It’s a good thing, Jah Wobble says, ‘to go through life like a tourist’.
By Miles Salter
The phrase, borrowed from a friend, fits with the renowned bass player’s Buddhist philosophy. His real name is John Wardle. Part of a Catholic family (his grandparents were Irish), he found himself drawn to a Buddhist worldview and its instruction not to be too attached to what comes our way in life.
‘It’s like the Christian teaching,’ he says. ‘Be in the world but not of the world.’ It’s good, he says, to be mindful of life’s frail nature. ‘We’re at risk of impermanence every minute of the day. Crossing the road, a plane crash, a virus…’ Wobble believes that leading a good life is important. I almost regret asking him about Buddhism as he delves into the details of Buddhist teaching. Suffice to say, he practices meditation.
The bass player is regarded as one of the best of his generation. He was part of John Lydon’s PiL (Public Image Limited), one of the bands that took punk into a more experimental direction. He’s had a successful career, maintaining a famously independent attitude to music. He wants to explore, push boundaries and avoid cliché. PiL were curious, avant-garde, unafraid to take risks – almost ‘progressive’ at times (guitarist Keith Levene had been a roadie for Yes, one of the 70s bands that the punks despised). PiL didn’t gain the success that other new wave pioneers like Talking Heads or The Police, but they did well. Metal Box, their second album, is seen by some as one of the best albums of the era.
Wobble was ecstatic when John Lydon, fresh out of the imploding Sex Pistols, asked him to be part of his new venture. It was a hugely fortuitous moment. The two young men had known each other for years. Wobble was invited to the first Sex Pistols rehearsal in 1975 and was one of the ‘four Johns’, a quartet of teenagers that all shared the same first name: John Lydon (later of The Sex Pistols), John Grey and John Ritchie. Ritchie doesn’t sound famous, but his alter ego is – he became known as Sid Vicious. Sid’s lifestyle was never far from chaos.
Behind the drugs and carnage, though, Sid’s life was tragic. His childhood was a train wreck, with a junkie mother and no father. Wobble made a thoughtful Radio 4 documentary in 2009, ‘In Search Of Sid’, about his friend’s life – if you’re interested in the Pistols, it’s worth seeking out on YouTube. On one occasion, Wardle went with Sid to some counselling sessions at college, circa 1975. In a moment of very dark English humour, Wardle suggested that Sid kill himself. ‘I don’t feel proud of myself at all,’ he says, when I ask about that. Sid’s image was a kind of harbinger of chaos, but Wobble saw him in a different light, ‘very sensitive, quite girly.’
When the Pistols split up in 1978, John Lydon spoke in darkly prophetic terms to The Evening Standard: ‘Sid can go off and kill himself and nobody will care.’ It all came true: after Nancy Spungen’s death (which Sid was blamed for), the bassist didn’t last much longer, overdosing on heroin his own mother had acquired for him. When ‘The Great Rock n Roll Swindle’ came out, Virgin promoted it with an image of a ‘Sid Vicious Action Man’, depicting the dead man in a coffin and wearing a T-shirt with a Swastika on it. It was a grotesque coda to a desperately sad life. Sid was, says Wobble, ‘a very, very lost soul’.
Wobble saw the punk scene up close. He was in London in the late 1970s, a time when musicians lived in squats. Creatives lived by their wits: Paul Simonon of The Clash was once so hungry that he ate the flour and water-based paste the band used to put up posters. Wobble, residing in a squat, had to burn furniture to keep warm. He knew Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, the guys in The Clash, The Damned and The Pistols. The whole crew suffered from postmodern malaise, not trusting or believing any of the big ideas – Christianity, Communism – or the government; the police. ‘We were angry, frustrated, left wing,’ he says. ‘All the institutions were mocked,’ he says. ‘It was a bit like Monty Python’s Ministry Of Silly Walks.’ But he is not sentimental about that time. ‘So many of the people around me were damaged,’ he reflects. The young men and women who made up the punk scene of 1976 and 1977 had fathers who went to World War II and returned traumatised. As somebody said to Wobble, ‘we all paid a big price for the Second World War.’
PiL’s second album, Metal Box (1979), which got to No.18 in the UK charts, would be acclaimed as a post-punk classic and the group’s finest hour. Levene played drums, synthesiser, as well as guitar, while Wobble played bass on tracks that explored dub, electronica and atonalism. There had been nothing quite like it before, and its boundary-breaking ripples spread far and wide. Rolling Stone magazine wrote that it inhabited “a fractured space between demented abstraction and cranky freedom”. Looking back on the trio of himself, Lydon and Keith Levene, Wobble wrote in his book, ‘Fuck me, what a weird, neurotic triumvirate of odd bods we were.’ Marco Pirroni, part of the same punk scene as Wobble, offered a similar perspective. The common thread in the post-punk movement, Pirroni once said, was ‘…a complete inability to fit into society as it was.’ Lydon has described in terms redolent of self-loathing: ‘we were all extremely ugly people. We were outcasts, the unwanted.’
Wobble left PiL after the second album. Arguments about money had crept in and he refers to a dark time. One senses that his relationship with Lydon has had its ups and downs, although they seem to respect each other from a distance. Lydon, says Wobble, was a counter-cultural force between 1976 and 1982. ‘He was incredibly special…stylish, he looked great, said all the right things. He was so charismatic. But somehow he rapidly diminished since then.’ In the decades since, Lydon has spectacularly fallen out with the other Sex Pistols, advertised butter and appeared on The Masked Singer as ‘The Comeback Yack’. What a shame.
The two men aren’t enemies exactly, but Wobble has resisted any temptation to reunite with Lydon. Wobble became independent in his own right, leading Invaders Of The Heart from 1982. He’s been involved in dozens of albums and has collaborated with Sinead O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan, Brian Eno, Primal Scream and Massive Attack. Wobble’s influences include Aston Barrett from Bob Marley and The Wailers. Barrett, Wobble once remarked, had four strings yet appeared ‘to have the power of the universe’. Wobble’s approach to bass is to create a hypnotic, repetitive vibe. Music as hypnotism, perhaps, a door to another world.
Drink and drugs were a part of late 70s and early 80s scene. Wobble had always been in thrall to booze – having a ‘pathological’ attitude to drink. He sank a bottle of Chartreuse one Christmas when he was 13. Temptations in the music business did not help. A photo in his autobiography, Memoirs Of A Geezer, shows him with a vacant look in his eyes, off his head, his eyes harbouring the thousand-yard stare of addiction. In October 1986, he was hit rock bottom, was ‘very ill’ and suicidal. He almost ended up in a psychiatric hospital. He pulled free, taking responsibility (he had a daughter to care for by then) and sorted himself out. ‘I can’t blame anyone but myself,’ he says. Recovery began in 1986 – he celebrates forty years of sobriety this year. Is he glad he made the change? ‘Fucking hell, yes,’ he says. ‘Your life develops a shape, a meaning.’ A regular at AA meetings, he believes in living a good life, the values of community and being kind to others. ‘It’s good to be good,’ he says, and mentions something about Plato (I should look that up). In the 1980s he worked as a train driver during a period when he focused on family and sobriety. (He would return to the job years later).
His spiritual learning was hard won. He came from a working class environment and had a very poor relationship with his father. When I ask if he witnessed violence as a boy and teenager, his response is abruptly brief in an interview that is categorised by long answers. ‘Yes,’ is all he says. He was born in 1958, ‘the best year to enjoy working class meritocracy,’ he says sagely. ‘We were surrounded by these fantastic working class heroes – Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Jean Shrimpton, The Beatles. So many great role models. The music business now is dominated by middle class people.’
The good-looking young man from 1982 is now in his late 60s. Ageing, he says, can be shocking. ‘You look in the mirror and think ‘fuck me, what happened’.’ His children are adults and he now has a grandchild. But he’s still interested in new forms of expression. A recent project is a revisiting of The Beatles catalogue in an ‘Eastern, mystic style’. Mystic Liverpool – The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook will be released later this summer. The project has involved input from Wobble’s sons, John T and Charlie.
An hour shoots by and we have to stop talking – he has to be at a photo call for the Beatles project in Liverpool. I wish we had another hour. But talk about six degrees of separation – I’ve been chatting to the bloke who was there when Sid Vicious went for counselling. Quite a life.
Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi’s Mystic Liverpool – The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook is released on 14 August 2026 and can be pre-ordered via Rough Trade.