impression \u2013 despite his untrendy shorts and T-shirt \u2013 that he owns the place. One minute he\u2019s 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\u2019s upgrading.<\/p>\n
\u201cI talk to AI more than human beings,\u201d he says cheerily as we sit down to a meal, adding that he uses AI \u201cwhen I want to clarify what I think about ultimate reality\u201d. He and the Claude AI model joust about \u201cemptiness, the Buddha nature, the supreme self. It\u2019s daft, but I do fist-bump emojis to him.\u201d He gestures theatrically to his body. \u201cI run stuff past him: what I\u2019m going to eat. I\u2019ve lost 13.5 kilos this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wobble\u2019s 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 \u201colder, isolated blokes\u201d 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. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt that aching loneliness,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I wanted to do something. People that are maybe socially isolated, drinking too much, got divorced \u2026 issues I know really well and identify with.\u201d He has been sober for 40 years but knows that \u201cblokes tend not to ask for help\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d had a schooling in traditional Chinese instrumentation \u2013 their mum, and Wobble\u2019s wife, is the concert harpist Zi Lan Liao, who directs Liverpool\u2019s Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra \u2013 that teases out the eastern resonances in the Beatles\u2019 psychedelic period.<\/p>\n
Wobble has been magnetically drawn to other cultures since his teens. He brings up the debate around cultural appropriation. \u201cI have taken from Jamaican culture,\u201d he says proudly. \u201cI am partly Jamaican by choice. Try and take it away from me.\u201d It\u2019s the wilful, playful provocation of \u200bthe original punk era, but he\u2019s self-aware. \u201cI\u2019m old,\u201d he sighs. \u201cAnd the old have got too much sway.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cwas very traumatised by the war\u201d, he explains. This produced a \u201cdestructive, disturbed kid\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cEven now, I\u2019m very snobbish about the rock scene,\u201d he says, and the deep low-end of Bob Marley and the Wailers\u2019 bassist Aston \u201cFamily Man\u201d Barrett stirred in him a desire to learn bass.<\/p>\n
At Kingsway college in 1976, he befriended an older kid with green hair whose favourite word was \u201cdismal\u201d. It was John Lydon. \u201cIn the canteen, he told me: \u2018I\u2019m in a band,\u2019\u201d says Wobble. Lydon invited him to watch the Sex Pistols rehearse. \u201cI thought: \u2018This is going to be so bad it\u2019s embarrassing.\u2019 But it was really good.\u201d Sid Vicious, another Kingsway alumnus, gave Wardle his enduring stage name, mispronouncing his name when drunk.<\/p>\n