I m standing outside Bethnal Green tube station in London s East End, waiting for Jah Wobble to show up. The Salmon and Ball on the corner is advertising a special offer: double shot and mixer for #3.00. It doesn t look like a place I d feel too comfortable walking into but then, looks can be misleading.
Neighbours include Dimi s Unisex Salon, Khaku Newsagents, Nico s Charcoal Grill Restaurant ( Home Made English Food , the window sign says reassuringly), a bookies, and the Sanctuary Pentacostal Church. At the junction, two small boys armed with sponges and squeegees are doing their best to extract cash from hapless motorists. This is a neighborhood of immigrants, first port of call for people from African and Asian countries seeking a better life. Once they ve made it, they ll move on to tidier, more middle-class surroundings as indeed have many of the old East End families who lived in this area when Jah Wobble was growing up.
Born in 1958 to a solidly Catholic family of Irish descent in Stepney, East London, Wobble was an altar boy as a child and dreamed of joining the Merchant Navy. Later, he fell into the nascent punk rock scene, becoming the bass player with John Lydon s post-Sex Pistols outfit Public Image Limited (PiL). He acquired his odd-sounding name after a drunk Sid Vicious introduced him to someone and slurred the words so badly that John Wardle came out as Jah Wobble. And now here he is.
We go into the caff, where Wobble tucks happily into a plate of steak, egg and chips washed down with milky tea while chatting about Bach, Sgt. Pepper, Bertrand Russell, mathematics and Wittgenstein; and then it s back to his house. The sitting room is comfortable enough, with wood floors and lots of light; but the furniture several cushy dark blue armchairs, a small sofa and the biggest television I ve ever seen looks a bit randomly positioned, as though he d only just moved in and hadn t yet decided where to put things.
Wobble lives here with his girlfriend, Chinese harpist Zi Lan Liao, whom he met at a summer solstice festival five years ago. I was saying when we met, darling, Finland, weren t it, 92? he asks her affectionately in an accent so classically Cockney it could be a parody of itself. What was you doing in Finland? You was doing a workshop, weren t you? You picked me up, really, didn t ya?
Wobble s father was a clerk in the tea trade, working at the docks that would eventually become Canary Wharf. Now both parents are living in Essex, as is Wobble s sister, but he himself remains stubbornly tied to his home neighbourhood.
I ve come from a generation of little two-up, two-downs, he says. I grew up playing on bomb sites. It was a real East End upbringing, a community that all knew each other, and they scattered to the four corners of Essex. I come from the last generation of real Cockneys. You ve got your EastEnders on television, and that s just hogwash. It s morose and stupid and crappy.
What I remember as a kid is you had this whole socialist thing where people educated themselves and got active in unions. And there was a love of culture. There was a very strong Irish influence as well, this thing of storytelling, yarn telling, where histories are passed on by way of people telling stories. And the celebration of character, great matriarchs. Cockneys are a great amalgam of Irish culture and Eastern cultures and Italian and whatever there s richness there, but on EastEnders it s all bovine and stupid and one dimensional.
After being kicked out of school at 15 for bad behaviour, Wobble took on a series of jobs in factories, building sites and warehouses none of which lasted long: I had this pattern developing of going doing jobs, getting the sack three weeks later, telling the boss to fuck off, throwing a moody. Luckily, he eventually managed to find a place at the Kingsway College of Further Education, which he describes as one of those places where you ve got the malcontents, the kids who are kind of bright but didn t fit in too well. There was this whole group of people that got really fucking angry and just wanted to kick out against something.
Among that group were John Lydon and John Ritchie, soon to be known respectively as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols.
The first time I ever picked a bass up was at Sid s place. It was a nice pre- 67 Fender. I just thought I could do something with it, so right from the word go I started composing little basslines. Totally simple, and I still basically do the same thing.
When the punk thing happened, it was great because it got people playing instruments. I would never have played if it weren t for punk. It opened up a whole world for me. It was fantastic. The bass was just a thing that suited me completely, that was my bridge into music. If I hadn t got into music I would have been in big trouble. I don t think I ever would have fitted in. I wouldn t have been a happy soul. Music really has given me everything.
After the Pistols untimely demise, Lydon formed PiL and asked Wobble to play bass in the new band. Wobble swiftly acquired a reputation as a formidable musician; Melody Maker described him as formulating some of the most awesome and original bass lines in modern music. Equally well-deserved was his notoriety as a wilful tearaway.
I was the baby in PiL, he recalls. I was 18 years of age when the whole thing started. It was all very indisciplined we didn t have a manager or anything. It was wild. It was really intense, to be that young and doing all this crazy stuff. The muse did descend for some reason on this bunch of fucking lunatics, and it worked. There was incredible power in that group. It was totally genuine, totally authentic, and it burned out in a couple of years, which is what a band should do, really.
I remember, we went to Maxim s in Paris and I didn t even know what a big deal that was. We didn t like the look of the food, so we asked for cheese rolls. All I knew was, you could drink wine that was very old. I thought it was incredible, to drink wine out of a bottle that had been there since the First World War started or something, so we got stuck into it, just drank it out of the bottle. I remember people were looking at us, thinking louts, got no class. But there were always crazy things happening.
Basically, why it s good is it gets all the bollocks out of you quickly. One of my most overriding memories is we went to America and we had the limo, big limo, you could put a tennis court in it, and there was the TV in it and all that, and I sat there, and it was like, this is great, I know this is bollocks. I know limos and all that won t make me happy. I m glad I ve done this, because this immediately doesn t make me happy, and I don t want to know about it, so I can go onto the next thing.
Wobble left PiL after two intense, drug and alcohol fueled years. He started up a power trio called the Human Condition, then put together a bigger band which became the first incarnation of the Invaders Of The Heart. Meanwhile, however, his drinking was getting worse and his marriage was falling apart.
I was becoming more and more of a handful for everyone. All the big labels didn t want to know about me, I was too much trouble.
Giving up both the drink and the music, Wobble went underground literally. First as a ticket collector, then as a guard and finally as a driver, Wobble worked in the London Underground, where for the first time in his life he was seen as a good steady worker with bright prospects. He enjoyed the job, but by 1987 the music was once again beckoning. Wobble soon reassembled the Invaders Of The Heart and emerged from the tunnels with the album Without Judgement, which drew raves in the music press: Jah Wobble shines like a beacon of integrity and hope, gushed the Sunday Telegraph. The next album, Bomba, was even more widely acclaimed, and its follow up, Rising Above Bedlam, featured a duet with Sinead O Connor ( Visions Of You ) and was short listed for the Mercury Music Prize.
On subsequent recordings, Wobble became ever more experimental, forming liaisons with a series of unlikely collaborators Gavin Friday, Dolores O Riordan, Natasha Atlas, Baaba Maal, Pharaoh Saunders and Brian Eno, to name a few.
Tired of trying to explain his ideas to record companies, Wobble has now formed his own label, 30 Hertz Records. Its debut release, just out last month, is The Celtic Poets, with the gravel voiced Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners reciting poetry by Louis MacNeice, Brendan Kennelly and Shane MacGowan to backing by the current lineup of the Invaders Of The Heart: Wobble on bass, the aforementioned Zi Lan Liao on ku-cheng and harp, Harry Beckett ex-Can sticksman Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Jean-Pierre Rasle (bagpipes), Baluji Shrivastev (sitar), Clive Bell (flute), Jogi Hirota (shakuhachi) and longtime Invaders stalwart Mark Ferda (keyboards).
I wanted to make something with a Celtic angle, but looking at the roots side, he says, and I wanted to couple that with good earthy from the heart poetry. Celtic music really is a sort of basic DNA code within music. There s that thing of pentatonic scales and three four rhythms, which is very Celtic, and it s also very African and quite Oriental as well, so all this stuff connects up. Three four rhythms make circles, so you lose where the one is, and in the process of losing where the one is, you re losing the separation between your false self and your true self, or greater self, and then you re going to lose the feeling of separation between yourself and your neighbour, so there s that feeling of oneness and unity, and that pertains to godhead and all that. The spirit is the most subtle form of matter, and matter is the most gross form of spirit, if you like, and everything becomes one entity.
Like it says in the Bible, first there was the Word, and then there was Light. So first comes sound. When you really play music, you channel the music the music exists, and it comes through you. You re there to help the stuff come into being. You do service to the music, and the music is a form of spirituality. The studio to me is like a temple. The real fun is in worshipping it s actually fun, it doesn t have to be po faced Gregorian chant. A three minute pop song can be divine as well.
Next on the agenda is a live performance, set for August 10th at the King s Head in London. Wobble isn t entirely certain what form the evening will take: I want to leave it off the wall spoken word and some very raw music. Around the same time, he ll be releasing a requiem mass, to be followed by an epic album provisionally titled Journey Of The Soul. Wobble s own soul appears to have finally found a certain peace. He doesn t take this serenity for granted, but nourishes it with Turkish baths, martial arts and 15-mile walks that take him all over London and its environs.
If you go for a walk for two or three hours, he says, for the first half-hour you might be worried about paying the bills, and then all that bullshit dies away and you start thinking what a wonderful place this is, London, this whole messy cityscape, and you can t help but ponder the nature of creation. n