Jah Wobble on punk, PiL and "unstoppable" Sinead O’Connor

But it wasn’t Marley’s six-stringed instrument which so fascinated this young, working class white kid from Stepney. It was the sound under-pinning the reggae legend’s band – the rhythmical, sonorous, feel-it-in-your-soul-as-well-as-your-belly sound of Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett’s bass.

“He had the phrasing, understood the power of the bass, but was so musical as well, ” he recalls. “He obviously really understood chords and scale, or he had an incredible ear ... It’s still the very best music show I’ve ever seen by a country mile.”

Three years later almost to the day, Wardle found himself in a studio recording a song with an old friend from further education college. Also in the room were a former roadie for prog rock band Yes and a Canadian-born, Berklee College of Music-trained jazz drummer recruited through an ad in Melody Maker.

By then Wardle had acquired a bass guitar for himself and also a new name, one which reflected his love of reggae and dub but coined after a drunken mispronounciation of his real name by another old college friend.

And so it was thanks to John Beverley, aka Sid Vicious, that it was as Jah Wobble that he joined John Lydon, Keith Levene and Jim Walker in London’s Advision Studios to record the first tracks of what would become Public Image Ltd.’s debut album, First Issue, released on Richard Branson’s Virgin Records label in December 1978. And the song? Public Image, still so fresh sounding it could have been recorded last night instead of last century.

John Lydon performing with Public Image Ltd in 1983 (Image: Getty Images)

The band, styled as PiL, took its name from the title of a 1969 Muriel Spark novel. But while the Edinburgh-born author would have appreciated the quartet’s iconoclasm, little about their sound would have appealed.

The punk snarl and lyrical concerns Lydon deployed as frontman of The Sex Pistols continued and were expanded. Levene added scratchy, post-punk guitar, Wobble dropped in thunderous, dub-inspired bass lines, and Walker drummed around rather than with them. The music they made was uncompromising, to say the least. “You should have seen Branson’s face when he heard that,” Lydon once said of First Issue’s seven minute closing track, Fodderstompf. “He was furious.”

After iconic second album, Metal Box, and 1980 live album, Paris Au Printemps, Wobble left.

“I was in Public Image for two years. I think we did less than 20 show. It was very vivid, short-lived,” he says. “It was one of the reasons I left. I got fed up that we weren’t doing enough work.”

Beset by drinking problems he periodically laid down his bass – he worked for a while on the London Underground – and only returned in earnest to music in 1987 when he re-formed his post-PiL band, The Invaders Of The Heart.

PiL continued with an ever-increasing roster of members until 1992, but were re-formed by Lydon in 2009. Naturally the singer tried to recruit his former bandmate – the pair went for a curry and set a spare place for absent friend Sid Vicious – but Wobble wasn’t happy with the musical direction or the financial deal on offer.

“With legacy acts, the smart thing is to do your flagship album [Metal Box] in an imaginative way, in imaginative settings, and then do something new,” he says, reflecting on his decision to say no.

“And when you do the new thing, you make sure that it’s f****** good. For your pride’s sake, you do something that’s f****** amazing, that’s contemporary and blows everyone out of the water. You’re Public Image Ltd., for f***’s sake. That would have been my attitude. But what I feared was I would be asked to play on those lumpen kind of rock tunes he [Lydon] did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thank God we never got down to those conversations. But I fear that’s how it would have gone.”

Jah Wobble onstage in London in 2022 (Image: Tina Korhoren)

But if Lydon’s career trajectory has gone from ground-breaking art rock to “lumpen rock tunes”, and from there to advertising Country Life butter and bidding to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Wobble’s has gone in the other direction. Ever restless, ever an outlier, ever on the hunt for new musical experiences and collaborators, his current and former workmates reads like a Who’s Who of musician’s musicians.

Fellow bassist Bill Laswell, a pioneering musician and producer who came out of New York’s vibrant 1970s scenes, has been a frequent collaborator. Wobble has also recorded and collaborated with Brian Eno, jazz great Pharoah Sanders, acclaimed jazz drummer Hamid Drake, U2 guitarist The Edge, the Modern Jazz Ensemble, reggae drummer Sly Dunbar, avant garde British saxophonist Evan Parker and Holger Czukay, co-founder of influential German group Can.

The late Sinead O’Connor was another. Wobble knew her well through her first husband and in 1991, the year after her smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U, she recorded a song he had written for her, Visions Of You.

“Some rich, famous people, there’s a kind of non-presence to them, a kind of weird distance,” he says. “They’re a little bit disassociated or something. She wasn’t like that. She was very present, very real, very funny. She had a very mischievous sense of humour. But when she clicked into the performance mode and she felt it, she was unstoppable.”

READ MORE: SINEAD O'CONNOR IN HER OWN WORDS

He realised just how unstoppable when she stepped up for the first studio take of Visions Of You.

“I knew what she was going to sing because I’d written the song and you knew roughly what it was going to sound like but you’re always just so excited to hear the power of her voice doing it. And in the first note sung in earnest she actually blew the mike.”

Now 65, Wobble’s discography to date numbers 60 plus records. Among the recent offerings are the atmospheric Nocturne In The City Ambient Jazz Grooves, the self-explanatory End Of Lockdown Dub, and Jah Wobble Acid Dub Punk Apocalypse, a collaboration with Killing Joke founder Youth.

In 2021 he also released Metal Box Rebuilt In Dub, a track-by-track remake of PIL’s classic album, and on August 11 he adds yet another title to the list.

A Brief History Of Now is a collaboration with former Siouxsie And The Banshees guitarist Jon Klein, who also featured on Metal Box Rebuilt, and sees him return to a less dub-heavy, more post-punk sound. In November he will tour both records with The Invaders Of The Heart, and early next year we’re promised his second volume of memoirs, this one titled Dark Luminosity.

He has many stories to tell and the raconteur’s gift for telling them. But regardless of the distance Jah Wobble has travelled over the years, 16-year-old John Wardle is still inside him, still rooted to the spot watching Bob Marley And The Wailers at the Lyceum and thrilling to the sound of that bass. It’s why, when I ask him to name his musical hero, he says in his amiable Cockney growl: “Aston Barrett. All day long, mate.”

A Brief History Of Now is out now (Cleopatra Records); Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart perform Metal Box Rebuilt In Dub with Jon Klein at St Luke’s, Glasgow (November 15) and La Belle Angele, Edinburgh (November 16)