Jah articles

[M!$H]

I have several articles on Mr. Jah Wobble. A lot of them have to do with his drinking problem in the early/mid 80s, which is why I saved a lot of them....



Jah Wobble talks a good fight, he fights the good fight, though he insists he never beat the crap out of 'Whispering' Bob. It's all here: Sid Vicious, PiL, the Johns, drugs, Moroccan trance music, and getting bricks thown at your head...

There was something bass about punk.

It was a generation of iconic bass players, from JJ Burnel's distinctive genius, to Paul Simonon's brooding coolness, to Sid's iconic status, to Dee Dee Ramone driving his band forward.

Before punk you didn't really hear the bass or in some cases feel the bass.

You always felt Jah Wobble's bass. It's one of the most distinctive tones ever coaxed from the four string. Obviously born out of hours of listening to dub reggae, he's taken it somewhere else entirely.

Typically of his generation, Wobble was a self-taught musician making it up as he went along, feeling his way through the musical mores. And watching him live recently it's still the same. There's nothing conventional at play here, a quarter of a century on from PiL and the big man with the piercing blue eyes is back on the road promoting a retrospective that traces his career from those border busting excursions with Rotten's post-Pistols mob, through his work with Can, and then all those madcap sonic adventures where he's twisted all the rules out of shape. Loads of projects, endless records, and still that distinctive bass wobble.

In 2004 he plays with bagpipes and English folk singers, and weirdly tying trad folk with dub bass, somehow it works.

It's a long way away from East London.

"When I grew up, no working class lad would ever be in a band that was all middle class people playing prog rock. It never occurred to us that we could be in bands. That took punk rock. That changed everything."

The young Wobble was already immersed in music.

"I was into Trojan stuff, ska, Rod Stewart And The Faces, T-Rex. I was never a massive Bowie fan. I never quite believed him. I was also a big Stevie Wonder fan. 'Innervisions' is a great record."

It was as at art college that the wild-eyed self-styled 'nuisance' met the fellow Johns who would team up to first terrorize their college and then the nation itself.

"It was at the College of Further Education on the edge of the east end. It was very Bohemian, and it attracted a lot of naughty boys! That's how I ended up there. The first meeting with John Lydon was a bit of a stand off - 'You're the nut case! you're the other nutcase, you'll do!' He was older than me. I was very impressed with him. Sid came the next year - John had fucked off by then so I ended up hanging out with Sid a lot. John knew Sid from Hackney College."

Wobble was already messing about with the bass guitar.

"My first bass was nicked for me by my mate Ronnie in the late seventies. I did have a natural gift for it. There have been only two things I've had a knack for in my life - the bass and clay pigeon shooting!"

And then Lydon pushed the ante when he announced to his astonished mates that he was in a band!

"John came back and said he was in a band and I said, 'what?'. No one was in bands from where we came from. In them days it was all virtuoso bullshit. The bands were very middle class, home counties types."

The Sex Pistols shot to fame changing everyone around them. Wobble was around for their ride to the top. One of Lydon's close coterie of friends, he picked up a reputation over the years for being a nutter, one of the psychos hanging out with Lydon who could use his fists. A couple of legendary incidents stand out: the beating up of Old Grey Whistle Test presenter and media champ of prog Whispering Bob Harris, and attacking Sid Vicious with an axe. Two myths that Wobble is only too happen to debunk.

"Those stories have been talked about recently a lot again. Look, I'm a working class boy and that's the way it is. It's like if you were growing up on any estate - you go walking through your estate - a few boys in gangs will be naughty and end up in the nick types. They know you from the other side of the estate and they will fuck with you - maybe throw a brick at you. You can't get your dad! What's he going to say? An ex-army vet, he'd say 'sort it out yourself.' You can't go to the police! You got to sort it yourself and they would know you weren't a soft target and it would be best to leave you alone. Speak to any one of my mates - they would tell you I'm a funny geezer, a fucking larf, a nuisance, but they wouldn't say I was psycho. I was considered one of the chaps."

So you didn't whack Sid with an axe then?

"It was not me! If it was I'd tell you. I was there when it happened. I was upstairs at the time. I nearly had a run in with Sid another time, then he was spitting in this electric fire at the squat and we nearly come to blows over it. If he spat one more time I would have been all over him like a rash. Sid really wasn't a tough guy by the way. He was a fucking nuisance. It's apparently come out now that he was a mugger and if I had known that, well, I'm from the East End and the particular community I'm from you don't do that, that's the line that you do not cross. Sometimes they would keep stuff like that away from me."

Wobble pauses. "Now the the axe story. I was really on one at John's house, John wasn't there at the time, and Sid phoned. I picked up and it was Sid. I can't fucking deal with it, I think he wanted to come round, he wanted to be in the PiL gang - he felt rejected by John or whatever. He thought he should have been in the band. I think it fucked him off. He come round and kicked in the door and this geezer went down with an axe. Now if you get hit by an axe you tend to die! I think the geezer prodded him a bit and Sid's completely off his head and he falls down backwards. He rolled over and cracked his head on the back of a boot scraper!"

And the Bob Harris incident?

"Another one I get tied in with is attacking Whispering Bob Harris. Now why the fuck would I attack Whispering Bob Harris!? You know what I mean! I wasn't even at the Speakeasy where it happened. I've had a few rows in the past but that's not the kind of thing I would do. You tell people you were not involved and they ignore it. They want to think of you being a nutcase. I've got mates who are the real deal who are gangsters. I managed to stay away from that somehow."

It seems weird now to think of Wobble hanging round with punk icon Sid Vicious.

"When people talk about Sid, I remember it was all such a pisstake. When we gave each other names - he changed my name from John Wardle to Jah Wobble - it was a pisstake and because he was so forlorn looking we called him Sid Vicious. There was some geezer doing a book. I told him all this stuff and he wanted to know about Sid, and the thing was there was not much to say. He died very young and all that but there just wasn't much to say about him. He used to say he wanted to be dead but he had an intelligence and it came out stupid. That wasn't him. He had a natural kind of intelligence."

What do you reckon would have happened to him if it all hadn't fucked up?

"He'd probably be in the rag trade or something, some fashion thing. A new romantic, that kind of a lark. I'm very good mates with his best mate from when he was kid - we talk about this from time to time."

Post Pistols, Lydon was on the prowl. Wanting to move on from punk rock and incorporate his love of dub and pre-post rock soundscapes of Beefheart/Can/Hammil so he started recruiting amongst his mates. There was talk of getting Sid in on bass. Lydon sounded him out on the Pistols last disastrous American tour but Sid was too fucked up on smack so Wobble was in.

Lydon had already got Keith Levene in on guitar- a masterstroke, as Levene - an original member of The Clash, where his sheet metal guitar sound threatened to take the Westway wonder into a totally different direction - was perhaps the most innovative guitar player of his generation.

"Keith came from squats. He definitely knew more about playing guitar than everyone else. He was quite a character. Keith had seen me play bass in a squat so I was in - I don't think there was a plan. The photographer Dennis Morris was around a lot at the time so he was on the firm, in the gang, he had a lot of views on how things would be packaged."

PiL was a whole package, from the music to the attitude to the artwork.

"The first album cover was a pisstake of Time magazine. It was done very well, done as fashion photos. When the first album came out the critics didn't like it - they wanted rock music - they were very middle class rock people and they didn't trust working class people doing this kind of thing, and so it got slagged off."

The first album was slated at the time but it remains Wobble's favourite, ahead of the more iconic 'Metal Box'. "You know what, I've come to like 'Metal Box' more and more, but that first album is still my favourite. Stuff like 'Lowlife' is great, it's something else, it's very underrated. It seemed like it was a quantum leap to 'Metal Box'- something very magical happened, the first album is more of a favourite of mine. It's got a great pop sensibility as well... The second album ended up with a shitty vibe round PiL. The first album was very optimistic - all lads together in a rock band kind vibe - then it went dark and down - there was lots of drugs being used. Not fun at all"

'Metal Box' has become a myth. A hip album to namedrop in recent years, it was released to a stunned silence. Critics were confused and the album didn't sell in big amounts, for some of us it became a soundtrack- a quantum musical leap and handy tin tray for preparing drugs on.

'Metal Box' was a cult thing, it got a few slaggings. John was a massive Beefheart fan...very dense deep dark record very static record tracks stay in one uncomfortable place... "It's lasted very well, we were all nuts in our way. It was genuine. Lots of bands market themselves as wayward with all the drugs and things, and it's used as marketing, but it's as threatening as Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears being on the Mickey Mouse club. We were the real deal, you know what I mean - PiL really was that kind of way and you can hear it in the music."

The dark mood around the album was too much for Wobble so he split.

"It got really boring. We did 15 gigs in two years during the 'Metal Box' time, I don't think we played Britain at all! We had no management, the business was disastrous, shitty deals, money going walkabout, it was a bad scene. A lot of people round the band should have not been there- it was time to get off..."

He had loads of projects on.

"I left PiL and I went and worked with Holgar Czukay from Can and then we made 'Snake Charmer' in 1985, a project with the Edge. I had a lot of things happening. I learned a lot from them - I learned to play intuitively and naturally with them. Also about this time I started listening to Eastern music from short wave radio and adding that to my music."

Outside influences were feeding in which would colour his music with his next project Invaders Of The Heart. "I like the eastern melodies, the eastern modes, Turkish music, and as the years have gone by I got into Moroccan trance music and went further into Laos music, Chinese music - it all fits with my music. They are all very earthy street musics. Music from the streets. The Laos music people sing in costumes and people think its all very nice but they are all very bawdy songs about having it off!"

The kind of drugs and booze lifestyle Wobble had been living since the punk period was begging to spiral out of control and it was time to get out.

"I'd been using gear and powders, uppers and pills from before PiL days. I was a heavy drinker as well, you can't leave this life when you are on the road. I never made a big deal about it. I can't stand it when these celebs go on about it like it's one of the basic chess moves of this game having a problem - it's being immature to be honest, not dealing with things in a responsible way...that problem was moving fast - I'd been using the gear, drinking a lot - somehow functioning and suddenly it reached a point where it was counter-productive and I ended up in a bit of a mess. I pretty much stopped drinking and drugging and that when I ended up on the underground driving a train - get a fucking job - it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me."

How long did it take to go back to music?

"It was only 2/3 months. At first I couldn't get arrested, no-one wanted to give me a deal at all."

And now the Anthology.

"I wanted to do a nice package for the anthology before CDs die out. Let's do it now!"

Is there ever any talk of reforming Pil?

"There's been talk. I'd have problems working with Keith- it would have to be viable- more than just going on stage doing the old songs...I could imagine working with John just about...It really fucked up with PiL, he didn't really learn anything from the Pistols...it turned out the best thing that ever happened. It made me a band leader and a musician. I'd have a problem with Keith because of his habit. I only told him to fuck off ten years ago...he's very classic of his kind - manipulative, charming, destructive. If Keith had been kept in reign more by John- the govner of the band- it would have made a difference...equipment would get sold...I watched the celeb thing - I dreaded it but he was really good - it reminded me of when I first met him. John is John and he changed the world for a lot of people. From meeting John it opened up the whole world...and I appreciated it...To me he was like a composition of and Withnail...that Kenneth Williams squeal and Brian Clough for that knowitall, and almost like Margaret Thatcher at times, ha ha!"

It's been a great ride for one of the few mavericks wandering around the British music scene. The Anthology is testament to this. Wobble has never bothered with the rules- he just makes his own up as he goes along, and that always makes for some great music. Long may he wander.

[M!$H]

This one was written by Jah himself.

The First Drink

I had my first drink when I was 12. A full bottle of my old man’s Cointreau. Blind drunk. Throwing up. Fucking Cointreau! I do not recommend that to anyone. I was a pretty wayward kid. Uneven, cheeky, naughty. A wee bit callow, always looking to clash with authority, especially my old man. He was an ex-army sergeant, giving it the tough guy. I remember sitting at the kitchen table one morning, reading the paper and having a bacon sandwich. Full-on, glammed-up punk rocker — mascara everywhere. The old man took one look at me and vomited in the sink. He must have thought he had a Martian for a son!

I was nervy, edgy, always wanting to move on to the next thing. I was the classic pile-driving drinker. I didn’t just drink, I went for it. Gung ho. Punk was the natural outlet for me, full of maverick characters. I started knocking around with John Lydon, my mate from college in London, and Sid Vicious.

Music touched me in the same profound way that booze did. Finally I had a chance to show the world how angry and frustrated I was, to kick against everything my parents stood for. But even when I joined PiL [Public Image Ltd] with John and we started getting some success, I quickly realised that it still wasn’t enough. There I was, 20 years old, sitting in a limo in the States, with as much coke and booze as I wanted. But it wasn’t what I was looking for. It was just another load of bollocks. When I left PiL I knocked the powders on the head, but I started to drink more spirits. When you start on the spirits, things start to accelerate quickly. When I was on a bender, there was no morning, noon or night. I carried on till I woke up, halfway home, pissy trousers, covered in sick.

The funny thing was, I was still able to make music. I was running my own label, I’d got a few quid coming in. But I was getting out of control, unpredictable.

I was getting the angry blackouts and verballing my friends. I’d remember little bits the following day. The look of hurt. It was like the Hammer Horror films, and I was Frankenstein. My friends were scared and disgusted by me.

Everybody knew how it was going to end. I’d already got myself one of those one-sided, editing razor blades. I was going to do it properly, the old-fashioned way. These days, I guess you’d have to tie your computer round your feet and jump in the river. Very modern. At the time, I remember my mum saying to me: "You always gulped your drinks when you were a kid." Always gulped my drinks! I thought that was very sweet. My parents were telling me to slow down. And my friends were telling me, but I couldn’t. It was easier for me to stop altogether.

So I tried. I prayed: "Please God, let me stop drinking. I’ll do f***ing anything. Just stop the drinking. I mean it. Stop it. Please." I’d been brought up a Catholic, so I’d always believed in a higher power. And for me it came in the form of this geezer round the corner in east London. A scrap-metal dealer. He said: "Are you serious about stopping? Are you ready? Have you had enough?" He was one of the boys. He’d had a similar problem.

I’m not going to tell you where this geezer was from, but if you asked me if he was part of Alcoholics Anonymous I probably wouldn’t argue with you.

I started meeting people who’d not had a drink for three months! I thought it was impossible. But it wasn’t. You go through those three months and you keep going. Slowly you start to get a sense of clarity. The karma starts to come your way. You start to make sense of things. The 12 steps will do a pretty good job of opening up those spiritual doors. If you work at it, you will see the world as a different place. My sobriety day was October 23, 1986. As long as I keep going — and don’t pick up a drink — I’ve got a chance.

This is not my "Jah Wobble drink-and-drugs hell" story. I’m not interested in that bollocks. I’m just a layman who had a problem. I was grossly immature and unwilling to take responsibility for myself and my problems. I was using alcohol as an anaesthetic, dulling the everyday pain. The pain I felt from being me, of being in my own skin. But what is that pain? Once the alcohol is out of the way and you take a proper look, you realise that this pain is just called being human. And that’s a relief. All my life I’d felt like some weird, faulty machine. But now I know that this is me. This is life.

As a kid, I hated those geezers in the suburbs who’d wash their cars on a Sunday. But the other Sunday I washed my car. And I was happy. I realised I quite like the mundane things. If God is anywhere, God is there, in the beautiful little things. My lovely wife. My two boys. A walk over the hills. Life is a series of beautiful moments and I love them all.

[M!$H]

Punk, bass player, pioneer, mystic... PAUL TINGEN meets a musician who lives life at breakneck speed, and isn't afraid of the dark.

Few people could more appropriately be called a walking contradiction. The man was once a major proponent of the punk movement; but today he's known as one of the pioneers of world music, and he's recently written several orchestral pieces, one of which was performed by the Liverpool Philharmonic. He was once an extremely angry young man who got up many people's noses with his nihilistic, destructive attitude; today he's one of the most respected and liked characters in the music industry, a positive, constructive man who likes to talk about sacred music and spiritual transformation. He was once a working-class lad from the East End of London who didn't think much of his own musical talent, and ended up dropping out of music to become a train driver on the London Underground. Today he's graduated to the music industry's aristocracy, his collaborative favours sought by the likes of Brian Eno, Björk, The Orb, Massive Attack, Mick Hucknall, Sinead O'Connor, Primal Scream, The Shamen, Pharaoh Sanders, Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell and The Dubliners' Ronnie Drew. And in the recording studio he refuses to deal hands-on with digital and computer technology, avoiding what he calls "MIDI hell", yet he writes an astonishing six albums a year in his kitchen on the tiny Yamaha QY20 sequencer.

Jah Wobble is the man's name, and to many people it doesn't only conjure up a bundle of contradictions, but also many legendary tales eagerly told in pubs around London -- such as how he acquired his musician's name through a slurred mispronunciation of his real name, John Wardle, by a drunken Sid Vicious. Or how he taught himself to play bass guitar in a few weeks by picking up Vicious's bass, immediately joined Johnny Lydon's Public Image Limited at the tender age of 20, in 1978, and went on to stamp a mighty musical mark on the band with his muscular bass-style. Or how he was sacked within weeks from every job he tried his hand at as a teenager because of his belligerent attitude. Or how he made a habit of insulting or beating up people during the first half of the '80s, when he was under the spell of drink and drugs. Or how he was sacked from London Underground for screaming obscenities over the intercom (this is untrue, he says). Or how his descent into the underworld of the Underground tested and purified him and caused a resurrection of Biblical proportions, when he returned to the daylight as a messiah of world music (this story is way over the top, though it holds some grains of truth).

Given this reputation, you're bound to approach Jah Wobble with some trepidation, but the press officer of his brand new record company, 30 Hertz Records, assures me that Wobble is "a very nice, unassuming man", and this proves to be an apt description of the Wobble I meet in an East London recording studio. It's called Intimate Studios, and in it Wobble, his regular engineer Mark Ferda, and assistant engineer Cai Murphy are working on a brilliant reggae-influenced song that will be on the forthcoming album Journey To The Soul, expected to be released this autumn. Wobble isn't only "nice and unassuming", but also charming and passionate; hardly ever lost for words, he speaks very fast in a Cockney drawl, switching constantly between matters musical, mystical and technical. Journey To The Soul, he explains, will be his first album of songs since 1994's Take Me To God:

"After doing songs for a long time, that format can become really tiring. Since 1994 I have wanted to stretch a little bit, doing instrumental music or music with spoken words. Music is a really flowing, abstract form. It's pure spirit moving, and I wanted to make some music without the interference and definitions of form that spring from singing."

SPEED

Wobble's musical output had already been extremely eclectic on the five albums he made before Take Me To God. After leaving PIL in 1980, he released three solo albums in the first half of the '80s, Betrayal, Snake Charmer, and Psalms: the crude, dark, but adventurous music on these albums confirmed that his contributions to PIL had been crucial, and broke him out of the punk ghetto and into a rock mainstream audience. The period 1986 to 1988 was when Wobble dropped out of the music industry, working as a taxi driver and for the London Underground. His 1989 comeback album, Without Judgement, introduced the world music and mystical themes for which he is now so well known. Rising Above Bedlam (1991) developed these themes even further, and was hailed by various music magazines as a masterpiece. Take Me To God was in a similar vein, and featured the talents of Baaba Maal, Dolores O'Riordan, Natacha Atlas and Gavin Friday; The Guardian called it "gorgeously imaginative". Wobble then increased his output, embarking on a series of experimental albums, the first of which were Spinner (1995), a dark and moody ambient/dub collaboration with Brian Eno and the instrumental Heaven & Earth (1995), which featured Bill Laswell, and instruments and musicians from Thailand, Iraq and China.

"In Western rock everything is so homogenised — there's a lack of colour and a lack of meaning there."

Island Records, who had released Take Me To God and Heaven & Earth, apparently started to grow tired of Wobble's excursions into uncommercial terrain, and accused him of trying to sabotage his own success. Wobble wasn't impressed with their ideas of what constituted a music career, and released his acclaimed The Inspiration Of William Blake (1996) -- which featured him reciting Blake's poetry -- on the small All Saints Records label, in collaboration with the record company that he was setting up, 30 Hertz Records. The same year saw the first genuine 30 Hertz release, The Celtic Poets. It was another record centred on the spoken word, with Dubliner Ronnie Drew's gravelly voice fiercely reciting Celtic poetry over a backing that included instruments as varied as pipes, crumhorn, sitar, pi-saw (a Thai flute), ku-cheng (a Chinese harp), khene (a low-pitched Thai wind instrument) and shakuhachi -- hardly a Celtic ensemble, but then authenticity never was high on Wobble's list of priorities. And now 30 Hertz Records are planning to release Wobble's orchestral piece Requiem, which features classical voices, plus the aforementioned Journey To The Soul, which will not only include some songs, but may also contain the orchestral piece called, The River, that Wobble wrote for the Liverpool Philharmonic. And, believe it or not, in the middle of all this frantic activity, Wobble still finds time to do the odd remix for various artists -- most recently for a Mick Hucknall track.

It's an incredible amount of releases, topics, information and different types of music to come to grips with, and trying to disentangle it all isn't made easier by Wobble's tendency to jump from subject to subject with the agility with which a mountain goat jumps from rock to rock. During the interview he asserts several times that speed is of the essence to him, and eloquently demonstrates this with the way he speaks, words tumbling out of him at a breakneck pace.

"People keep saying to me that I can't release six albums or so in a year. But I can't stand that process of one album or less a year and then touring. It's too slow for me. I'm on a roll creatively at the moment and I want things moving very fast. Five or six albums a year seems about right, and they're all long, about an hour each. I just sit in my kitchen with one of my three Yamaha QY20 sequencers, a notepad and a pair of small speakers, and write lots of music. Do I have problems with quality control, like Prince? No, not at all, because I know that the stuff I'm doing at the moment is good. I feel that since Take Me To God the quality of my output has been consistently high. It's exactly right, and I'm just totally on it. This might not be the case next year: I might feel that I need to slow down a bit, I might start to make mistakes. But at the moment I have no doubts. It's just flowing."

CATHARTIC

Wobble appears to have found himself, and the critical acclaim that has greeted every one of his releases during the '90s suggests that music, and an audience, have found him as well. It's all a far cry from the confused days of the early '80s, when a post-PIL Wobble made life very difficult for himself and everybody around him by descending into a daze of drugs and booze.
"I had no career plans before I joined PIL," he reminisces. "I didn't know what the fuck I was going to do with my life. I loved music, but I never thought I'd become a professional musician: that seemed totally out of my league. You had more chance of becoming the captain of the QE2. Then punk came along and suddenly it was OK to have a go, and I discovered that I had a talent for bass playing. I never liked punk music, I thought it was absolute shit, but I'll never slag that period off, because it got me into music. However, there was a collective anger that was never going to go anywhere, and that burnt itself out. We were a very angry generation. I look on us now as little orphans, all dressed in black, and I must say that I still feel a bit drawn in that dark way."

"You'll find that people who are on a path of sorts are often very angry and unhappy, and that's why they try to find solutions to their inner problems and inner conflicts. You don't want to get stuck in anger and darkness, like some of these people who today still walk around with a punk state of mind and wear punk clothes. Darkness that's cathartic and leads somewhere is great, but when it becomes a thing in itself, it becomes evil, stagnant, because there's no movement there. I became conscious of my spiritual journey in 1986, when I stopped drinking alcohol. I had a terrible drinking problem and I was halfway through working on my Psalms album, and realised that if I didn't stop drinking, I'd die. I woke up at five in the afternoon every day, I was stinking dirty, and I'd lost a lot of self-esteem. It was really a choice of, do I want to die, or do I want to live and show a little balls and stand on my own two feet and take responsibility for my life? I was also completely fed up with the music business, which just seemed completely shallow and fake. I was burnt out and wanted an ordinary everyday life. "

"I was halfway through working on my Psalms album, and realised that if I didn't stop drinking, I'd die."

"So I finished Psalms, dropped out of the music industry and ended up working for London Underground. It was one of the best experiences of my life, totally exciting. I went to work at the times when I normally would come back from the night clubs, and I loved it. When I was a teenager I was sacked from every job that I did, but this was the first job I resigned from, and I can to this day still get a good reference from them. It gave me my self-esteem back. I didn't think I'd get back into music again, but I started to listen to music again, especially Salif Keita's Soro, and that inspired me. Then percussionist Neville Murray asked me whether I was up for something, and so we started a band together, and gradually it became like starting all over again. But the music industry wasn't exactly cheering on the sidelines at my return, and it took a while for things to start to happen again. I was still working as a taxi driver until 1991, three years after I'd left the underground. And it wasn't like I was then really bad and had now suddenly become really good. It was more a question of opening up, and I still have good and bad inside of me. Good and bad, dark and light always come together. There's this incredible, continuous coming into being that goes on when dark comes into light. William Blake understood that. Miles Davis understood that."

MAGIC

In his sleeve notes to The Inspiration Of William Blake, Wobble writes that life is about "a perfect balance between heaven and earth, good and evil, man and woman, yin and yang, two archetypal forces moving against each other and yet in harmony. Both are separate and yet contain each other. Neither can live without the other and therefore nor could human life." One could add to this: 'nor could music'. During our conversation, Wobble and I agree that New Age music is so insufferable and flat because it tries to be all light, and that darkness is an essential ingredient of music, or any work of art, because it's a prerequisite for creating depth and shade and form. In his music of the '90s Wobble has been incorporating an amazing array of shades and colours, drawing influences from the Far East as much as from Africa, the Middle East and North and South America. He sees no problems with such stylistic diversity:

"There are only two types of music, sacred and secular, and my natural inclination is towards the sacred and the ritualistic. It's why I picked up on world music, because in Western rock everything is so homogenised -- there's a lack of colour and a lack of meaning there. The roots of my interest in world music probably come from the reggae music I used to listen to as a teenager, and then I learnt how all the musics of the world have lots of things in common. North-African music relates to European music, which relates to American music. And Indian and Irish music, sitars and bagpipes, both work with drones and overtones; pentatonic melodies can be found all over the world."

Nevertheless, Wobble's albums sometimes sound like an ethnomusicologist's wet dream, with a bewildering variety of styles thrown together. Wobble manages to hold all these disparate colours and sounds together with the unique and instantly recognisable sound of his bass guitar. It rumbles deep and low and dangerous, supplying much of the music with necessary darkness and depth. Mixed way upfront, and with influences of dub and dance very evident, Wobble's bass has more a melodic than a harmonic function. Back in the late '70s, when Wobble was still playing with PIL, Melody Maker were already noting that he was capable of playing "some of the most awesome and original bass lines in modern music". Wobble elaborates...

"I just knew how you made bass lines. They went around in circles and I played them really simply, and it was great to play the same line for two hours at a time. Through this I got into listening to resonances. People think bass lines are just about repetition, but I learnt that the more you play, the more you also pick up on the resonances and overtones of the players around you, and that relates very much to the phrasing on the bass and the notes you play. To me, this makes the difference between a good and a bad bass player. A good bass player can hear the overtones in, say, the toms, and connect that to his bass line. So you're picking these things up in your playing, and that can be really magical."

The word 'magical' crops up more than once while Wobble is talking about music, and he asserts that it's a quality he's become more aware of since he started to walk the spiritual path consciously after coming off alcohol in 1986.

"Since then I understand music much better, on one level. There are two main worlds, the world of relativity and the absolute world. In the world of relativity I have a better understanding of music, but there's also something I still totally don't understand about music. Music is a very demanding mistress, and it's dangerous when you start thinking that you understand her. You always have to be humble enough to be able to forget everything you thought you knew. You have to let the music dictate to you where you're going. Miles Davis talked a lot about listening, about letting the music guide you, whereas the Western tendency is to try to control and dominate things. But when you're open you can expect the miraculous from music. And this openness is a technique of the mind. I know people sometimes think that it's incredibly clever what I'm doing on the bass guitar, but I'm just being open to hearing the resonances that are already there, and that may suggest a note that's outside of the chord. And that one note in there is the one that creates the magic."

STERILE

But where once all Wobble's musical magic was created on the bass, nowadays much of it is called into being when he sits on his own at his kitchen table with a Yamaha QY20 sequencer and two little powered speakers. It's somehow amusing to imagine this tall, mighty, spiritually-driven ex-punk doing his trade on a tiny little machine the size of a video tape. Wobble recalls that he encountered the QY20 for the first time a little over two years ago, and that the whole of Heaven & Earth, Requiem, The River and much of the William Blake album were written on it. Only The Celtic Poets was conceived without the help of the QY20. He elaborates on what's clearly a favourite topic: "Everybody knows that I don't give a fuck about what bass guitar I use or what studio equipment I use or what other equipment I use. But when I saw the QY20 I thought 'Mmm, that's small', and it sounded quite good. I started mucking around with it and got really addicted to it. It's fantastic and it has a really great reggae horn section which I love. My QY20 has become my musical sketchpad, and I write all my things in there without even going into song mode. I just stay in pattern mode, and once I'm done, Mark Ferda transfers it straight into the Logic Audio software that we have on the Mac. It's a bit embarrassing to have a prototype sequencer at this stage in my career, but I love it, and some of the sounds actually end up on my albums."

"I want things moving very fast. Five or six albums a year seems about right."

Wobble admits with a mixture of pride and shame that he actually has three QY20 sequencers. His liking for them has a simple reason:

"I'm totally low tech. I hate setting up or programming sequencers, or working with computers. It's like MIDI hell to me. That's why I prefer to play everything live into the QY20; I don't quantise at all any more. In the past I used things like the Roland CR78 drum machine, the first analogue drum box with the wooden cover. I like analogue drum machines. They might be cheesy, but they definitely had their own sound, and there was some sort of mystery to them. Whereas the Linn had much too clean and pompous a sound for me, and contributed to making the '80s a terrible time for music. I also used to work on a Portastudio, working out the skeletal structure of my pieces, taking care not to go into too much detail, otherwise you get that the-demo-has-more-spirit-than-the-final-recording syndrome. So I was looking out for a sequencer that was very simple and very easy to learn and which allowed me to get my basic ideas down very quickly, without going into too much detail. The QY20 is ideal for that. People think I'm bullshitting them when I talk to them about the QY20, but I'm serious."

Wobble is also serious about his aversion to the underworld of 'MIDI hell'. Given that his music involves the application of huge amounts of computers, MIDI, and digital recording gear, he explains, his way of staying in music heaven is to use the talents of engineer, programmer and keyboard player Mark Ferda, who has been assisting him since 1989.

"Without Mark I would be fucked. He's brilliant, because I work manically fast, and I'll come into the studio with six hours of stuff on the little QY20, and he'll load it into the Mac and process it all. I made a decision a few years ago to not go too far into technology and engineering. I think that's a mistake many people make. I used to have a Brennel 8-track tape recorder in the '80s, and a little drum machine and a little bit of outboard, and I knew how to work that, and that was how far I wanted to go into technology. I come from the generation that grew up before the digital explosion, when everything was still very logical and easy to understand. But now it's a pain in the ass to keep up with just knowing about all the new formats and technologies that come out, let alone knowing how to work with them. Now there's Zip drives and this and that and I start feeling 'Jesus Christ, I need an intensive update'. All this new technology is supposed to be helping me get some music together, but with all this fucking talk of disks and systems, it's all become so sterile, it's like the world of graphic design or something."

TWILIGHT

Despite his dislike of the hi-tech complications of the late-20th-century recording studio, Wobble acknowledges that it's actually this very technology that allows him to do what he likes most: work fast, frighteningly fast.

"I want to get my ideas down, right now. I can't wait. It's painful for me to be in the studio, it's like giving birth. I want to get the music out of me as quickly as I can, because it's such a strain to wait. I'm totally impatient. So the important thing for me is the people that I'm working with, and that they can work whatever equipment we use very fast. But I couldn't have made all this stuff the last few years without all the new technology. I could never have written The River and the Requiem so quickly if it hadn't been for the QY20, and the possibility of transferring the MIDI data into the Macintosh and Audio Logic, which Mark runs via Session 8. And we've recently used the Otari Radar hard disk recorder, and it's pretty fast too. I hate being held up by technology so much that if I'm not working with Mark, I'll work totally analogue, because I do not want to be fucking about with people who don't know how to get the digital stuff working. A lot of people are quite slow working with digital and MIDI equipment. I've been on quite a few sessions with other people when you're waiting for five hours because things don't sync up properly or something else isn't quite right, and that can be very frustrating. People get tied up with technology and formats and the simplicity gets lost: what's lacking is good music and good ideas and good approaches. We have enough formats as it is."

"Darkness that's cathartic and leads somewhere is great, but when it becomes a thing in itself, it becomes evil, stagnant, because there's no movement there."

By contrast, what Wobble clearly doesn't think we have enough of is his music. Compare his six releases during 1995-97, and his aim to release five or six CDs per year, with the output of that other pioneering champion of world music, Peter Gabriel, and you wonder whether they're actually inhabiting the same world. But it's not just modern technology that allows Wobble to be so prolific; he wrote, recorded, and mixed The Celtic Poets in 16 days, without help from his ubiquitous QY20.

"I made some keyboard and percussion loops and got Jaki Liebezeit [the ex-Can drummer, and a long-time collaborator] in to play against that, then wrote parts for other players, which were recorded one by one. They were all older players who knew what they were doing, and so you can work very quickly. The CD starts with a dramatic opener about the Great Famine, written by Shane MacGowan. It's called 'The Dunes' and it's very, very heavy. You'll notice on the Celtic Poets album and on the Blake album that there are very few moments where there's a rhythm in the music behind the spoken words. I don't like breaking up the rhythms of the words and making them fit the rhythm of the music, as in rap. It's tiring for people to listen to. I like to keep the poem's rhythm. So the backing is going to have to be plaintive. But you don't want something sentimental, you don't want to convey the feeling of someone who has lost their pet budgie or cat, so you avoid minor keys and you have something between major and minor, something modal. Again, it's the area between dark and light that interests me."

And so, a decade after his return from all manner of nocturnal, Underground and dark worlds, Wobble now inhabits a mythical, magical musical world somewhere in a twilight where he can safely explore both light and darkness, without risking falling into some abyss again. It may seem odd that a man who's lived in East London for most of his life has become a champion of world music and spiritual awareness, but Wobble quietly and eloquently solves this seeming contradiction by declaring London a magical world city.

"I very much identify with Blake, who lived almost his whole life in London. He was one in a long line of Cockney mystics, and a lot of his spiritual visions were tied up with London. It's my city and it's a very special, deep, subtle city. There are references to London on the Celtic Poets as well, and to the Thames. All rivers are holy, and the Thames is my river. London was once a Celtic city, and I'm of Irish descent, so all these things weave together. All cultures, whether Celtic, or English, or Buddhist, or Aboriginal, or Mongolian, or Indian, represent eternal truths that are very ancient, but still very alive today."

[M!$H]

‘I’m still ye olde noble savage’

The drugs, the drinking, the bust-ups with John Lydon are over. Jah Wobble tells Stephen Dalton about his journey from punk rock to Plato

Before we start, Jah Wobble wants to get a few things straight. First, he had no involvement in sinking Richard Branson’s houseboat. Nor did he hit Sid Vicious with an axe, since he was “comatose upstairs” at the time. Besides, Sid was only “prodded” with the axe. And forget those stories that he set fire to the drummer Karl Burns — those singed curtains were merely part of an LSD-fuelled game of live-action Space Invaders that got out of hand. Obviously.

“And another thing,” says Wobble. “I was not with Sid the night he attacked Whispering Bob Harris at the Speakeasy. Why the hell would you want to attack Bob Harris? You might point and laugh, but you wouldn’t attack him.”

Even now, 30 years after anarchy swept the UK, and two decades since he gave up drinking, Wobble has a lingering reputation as a boozy East End bootboy. In fact, the 48-year-old father of four who greets me at his home in Manchester’s leafy southern suburbs is affable, avuncular and highly articulate.

Being typecast as the postpunk Vinnie Jones, Wobble argues, is just another reflection of the class-ridden music industry. “I’m still ye olde noble savage,” he says with a shrug. “The credit you’re given is often that you have got this intuitive knowledge, never the fact that you’ve spent years honing and working at something. A bloke like me, you feel you’ve got to work twice as hard and be twice as prolific.”

Wobble certainly has been prolific since the punk era, when Vicious christened him by drunkenly slurring his real name, John Wardle. He has released some 30 solo albums and collaborations in the past 25 years, and his canon includes dub reggae, avant-garde jazz-rock, English folk, multicultural fusion and the writings of William Blake.

Many of these diverse musical moods resurface on Wobble’s latest album, Heart and Soul. From postpunk sneers to sumptuous Middle Eastern soundscapes, it is probably his richest and most accessible solo work to date. There is also a sweet symmetry in releasing the album on the legendary reggae label Trojan, recently reactivated and enjoying its 40th anniversary.

“It does mean a lot to me,” Wobble says. “There is a continuity there. I bought Trojan records when I was 9 or 10, and I stayed with the reggae. It was a perfect completion of the circle to be on the label so many years later.”

Born and raised in the docklands of the East End of London, the young Wardle was something of a teenage tearaway. But he was also a bright spark, voracious reader and knowledge junkie. Which helps to explain why his conversation, like his music, is a vivid patchwork of diverse cultural references. Plato is a favourite, cropping up repeatedly in our interview, between Descartes and Derrida, David Cameron and Richard Dawkins.
Wobble’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur is another recurring theme. If he managed a Premiership team, he argues, he would “car bomb” overpaid prima donna players and force the rest into barracks on starvation wages. “They would live more like warrior poets,” he says. “And they’d have to study Plato.” Splendid stuff. You don’t get this kind of insight from meeting Joss Stone.

A former altar boy from a staunch London-Irish family, Wobble was schooled by the Sisters of Mercy, “the Waffen SS of Catholic nuns”. Although he rejected Catholicism in his teens, he retained a lifelong fascination with the magical and metaphysical. “I still feel when I play [that] the Holy Spirit is present,” he says.
The former Sex Pistol John Lydon, another mouthy autodidact from a similar working-class London-Irish background, gave Wobble his bass-playing break at the age of 20. But these childhood friends fell out bitterly. It is 25 years since Wobble walked out on Lydon’s ground-breaking postPistols band, Public Image Ltd. Knowing that the singer kept his cash in a shoebox in a neighbouring flat, he helped himself to an unauthorised pay-off, then strode off into the sunset.

“I didn’t see John for ten years,” he says. “I f***ing hated him, couldn’t wait to get away. The music in PiL was good, but everything outside of that was complete trouble. The business was badly run; there was extensive heroin use within the band. One of my big arguments with John is that it was his responsibility to sort that out. People say PiL had this fascination with drugs and darkness, but I think we were good in spite of all that bollocks rather than because of it.”

Lydon and Wobble eventually patched up their differences, and still occasionally meet up.

Meanwhile, the bass virtuoso enjoyed a creative spurt after PiL, but drugs and drink clobbered him in the Eighties. He took speed, even dabbled in heroin, but booze was his main poison. “I never had anything but a pathological relationship with alcohol,” he says. “It was the elixir of the gods; it just took me somewhere. I had to have more and more.”

In 1986 Wobble entered an Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme. He has been clean and sober ever since. Married with two young daughters, he then made ends meet by working for London Underground. During this “Kafkaesque” period he baffled rush-hour commuters at Tower Hill by declaring “I used to be somebody” over the intercom.

But he would soon be somebody again. Wobble bounced back in the early Nineties, enjoying chart success with his multicultural dub-pop outfit Invaders of the Heart. He also worked with younger acolytes such as Primal Scream, Sinéad O’Connor and Björk.

Inevitably, perhaps, Wobble’s wayward style soon rubbed up against major label politics.

“Everyone used to tell me I did too many records, but I always thought that was mad,” he says. “No one would say about Picasso: ‘He was f***ing good but he did too much’. ”

Wobble founded his own independent label, 30 Hertz, in 1996. Soon afterwards he finally left the East End and settled in suburban Stockport, partly because his second wife, the Chinese-born harpist Zi Lan Liao, has local family connections. Detached from the mainstream music industry, he now enjoys a flexibility and autonomy unthinkable in his years as a hired hand.

“If I had an idea for another album right now, I could start it today,” Wobble says. “I’m reminded of the William Blake quote: ‘If you don’t have your own system, you will be enslaved by another man’s.’ I was able to have my own system, which feels fantastic. I’m not complacent about that because I know I could be wired up to a machine in hospital tomorrow. But right now, I’ve never had it so good.”

[Snoogans4Jay]

WOW I had no idea that drug use was so rampant in PiL back then. I always knew John had used Amphetamines and drinks quite a bit, but HEROIN was fucking up PiL too? Geez . You would think after the whole Sid and Nancy thing......

The articles are GREAT though, thanks much for posting them, it is good to know more about Jah......always so mysterious seeming him....

[Tao~]

Those were some great articles.....I am always eager to learn more about the members of PiL.....and I have a deep fascination with Jah.....the poor guy has been through HELL!!! But it's nice to see him happy now.......Thanks for sharing with us......

[M!$H]

admin said:

WOW I had no idea that drug use was so rampant in PiL back then. I always knew John had used Amphetamines and drinks quite a bit, but HEROIN was fucking up PiL too? Geez . You would think after the whole Sid and Nancy thing......

The articles are GREAT though, thanks much for posting them, it is good to know more about Jah......always so mysterious seeming him....

Keith Levene was a severe heroin addict. But yeah, there were a LOT of drugs back in PiL... all sorts.

[Snoogans4Jay]

mishhell said:

admin said:

WOW I had no idea that drug use was so rampant in PiL back then. I always knew John had used Amphetamines and drinks quite a bit, but HEROIN was fucking up PiL too? Geez . You would think after the whole Sid and Nancy thing......

The articles are GREAT though, thanks much for posting them, it is good to know more about Jah......always so mysterious seeming him....

Keith Levene was a severe heroin addict. But yeah, there were a LOT of drugs back in PiL... all sorts.

Awww nuts.... ......to be expected I spose.... .....but still I had always figured Johnny probably did coke....so thin back then and all (isn't it awful you can't be thin without people thinking you are on drugs )..........but Keef whyyyyyyyyy

[M!$H]

admin said:

mishhell said:

Keith Levene was a severe heroin addict. But yeah, there were a LOT of drugs back in PiL... all sorts.

Awww nuts.... ......to be expected I spose.... .....but still I had always figured Johnny probably did coke....so thin back then and all (isn't it awful you can't be thin without people thinking you are on drugs )..........but Keef whyyyyyyyyy

If I piece all the stories together correctly, Keith's addiction started before PiL... when he was squatting around London, etc. It's what eventually lead to him being kicked out of PiL because they were headed to Japan or something and they were worried about being caught with drugs...

I know the whole lot of PiL did coke, and, as Jim Walker said once, they were all "drowning in a sea of alcohol." I guess it's to be expected, as they were all quite young and being given large amounts of money from record labels, as well as all the connections & free time they needed for drugs, but it's just good they all got out of it without any serious damage.

[Tao~]

THat's so true...Mishhell.......Sadly many performers can never get away from what their fortune brings...I am so glad that did not happen to Johnny.........

[M!$H]

tao said:

THat's so true...Mishhell.......Sadly many performers can never get away from what their fortune brings...I am so glad that did not happen to Johnny.........

Yes, he was/IS far too talented for that fate, same with Jah, Keith, and all the others.

[M!$H]

"Thank you for posting. Yeah, you'd think Keith, etc. would have learned a lesson from Sid about the heroin. But look at Steve Jones. Steve got a first hand glimpse of what the drugs did to Sid. He even shared a stage with Sid who was acting so erratically because of the drugs. Despite this, Steve developed his own heroin habit at about the time Sid died. I guess with drug-abusers, they think they can handle it, don't care, feel they need something to cope with the pressure, or just do the drugs and let the chips fall where they may. Sad and a real waste." - Kathy

I think that's waht you said? LOL the quote thingy got a little messed up in your post. So yeah.

But anyway. Yeah. I know Steve actually started doing heroin around the same time Sid did. But Steve wasn't an intravenous user - he smoked it, which is no different, but it's a little less harmful to the body, as it doesn't cause your veins to collapse. But we know he started around the same time as Sid because when he realized he was addicted, it was just after the Pistols had broken up and he's mentioned that he'd been doing it off and on for about a year. :\ It didn't affect him as quickly as it did Sid.

Plus, regarding steve, we know he has an easily obsessive personality - he's talked about it and other's have. IN Glen's book, Glen mentions how Steve would use a word and he'd use that word constantly because he was obsessed with it. (I'm like this too, but I know i have a very addictive personality as well.) Steve had a lot of abuse in his childhood, which is granted no reason for drug abuse, but he's mentioned how he became a sex addict because he was trying to feel "normal" after years of physical and sexual abuse as a child. So I think drugs played a huge hand in that sort of trying to feel normal or trying to block out memories. And no matter how fucked up the people around him were (re: Sid) he was just trying to look past his pain. Also in Glen's book, he mentions how Steve used to be very unable to cope and to discuss things like an adult; he figured it was best to just avoid things and run away. Which also says a lot about why he used drugs/sex/alcohol to try to forget his past.

WOW now that I'm done analyzing STeve... lol

[kathy]

Mishhell, I suppose we'll have to wait for Steve's book to be sure (and that's one I'm definately buying!!), I think you gave some good insight into addressing the question of why Jonsey did drugs in the first place and continued to do so after he saw what happened to Sid. It's sad to think he had so much pain in his life.