Jah Wobble - Lying back in ecstasy

“Fucking morals, fucking money”: collapse and climb back out of a punk abyss

England in the second half of the Seventies is a country steeped in social and cultural tensions: there's an air of crisis, unemployment is rising, and the controversial Thatcher era is just around the corner. Among Albion's young subjects a renewed anti-bourgeois impulse is spreading, while the large Caribbean community responds by strengthening its ties to its homeland and begins to play, even in grey, buttoned-up England, that strange, deeply psychedelic music that was being born on the other side of the Atlantic in those very years: dub.

It's in some dark basement on the outskirts of town, at parties more or less legal, that the parallel universes of coloured spikes and dreadlocks converge, where a London punk and a sly-smiling rastafarian find themselves sharing music and spliffs.

It's on nights like these that a young anarchic-minded lad, a son of the East End working class, John Joseph Wardle, finds himself with a few college mates – one Johnny Rotten and one Sid Vicious – discovering the records of King Tubby, Augustus Pablo and Lee “Scratch” Perry, soaking up their alien, distorted sounds and, above all, their dark, amplified basslines. The experience must have left a deep mark on the three future punk hotheads, Lydon included, who would later embark on genuine study trips in search of the genre's origins.

Meanwhile punk is literally setting London ablaze, Lydon becomes a star in his own way, and during one of the last three-way benders, Vicious was apparently so wasted that he spent the whole evening muttering an incomprehensible “Wobble” in reference to his friend: from that moment on, John Joseph Wardle becomes simply Jah Wobble to everyone. Or at least, so the legend goes.

What happens right after falls under the heading Public Image Limited: Jah Wobble, still with those “dub” nights ringing in his head, joins as bassist – an instrument he'd actually only just learned to play – and leaves the band with a handful of staggering performances, chief among them the one on “Metal Box“, whose show-stealing bass became a genuine turning point in the history of post-punk.

The honeymoon, however, cracks very soon: Jah's aspirations and Lydon's intentions are no longer compatible. Also undermining the relationship between the two is Wardle's increasingly restless, over-the-top personality: on various occasions he's caught drunk, starting fights and causing brawls, and even attempting to set fire to the then-drummer of the Fall, Karl Burns.

At the height of his nihilistic whirlwind, Jah Wobble forms Steel Leg, a band thrown together with Keith Levene and Don Letts chasing a somewhat contrived dub-rock, and surprises everyone by releasing his first solo album. The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal comes out in 1980 and is met first and foremost with protests from Lydon, who accuses Wobble of having used some tracks from “Metal Box” without permission, marking the definitive split from Pil, a band the bassist had, in effect, already left.

Jah Wobble's “betrayal” plays out across eight tracks staging a kind of pop music from Mars — dazed and mocking, still post-punk at its core but favouring distorted, unpredictable solutions. “Betrayal” is thus the delirium of a punk minstrel, its brief bass line proudly on display, while “Beat The Drum For Me” abruptly slows the pace to a hazy, hallucinogenic dub-reggae groove, with a bass line that seems to chant a mantra: certainly the most obvious and instinctive tribute to the Jamaican masters.

The following “Blueberry Hill” and “Tales From Outer Space” are two lively, brazen pop sketches fit for paranoid crooners and sci-fi films; with “Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life” Wobble takes us straight aboard a disco-funk spaceship populated by alien creatures and drunken backing singers, as we spot from above that little coloured dot called Earth. “Dan Mcarthur”, opened by a dark warning in Russian, is a de-structured instrumental, almost obsessive in its synthetic pulses and processed harmonica phrases, which sets up the closing “Pinapple”.

A relatively short album, Betrayal is an atypical, mysterious record, yet a perfect litmus test for the multifaceted, elusive personality of its mad sculptor.

Over the following two years Wobble toured Europe and America under the moniker Human Condition, with Jim Walker on drums and Dave “Animal” Maltby on guitar (two cassette releases would also document the adventure), while the London anarchist began forging ties with the respectable salons of the European avant-garde — in particular with former Can member Holger Czukay, with whom he struck up a long, if unstable, friendship.

In 1982 came Full Circle, a three-way effort with Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. The record is a bizarre ethno-kraut experiment, in which the mastery and rhythmic meticulousness of the two German artists are easily traced, but it's Wobble who is the trio's real surprise and “loose cannon”: his is the opening “How Much Are They?”, which could easily have fit on the tracklist of Betrayal, as well as “Trench Warfare”, dense with sonic debris and shrapnel, held together masterfully only by his bass line, and the spectral dub of “Twilight World”. The record's peak, however, is “Where’s The Money”, where the three musicians' abilities find a perfect point of fusion, amid pitch-black basslines, Wobble's zombie-like vocals and assorted tribalisms, arriving from a planet not too far from that black hole that is, even today, “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts“.

A refined album, one that perhaps pays the price of a little too much virtuosity (the two central tracks) — inevitable, maybe, when the professors in the room are heavyweights like the two former Can members — but this in no way undermines the success of a record that remains pure listening pleasure to this day.

Within the space of barely two years, then, punk's problem child seems to slip effortlessly into the role of attentive student of his instrument (soon becoming one of its most renowned and sought-after experts), equally at ease among the elites of the avant-garde and of pop-rock, happily married and with a daughter to support (the future actress Hayley Angel Wardle).

In 1983 came another ambitious project masterminded by Czukay, Snake Charmer, which also featured The Edge of U2, this time devoted to Kraftwerk-style synth-pop and a close study of electronic beats. Wobble initially joined in with great enthusiasm, then lost interest in the project, frustrated by Czukay's academic approach, and began publicly voicing his disgust with the dynamics of the record industry and the commercialisation of music — a fight he would pour all his energy into in the years to come. As if to say: the East End punk had awoken again.

But with rejection and rebellion the usual problems, never truly resolved, resurfaced too: drugs, and above all the outrageous amounts of alcohol he was by then consuming daily. For his second proper album, Wobble thus refused any “hot” collaborators and promotional gimmicks of any kind, deciding provocatively to play everything himself, assembling every part in low fidelity directly in his bedroom, in the company of his long-time friend Animal.

The resulting work, aptly titled Bedroom Album, is a true one-off within his substantial discography. At the centre of the scene this time is a stripped-down, subdued musician, surrounded by the ghosts of his own mind, busy mending shreds of dreams and visions under the influence of opiates.

“City” opens the proceedings with a typically new wave attitude, were it not carried elsewhere by Wobble's paranoid vocals and a flute that seems to twist the knife in the wound of the obsessed. “Fading” continues along the same path, swapping the post-punk architecture for a carpet of tribal percussion and synths, while the single “Long Long Way” is a number of pure hallucinogenic psychedelia, a kind of road trip daydreamed in the bassist's distorted imagination. With the macabre “Sense Of History” and the requiem organ of “Hill In Corea” the album reaches its peak of gloom and darkness, which resolves into the total haze of the drone of “Journey To Death”.

The second half of the record becomes almost claustrophobic in its suffocating repetition of tribal rhythms and funereal themes, from the Arabic-tinged “Invaders Of The Heart” to the tragic “Desert Song”, squeezed between a pitch-black bass and a flamenco guitar, all the way to the macabre rosary of “Heart Of The Jungle”. Wobble unleashes a handful of requiems as evocative as they are oppressive, following his mind's altered perceptions towards an impenetrable, anguished “Heart of Darkness”, sealing what remains to this day his darkest and most personal work.

Bedroom Album would also be the last release under the Jah Wobble name for over a decade: having stepped out of his bedroom, Wardle found himself once again repulsed by the record industry's world of marketing and phoney relationships, as well as by his one true friend/enemy, the bottle, which paved the way towards a tunnel of addiction and sudden outbursts of aggression that undermined every fresh artistic impulse.

In 1985 he still found time to record the mediocre Neon Moon with Ollie Marland, before surprisingly deciding to hang up his bass and leave music altogether. Over the following five years Wobble vanished without a trace, wandering in search of odd jobs to support his family and trying to finally break free of his old vices.

It is from this period, finally, that the curious anecdote dates of Wobble working on the London Underground and shouting loudly over the speaker: “I used to be somebody – I repeat, I used to be somebody!”.

Redeemed on the road to world music: the Invaders Of The Heart

He had to start somewhere. Having won his gruelling battle with alcohol, Wobble returns right to where it all began: amid the fumes of dub.

It's with a brand-new fervour and clarity that the bassist slowly starts rebuilding his ties with the music world, forging important new friendships (Justin Adams, John Reynolds, Abdel Ali Slimani) alongside the usual, essential David Maltby and Neville Murray. A muse also appears in Jah Wobble's new path: a then-unknown Natacha Atlas, a formidable Maghrebi vocalist with whom Wobble strikes up a turbulent personal relationship, and a key figure in the musician's evolving journey.

With this sizeable ensemble of collaborators and friends, christened Invaders Of The Heart, Wobble officially gets back on his feet in 1989 with a long European tour culminating in two acclaimed shows in the Netherlands, where the material that would later make up Without Judgement was recorded live.

Jah Wobble's rebirth comes under the banner of a Babel of forms and genres, improvisation and pop structures, dub rhythms and riffs built on Middle Eastern scales, with the only guiding spirit being the sturdy, circling bass that breathes over the chaos of souls unable to communicate.

Yet the whole record manages to sound remarkably cohesive and fluid, from the nocturnal moves of its first quarter, which culminates in the sermon of "Spirit", to the riot of riffs and rai vocals of "Drowned And The Saved" and the brilliant pop number "So Many Years". The album's middle section is a mash-up of quotations, samples and warnings somewhere between the spiritual and the satirical, aimed at the ever-maligned société du spectacle, flowing into the warm groove of "What Will You Say". "Voodoo" briefly recalls the work with Liebezeit, while "Psyche" improvises a vigorous dub thick with synths and distortion, setting up the final stretch of the record, which blends completely free-form dub, ambient textures, psychedelia and "world" fragments.

Assembled in a relatively short time given the sheer amount of material, Without Judgement is striking for its freshness and cohesion, finding a third way between technical rigour and off-the-cuff inspiration, and above all unleashing a flood of ideas and inputs that would lay the groundwork for the musician's future evolution, as well as serving as a primary source of inspiration for several other projects taking shape around the same time (Transglobal Underground chief among them).

Making the most of a hugely fertile creative streak, Wobble heads straight back into the studio to work on and further develop the ideas that had taken shape during the recent live shows. Tweaking the line-up of his Invaders Of The Heart, the bassist this time looks to build a bridge towards pop proper, expanding the ensemble to include Sinéad O'Connor and Margot Vynia, and this time giving his Natacha Atlas a leading role, despite the pair's constant bickering and mutual accusations of madness and unruliness.

Rising Above Bedlam arrives as early as 1991: a pop record full of vivid, exotic shades, seeking (and finding) a light, naive formula, even as it rests on polyrhythms and instrumental layering that are anything but simple.

The record opens with "Visions Of You", featuring Sinéad O'Connor on backing vocals, an ethereal, dreamy single with ambiguous lyrics that fuelled rumours — never confirmed — of the bassist's conversion to Catholicism. "Relight The Flame", by contrast, is a dub track with Hispanic touches, with Atlas's vocals rising distantly in the background, before she takes centre stage in the delightful upbeat Caribbean sway of "Bomba". The party-starting "Ungodly Kingdom" and the drier dub of the title track pave the way for the record's true "hot" core, "Erzulie", an adventurous worldbeat journey wrapped around the Maghrebi goddess's trills, somewhere between ambient and Afro-Cuban fanfare.

The arrangements grow more complex in the final stretch of the record, with the long Middle Eastern-flavoured ride of "Everyman's An Island" (another jab at the world of showbiz), the dark, mystical "Sweet Divinity", another cameo from the Irish singer-songwriter, and finally the positive, reggae-flavoured vibrations of "Wonderful World".

The John Wardle of Rising Above Bedlam is by now a mature musician, praised by critics and industry insiders alike, and counting among his fans an illustrious name like Prince. Among the curious episodes involving Wobble is the one in which the Minneapolis imp has his manager approach the London bassist, keen to have a private word with him: upon receiving the request, Wobble reportedly flew into a rage and ordered the manager: "Take this f***ing bullshit out of here, now!"

Wobble's temper didn't spare poor Atlas either, who was kicked out of the band for daring to want to take the helm of the Invaders Of The Heart.

Wobble's project, however, kept gaining momentum, reaching the peak of its popularity with album number three: Take Me To God. The third Invaders Of The Heart record picks up the world-music ideas of its predecessor and expands and stirs them further into a new, indecipherable chaos, this time with the shape and urgency of a joyous pop Apocalypse.

Bolstered by some notable guest appearances (Anneli Drecker of Bel Canto, Dolores O'Riordan, Najma Akhtar), Take Me To God is a brilliant union of dub and world music, which Wobble and his many guests fit into structures closer than ever to the traditional song form, with an eye on the clubs and the musical "feel" of the Nineties. The material is once again extremely varied, from the dream-pop of "Becoming More Like God" to the cumbia of "Whisky" and the Hispanic-tinged dub of "Amor", from the Afro-flavoured melancholy of "Angels" and "I'm An Algerian" (with Slimani on vocals) to the joyful "The Sun Does Rise", from the techno-world delirium of "Yoga Of The Nightclub" to the Teutonic drift of "No Change Is Sexy" and "Raga", once again featuring the excellent Liebezeit on percussion.

Even with such a varied array of sources, the record once again pulls off the trick of staying cohesive and enjoyable from start to finish, thanks above all to Wobble's firm hand – by now firmly established as the prophet of a brand-new way of conceiving world music, in the age of techno, fast food and Real World.

Over the years, many critics have tried to draw a parallel between Wobble's path and the far more celebrated career of Peter Gabriel – comparisons the bassist has always firmly rejected. This time, though, it's Wobble himself who has an anecdote about the former Genesis man's very different Weltanschauung: "Once I dropped by Real World to ask what had happened to some material recorded in his studios with a Cameroonian musician. Gabriel arrived and immediately pulled the 'colourful shell' out of a drawer and handed it to me. I felt like some third-rate gardener making inappropriate requests to the landlord – that's when I realised just how cold-blooded an art collector he really is, except instead of acquiring paintings, he acquires music."

Jah Wobble's run with the Invaders Of The Heart doesn't stop with Take Me To God, though over the years it drifts toward increasingly intriguing solutions (chief among them the curious tribal-Celtic dub of The Celtic Poets) that nonetheless lose vitality and pop lightness, culminating in the thoroughly watered-down Full Moon Over The Shopping Mall (1999).

The decline of the Invaders Of The Heart coincides with the growing fragmentation of Wobble's activities: he resurfaces as a remixer with Brian Eno on Spinner (1995), collaborates with Björk and Pharoah Sanders, strikes up an important and fruitful friendship with Bill Laswell (joining his Divination project), and, above all, founds his own label, 30 Hertz Records, through which he breaks away from the rest of the music industry for good.

Back to Zion: electronic dub and (anti)global revelations

By now the time is finally ripe to go back to recording under his own name.

Jah Wobble's return, nearly thirteen years after Bedroom Album, is sealed by Heaven & Earth (1996), a manifesto of Wardle's new spiritual and artistic dimension, for which the label 'bassist' has by now become far too limiting.

The album is a sophisticated, ambitious blend of Eastern and Western tradition, embracing orchestral arrangements and electronic trance, jazz and downbeat. Solemn, crystalline melodies straight out of the Far East open the record, a continuous movement between folkloric longing for an irretrievably lost Japanese grace and purity, and majestic processions straight out of "The Last Emperor".

"A Love Song" is another notable track, not only because it mysteriously sweeps us off toward some parched shore of the eastern Mediterranean, but also because it marks Wobble's renewed chemistry with his favourite muse: Natacha Atlas. Speaking about her involvement in the "Heaven And Earth" sessions, Atlas reveals some details about Wobble's "bizarre" methods: "Jah wanted very specific vocals for the track ('A Love Song'), but for some reason I couldn't keep up with what he wanted and kept insisting on singing it my own way. He's willing to challenge his collaborators in every way until he gets the result he's after: that time in the studio he unzipped his jeans in front of the whole band, pulled out some pubic hair, put it in his mouth and ate it while staring at me during the take…"

The album then gathers itself into the brief sonata "Dying Over Europe", a prelude to the splendid "Divine Mother", driven by a dry, spellbinding dub, steeped in circling basslines and Eastern scales.

"Gone To Croatan", on the other hand, settles into a long, thoroughly enjoyable, expansive chill out, while "Hit Me" hooks back into the West of the Nineties, with Rob Swift's scratching and Pharoah Sanders' sax prominently on display, and "Om Namah Shiva" closes the circle with a thoroughly modern trance on the banks of the Ganges, swirling around Najma Akhtar's vocalising. It's also from here that, symbolically, Jah Wobble's new artistic incarnation takes flight.

As the 2000s draw near, then, we find a fertile and bold musician. With Requiem (1997) and The Inspiration Of William Blake (1996), Wobble chooses to pay tribute to the poet who has obsessed him since adolescence in two different guises: for the former he opts for classical, ambient melodies, spread across five long tracks; in the latter, by contrast, he himself recites the verses of the English symbolist over typically worldbeat backdrops.

Umbra Sumus best sums up Wobble's many creative passions at the close of the century. The Londoner's eleventh studio album can only be an extremely varied work, one that on one hand reaffirms the orchestral inlays of Heaven & Earth, and on the other revives the ethno-dub formula of the Invaders Of The Heart, adapted into more relaxed solutions that flirt with ambient music.

"Il Je Vedro Il Oblačno" and "Mehmeda Majka Budila" rank among its finest gems: the former drifts dreamily over Amila Sulejmanovic's melancholy vocalising, while the latter carries us toward a Middle East of arcane, unfathomable percussion. These are followed by the instrumentals "Paternal Kindness", with Liebezeit's rhythmic play, and the double-length "Moon Slowbeat", which starts out as a calm downtempo piece before thickening with synths and keyboards in its second half.

"Just A Prayer" renews the partnership with Natacha Atlas, whose trills this time dissolve into a cosmically-tinged dub, foreshadowing a formula Wobble would only explore at length later on. Moving through "St. May-Le-Bow", a collage of rhythmic architecture and Kenyan trills, we arrive at "I Offer You Everything", another small ethno-pop gem from Wobble, on which the musician handles everything himself, and then a series of brief experiments and instrumental sketches (chief among them "Basses, An Organ, Jaki & A Train") that fill almost the entire second half of the record. Before signing off, though, the album still has one more treat in store, "Mt. Zion", a mongrel dub in which Rastafarianism, Indian sitars, "Afro" rhythms and exquisitely Celtic bagpipes coexist for twelve minutes.

A perfect synthesis of Wobble's thousand artistic impulses, of the directions he's travelled and those merely theorized, Umbra Sumus succeeds in being all of this while condensing it into an extremely compact and enjoyable package, presenting his own personal and intimate response to the world music phenomenon.

In the years that followed, Jah Wobble delved deeper into the "cosmic" potential of his dub, aided by his friend Bill Laswell, for whom he played on his Sacred System albums, and in light of genre experiments coming from the techno side of things (just think of Orb and Sun Electric).

Crucial in this respect is Deep Space (1999), which veers decisively towards a more liquid, hypnotic sound, steeped in reverb and electronic effects, rediscovering and reinterpreting in his own way the lysergic origins of Caribbean dub. Riding this wave of enthusiasm, the musician decided to create a dedicated project, Jah Wobble & Deep Space, with prestigious collaborators such as Philip Jeck and Mark Sanders, with whom he would release two albums, Beach Fervour Spare (2000) and Five Beat (2003).

Radioaxiom: A Dub Transmission (2001), made alongside Bill Laswell, moves in the same direction. Two musicians who are practically polar opposites in background and approach yet so close in artistic sensibility, Wobble and Laswell craft a distorted, percussive dub, pierced by the Norwegian trumpet of Nils Petter Molvær and distant afro-soul refractions ("Alsema Dub" and "Alam Dub").

The 2000s were an almost too intense decade for Wobble, who produced an abnormal amount of material, between albums, EPs, side projects and the most disparate collaborations, maintaining an exceptionally high average quality, even if the bold ideas dreamed up on paper don't always find an equally strong outlet on record.

Among the worthy records of the period: the fascinating Passage To Hades (2001), a dark ritual tinged with free jazz featuring Evan Parker's tenor sax, multi-instrumentalist Clive Bell, and Wobble's own floating dub backdrops; the atmospheric trip-hop of Elevator Music vol. 1A (2004), perfect ambient music for post-global elevators; and the pairing of Chinese Dub (2008) and Japanese Dub (2010), in which far-Eastern traditions are stirred up and scrambled into spacey, intoxicating dub.

Finally, not to be missed is the excellent live project Solaris, from which came the album Solaris: Live In Concert (2002), a true all-star hand, with Bill Laswell on electronics, Liebezeit on percussion, Graham Haynes on horns, Harold Budd on piano embroidery, and Wobble, as usual, bringing it all to a common denominator with technical rigour and undiminished punk fire.

Jah Wobble's creative streak and name — by now a middle-aged man deeply politicized and passionate about football and philosophy — have carried him through to the present across a myriad of records and projects he's had a hand in, mixing flashes of genius, very rare missteps (the clumsy Psychic Life) and unexpected, partial reunions: in 2012, indeed, amid general excitement, Wobble set off on tour with Keith Levene with the project "Metal Box In Dub", reopening, not without a touch of irreverence, the Public Image Limited chapter more than thirty years after their noisy but ultimately providential "betrayal".

Wobble and Levene then decided to carry the live experience over onto record, giving birth, however, to the underwhelming Yin & Yang (2012), a formulaic album with no truly memorable ideas or flourishes, salvaged only by Wobble's inevitable killer bass lines, proving once again that he still has plenty of — however scattered — ammunition left to fire.

In 2014 Wobble returned with Inspiration, a little over half an hour of music, in the company of the enchanting voice of PJ Higgins, whom some may already have noticed as part of Dub Colossus.

The album, brief as it is, has everything it needs to win over anyone not yet won over by the sinuous depth of Jah Wobble's bass lines. "My Heart Is Burning" and "I Did Bad" are incantations that help calibrate the neurons for the English bassist's hypnotic dub. Higgins' voice is the perfect instrument to revitalize bass lines that Wobble obsessively showcased on a handful of essential records released in the '90s. But it's only with "King Of Illusion" that Jah Wobble shows his full love for classic reggae, complete with the inevitable "dub version" that adds depth to the arrangement, thanks also to Sean Corby's trumpet.

A thoroughly respectable band helps the English bassist pull it off: Alex McGowan (Tricky, Martina Topley Bird, Wilko Johnson) weaves hypnotic arpeggios on his six-string, while Marc Layton-Bennett keeps time with the grace of a Sufi master. McGowan himself, behind the mixing desk, makes the whole blend soft and seductive.

Contributions by Roberto Mandolini ("Inspiration")

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