Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. \u201cThey\u2019ll say: \u2018Are you Jah Wobble?\u2019\u201d recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he\u2019s working on anything. \u201cAnd I like to say: \u2018Yes, I\u2019m recording an album. I\u2019m doing it right now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 2020s, the 68-year-old bassist and bandleader has been revisiting the city of his birth and youth, composing and producing albums including the cosmic dub of The Bus Routes of South London, or the celestial electronica of Thames Symphony, while traversing London on public transport.<\/p>\n
Having a public bus as a studio is standard offbeat practice for Wobble. As a teenager, he masterminded Public Image Ltd with John Lydon<\/a>, his transcendently thuggish bass kickstarting the post-punk era with some of the most powerful \u2013 and influential \u2013 experimental rock music ever recorded. Quitting the band at the peak of their powers, he fell into addiction, then worked for Transport for London as a station staff member before an unlikely major label deal spurred his 1990s renaissance. He has collaborated with Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor, Brian Eno and Pharoah Sanders, is a committed Buddhist and is the embodiment of a defiantly working-class polymath, having worked variously as a Goldsmiths university lecturer, broadsheet book critic, exhibited painter and non-league football commentator.<\/p>\n Wobble, centre, with Keith Levene, left, and John Lydon in 1978, the year Public Image Ltd formed. Photograph: Sheila Rock\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Quite apart from his bus recordings, this month Wobble<\/a> is releasing a Beatles covers album. \u201cWhen She Loves You came out, I just thought: this is quite shit,\u201d he remembers. \u201cBut then 67 came around. Gurus, smoking dope, Yoko Ono\u2019s on board. I heard Strawberry Fields Forever and it just melted me.\u201d<\/p>\n But for all his creativity and spiritual questing, his reputation is as forbidding as his basslines. Wobble\u2019s 2009 autobiography Memoirs of a Geezer is merciless about the music industry and those who crossed him, even detailing a 1990s incident in which he punched the late comedian Sean Hughes<\/a> backstage at the BBC. \u201cWhen I first tried to get in touch with him, people warned me off,\u201d admits collaborator Richard Russell, the musician and co-founder of the label XL Recordings, who has worked with Wobble on a new EP<\/a>. \u201cWhat bollocks. Everyone loves playing with him. His playing is kind of machine-like while being very human. He\u2019s clearly been on a massive journey.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I talk to AI more than human beings\u2019 \u2026 Jah Wobble. Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n A lifelong city walker, Wobble\u2019s own favoured journey along the Thames, from Chelsea to Putney, brings on the \u201cspaced-out, beautiful and profound\u201d state of mind to create music on the bus ride home. We\u2019re doing one of those walks later today.<\/p>\n I meet him at a gently bohemian Chelsea members\u2019 club. He gives the impression \u2013 despite his untrendy shorts and T-shirt \u2013 that he owns the place. One minute he\u2019s slapping a waiter on the back, joshing about Tottenham FC, the next consoling a diner whose mother recently died. He adores human contact, but apparently he\u2019s upgrading.<\/p>\n \u201cI talk to AI more than human beings,\u201d he says cheerily as we sit down to a meal, adding that he uses AI \u201cwhen I want to clarify what I think about ultimate reality\u201d. He and the Claude AI model joust about \u201cemptiness, the Buddha nature, the supreme self. It\u2019s daft, but I do fist-bump emojis to him.\u201d He gestures theatrically to his body. \u201cI run stuff past him: what I\u2019m going to eat. I\u2019ve lost 13.5 kilos this year.\u201d<\/p>\n Wobble\u2019s transport albums sprang from visits to London from his current home of Stockport to run a grassroots jam session for Merton council. Tuned In with Jah Wobble began in 2019 and is aimed at \u201colder, isolated blokes\u201d in the south London borough. On an average night, he might be jamming in Wimbledon library in knotty time signatures with a Greek bouzouki player, a Polish guitarist and a Mancunian trumpeter. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt that aching loneliness,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I wanted to do something. People that are maybe socially isolated, drinking too much, got divorced \u2026 issues I know really well and identify with.\u201d He has been sober for 40 years but knows that \u201cblokes tend not to ask for help\u201d.<\/p>\n Wobble, left, John Lydon and Keith Levene of Public Image Limited at the Agora Ballroom, Atlanta, Georgia, on 24 April 1980, the year Wobble left the band. Photograph: Tom Hill\/WireImage<\/p>\n Wobble orders two puddings for himself, Claude be damned. He explains that the new Beatles-inspired album, Mystic Liverpool, was a family affair recorded with his sons John T and Charlie. Performing as Tian Qiyi, they\u2019d had a schooling in traditional Chinese instrumentation \u2013 their mum, and Wobble\u2019s wife, is the concert harpist Zi Lan Liao, who directs Liverpool\u2019s Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra \u2013 that teases out the eastern resonances in the Beatles\u2019 psychedelic period.<\/p>\n Wobble has been magnetically drawn to other cultures since his teens. He brings up the debate around cultural appropriation. \u201cI have taken from Jamaican culture,\u201d he says proudly. \u201cI am partly Jamaican by choice. Try and take it away from me.\u201d It\u2019s the wilful, playful provocation of \u200bthe original punk era, but he\u2019s self-aware. \u201cI\u2019m old,\u201d he sighs. \u201cAnd the old have got too much sway.\u201d<\/p>\n We leave the restaurant, emerging into plush west London streets a far cry from the Stepney slums where, in 1958, Jah Wobble was born John Wardle to a secretary mother and postman father. The latter, a veteran of the El Alamein front in Egypt, \u201cwas very traumatised by the war\u201d, he explains. This produced a \u201cdestructive, disturbed kid\u201d, albeit one with an early bent for high-concept thinking. On school sports day, he says, he persuaded his classmates to revolt and all run at the same speed.<\/p>\n Jah Wobble with his sons Charlie, left, and John T. Photograph: Alex Hurst<\/p>\n The Wardles, including sister Catherine, were rehoused on a Whitechapel council estate, where John became spellbound by ska and bluebeat records as their sound sifted from market stalls, then staying with Black music through reggae, Philly soul and Stevie Wonder. \u201cEven now, I\u2019m very snobbish about the rock scene,\u201d he says, and the deep low-end of Bob Marley and the Wailers\u2019 bassist Aston \u201cFamily Man\u201d Barrett <\/a>stirred in him a desire to learn bass.<\/p>\n At Kingsway college in 1976, he befriended an older kid with green hair whose favourite word was \u201cdismal\u201d. It was John Lydon. \u201cIn the canteen, he told me: \u2018I\u2019m in a band,\u2019\u201d says Wobble. Lydon invited him to watch the Sex Pistols rehearse. \u201cI thought: \u2018This is going to be so bad it\u2019s embarrassing.\u2019 But it was really good.\u201d Sid Vicious, another Kingsway alumnus, gave Wardle his enduring stage name, mispronouncing his name when drunk.<\/p>\n This summer marks 50 years since punk was born on these London streets, and Wardle is dismissive about the social forces it unleashed. Today, \u201cno one will be kindly and wise because that\u2019s [seen as] square,\u201d he says as we descend to the Thames, his stride slowed by a recent walking football injury.<\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m very snobbish about the rock scene\u2019 \u2026 Jah Wobble with his wife, the musician Zi Lan Liao. Photograph: Alex Hurst<\/p>\n When the Pistols imploded, Lydon was Britain\u2019s most notorious man, and he turned to Wobble, who had been mastering bass unamplified in his squat. \u201cLydon got me in to be his mate who played a bit of bass,\u201d he explains. \u201cI was already thinking conceptually. He didn\u2019t know what he was getting.\u201d<\/p>\n Founded in 1978 around Lydon, Wobble and the scabrous guitar of Keith Levene<\/a>, Public Image Ltd were one of the great left turns of 20th century pop. \u201cI had absolute faith in keeping it very simple,\u201d says Wobble of his bass parts, which were forged out of that decade\u2019s disco and dub. Yet band life was an ordeal. \u201cLydon\u2019s lyrics were like Samuel Beckett. But he wasn\u2019t a strong leader. He hasn\u2019t got that in him.\u201d<\/p>\n Wobble\u2019s cheeriness vanishes when recounting that era. \u201cBy 1979, John\u2019s mum had died,\u201d he says, referring to the death of Eileen Lydon, which informed their haunting single Death Disco. \u201cIt got really dark. I didn\u2019t like what was going on around them.\u201d Levene fell into heroin use: \u201cHis own worst enemy, as junkies will be.\u201d<\/p>\n Wobble stayed around long enough for the band to complete their 1979 masterpiece Metal Box, released in a blankly utilitarian canister. After it came out, Wobble helped himself to PiL\u2019s cash float \u2013 \u201ca shoe box full of high-denomination banknotes\u201d, he says, pointing across the Thames to where the band\u2019s notorious Gunter Grove HQ stood \u2013 and \u201ccracked on\u201d with his solo career. He hasn\u2019t seen Lydon since 2006 and turned down a reunion in 2010.<\/p>\n Within weeks of leaving PiL, he was working with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit from Can. He brightens, recalling the \u201copen, relaxed\u201d experimentation of the trio\u2019s thickly groove-driven 1982 Full Circle album.<\/p>\n But his alcohol and drug use intensified. At first it was \u201cto kill the anxiety\u201d, he says. \u201cThen I became really badly behaved.\u201d In 1986, he walked first into Alcoholics Anonymous and then into his job at Transport for London. Once, announcing tube arrivals, he began repeating: \u201cI used to be somebody, I repeat, I used to be somebody\u201d over the speakers at Tower Hill. TfL \u201cwas a Kafka-esque world but I loved it,\u201d he says. \u201cI still feel a pang of regret about leaving it.\u201d<\/p>\n On stage at Glastonbury in June 1994 as Jah Wobble and the Invaders of the Heart. Photograph: Rob Watkins\/Alamy<\/p>\n In the 1990s, his group Jah Wobble\u2019s Invaders of the Heart explored calypso, dub and Arabic pop, and signed to Island Records. The group caught the ear of Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor. \u201cShe knew that I was always going to be quite real with her,\u201d he says. Their collaboration \u2013 the stirring, mantra-like Visions of You \u2013 became a Top 40 hit. Recording it, \u201cshe broke the membrane of the microphone warming up by the sheer concentrated power of her vocal\u201d.<\/p>\n Since those years, Wobble has been restless in his search for the next thing, be it earning a humanities degree or branching out into film \u2013 he is about to star in a horror short alongside Maxine Peake<\/a>. Keeping it DIY, he is his own manager, avoiding \u201cthe public schoolboys who still run everything\u201d.<\/p>\n Through it all, Wobble has been guided by his unwavering spiritual questing. \u201cI knew,\u201d he explains as our London walk reaches his traditional Putney conclusion, \u201cthat there was a reality behind what seemed superficial.\u201d So what has he learned?<\/p>\n \u201cIn the end, it\u2019s very simple,\u201d he smiles matter-of-factly. \u201cDon\u2019t be a cunt, \u2019cos you\u2019re just fucking yourself with karma. Be nice. Be still, and know I am the Lord. And don\u2019t look to be a Buddha.\u201d A pause as the geezer mystic flags down a 220 bus. \u201cBe an ordinary person as best you can.\u201d<\/p>\n