Hello, happy Friday, greetings from the frozen north (for various reasons I’m in Talinn and Brian is in Aberdeen). Thanks again for all the new sign-ups and feedback, it’s helping bring this project to life, day by day. I know we said this wasn’t going to be all about Men Of A Certain Age, but just in terms of availability of subjects and the hecticness of freelance life, the dice seem to have fallen a certain way… and come on, we weren’t going to say no to Jah Wobble, were we?
He’s one of those people who was right at the top of the shortlist for Bass, Mids, Tops anyway - he could so easily have worked brilliantly within the narrative of the book, and only missed being in it by a whisker. So of course we were going to grab the opportunity when it came along – and he didn’t disappoint. Though he was in his youth, by his own frank admission, “a very horrible person” – and in Brian’s pics you can see the lingering menace, like a Neil Gaiman villain lurking in a Victorian street scene - these days he is charm personified, and for good reason.
As we discuss at some length in the interview, the man born John Wardle (the pseudonymic mispronunciation was bestowed on him by Sid Vicious) has been through untold self-reflection, perhaps most of all when he decided to sober up in the mid-1980s, but also continuously thereafter. The odd thing is that these personal changes didn’t create dramatic creative changes: rather, although he’s been through many musical scenes over the years, they better enabled a continuity that you can hear ringing in the basslines ever since he joined Public Image Limited with John Lydon, through years of disco, hippie-rave, world music and other experimentation.
Hopefully you don’t need his many contributions to music spelled out, so let’s jump in exactly there - with his continuity across scenes… Brian photographed him in the basement of the Social in the West End – perhaps appropriately for that Gaiman London underworld look – and once again I spoke to him on Zoom, him at home, wrapped in a dressing gown pulling it up tight, eventually admitting that this was in the hope I wouldn’t realise he was wearing a Jah Wobble t-shirt underneath.
So our theme here is subculture – and you’ve worked across quite a variety of things....
I see myself as a Forrest Gump character, I just happen to kind of stagger from one little scene into another. Oh, what's this? The New York Loft club scene1…
A low frequency Zelig!
Yeah.
As a young kid, can you remember wanting to be part of something bigger – whether it was social scenes or just something bigger beyond your world?
Not really. I think there's always the main thing – I think with a lot of people, it's like quite that – that feelings are quite vague, and sometimes they're not particularly articulated, I suppose, especially when you're younger. So, you just have a yearning that you want fun and excitement; you want to be happy, and you want to do the things you'd like doing. I think for a lot of working-class kids, there isn't a thing of plotting a career, or plotting your course through life, because there's probably an acceptance that – certainly my generation – you have a bit of fun, and then you probably get married, and you'd the same job where your work for the post or the underground or in a factory, you know, and your life wasn't there to be to be enjoyed, or to have any big plans for yourself. If you tended to talk that way, you would probably be cut down to size.
So, I think there was that element. But obviously, that started to change. In fact, the year I was born in 1958, was the most meritorious year for a working-class person to be born – you had more opportunities. So, there was, as I was aged eight or nine, you became aware of icons like Michael Caine. These working-class kinds of actors were coming to the fore; working class playwrights that you'd became aware of as you as you got a bit older; footballers they became iconic. It was all working class, and it was wonderful, because it meant you had a kind of role model of sorts. It was like, okay, I can kind of go there and rise out of the mass ranks and become, maybe in some way, special or something.
And, of course, there was the thing with music where I was so switched on with music that I just followed my nose with it, you know. I just loved music, I still do really, so that was just such a pleasure in itself, that you just wanted to be involved with music. And when punk came along, and there was a sudden sort of realisation you could somehow be involved making music. That was… wow, that was wonderful, and that was the first time I suppose you have any sense of desperation, of “Right, I'm going to grab this opportunity with both hands.” You know when I’ve gone into the Public Image. It’s a long-winded answer but I hope that makes some sense.
Completely, that gives us our starting coordinates! When you first started being a music fan, were you a fan of individual rock stars or was it about the sound or general spectacle?
Primarily the sound, but then as I got older, I mean, I could give you a whole bunch of names – Stevie Wonder was probably the main one. As I got into adolescence, Stevie Wonder, when he did Innervisions, I absolutely was fascinated with that record, knew all the words and I still do. Rod Stewart and The Faces I absolutely loved. He seemed very cool and he had that kind of Celtic edge to it. It was the tartan scarves and all that – OK I didn’t like the Bay City Rollers, but you got that with Faces fans too – it was a kind of vaguely like, he's a Celtic fan, of course as he had that Celtic thing going on. The Sound of Philly, and there were people within The Sound of Philly that I started to kind of gravitate to. I suppose [in] early adolescence, everybody was fixated with David Bowie, and I wasn't. I liked him, but I wasn't like everyone who was absolutely fixated with him, but I thought he was good, you know? By that time, I was really into Stevie Wonder. I liked Quadrophenia – I didn't like Tommy but I really liked Quadrophenia. I was absolutely fascinated with that album. I love the artwork. I pored over it. It was such an adolescent record, and as an adolescent, I loved that, you know, as this disaffected kid. That grabbed me as much as the 400 Blows film about the delinquent kid. That really grabbed around that time. I think I saw it on Saturday night, when they used to have series of film noirs and I really loved that, so, movies grabbed me quite early on as well.
All of those things that you mentioned are quite crafted. The Faces, they were serious musicians, but they weren't about the solos – they were about locking together and kind of being a unit, and obviously, that's true of Stevie Wonder and Philadelphia International…
Yeah, it was quite high-level sort of stuff. I did like some pop music and the glam rock thing especially The Sweet. The productions on those… I mean, I didn't sit there and think, wow, it's a great production. You just thought, this is an incredible sound. I suppose actually, it'd be fair going right back to when I was about eight. I talk about in the book: The Beatles... everybody loved the Beatles, everybody – even the mums and dads. They were four clean-cut working-class boys, and they liked them. I just didn't really take to them and I hated “She Loves You” but all the little girls at primary school would sing that. I kind of had a strong sense of what I liked and what I didn't like, somehow, and I didn't like it.
Then Yoko Ono got involved, and my mum and dad and all the older grown-ups didn't like her. She was a sort of Eastern temptress, she was no good for them, she was foreign, and now they were getting involved with drugs – that was seen as a real no-no. So, they really turned against them but then “Strawberry Fields” came out – which I think was a watershed for The Beatles – and that intro, it absolutely grabbed me. It just did something to me, it was very sensual, visceral, and I just loved it. I've got memories, where I would just be singing it over and over, we'd go round at that time, my mum was talking to her brother Johnny, and they lived near the Duchess pub in Commercial Road – that was the local – so they’d all go there and we'd be sitting outside having crisps that you had little packets of salt you had to put on yourself, and I guess the pub would have been playing it on the jukebox or whatever, and I absolutely just lost myself in it.
In a way, when I'd go somewhere like The Globe years later where they would have DJs in the East End, and they’d play really good soul music and people would be talking to you, but I just think, I just want to listen to this tune, I love the tunes. It didn't dawn on me, when I was younger – when I was adolescent or even sort of mid-teens – that I was maybe getting off on music more than most people around me were. I just didn't really don't know. It was the same way that when I drank booze, it really did it for me, it really relaxed me and I just would feel really high with it. It took me years to realise it really isn't like that for most people, you know, it just enhances their evening and a point comes for them, quite early on in an evening: Oh, no, please, I've had enough. I couldn't understand that – I wanted to be engulfed in music, you know. So, when I come back from school – and then when I was expelled from school, so I had all day to sort of potter about and everything – I would have two speakers and put my head down in between them. It's no wonder I now have hearing aids, Joe. So yes, I’d be immersed in sound at that time
What a time to do that though, right? That period – late ‘60s into early ‘70s – was when the art of production was just hitting an absolute high point that in some ways have never been bettered. And like you say, things The Sweet, even Status Quo had amazing sonic power. I played a 60th birthday where they asked for all ‘70s music recently, and I played “Down Down” by Status Quo on the big speakers, and it sounds like a demolition machine, it's just immense.
Oh they were great. I really liked Status Quo. It is one of those things you couldn’t really admit to people. I could tell you who was a big status quo fan – Holger Czukay in Can. He loved them.
Ha that’s amazing, I have had this conversation with various people that they are like British Krautrock.
He absolutely just loved it. I can't remember the lyric – it wasn't “Down Down” – it was one of their other lyrics that he would sing and he would go, “It’s absolute genius over and over2, this like a machine!” It was very German, so he loved them, and everyone would take the piss out of them, but they were like German music – they reduced that style down, and of course, Germans love homoeopathy and things just reduced to a certain point, you know.
Quo, Hawkwind and Motorhead. I swear, if they were German, the hipsters would be all over it.
Oh, absolutely. Oh, it's incredible. It's like a sort of mutant blues. You know, they’d love it.
And it's mechanical, you know. It's that kind of British industrial era. There’s lot of factory in it. It’s the same with Black Sabbath as well, obviously.
Yeah yeah, definitely. Very tight playing, and the chords – it's very easy to get the chords not quite right, with the feel, but they get it really nice, really smooth, as well, you know, and the singing is really on it. Francis Rossi – the singing is really in with the guitar. They were a good band.
As you got more into the music, you said you sort of started to home in on particular things within say Philadelphia International. Were starting to join dots with the actual personnel of who played on what and thinking about the social context of where it came from?
Yeah, very much, very much. So you're very aware of all the Black Panther stuff and all that at that time. I was into the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and it was very left wing. I loved the idea the romance of revolution, I was fascinated with it. So, I was fascinated with reports on radio of the Red Guard in Tiananmen Square, and the cultural revolution. That absolutely fascinated me, because it seems so extreme. I was fascinated with that, and of course, the Black Panther movement. Something like the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power,” which is different to the Public Enemy, very different to them. There was really was this revolution reaction to a lot of black music. And also, as I got into Philly and soul, when I was sort of 15, 16, that kind of age, I’d hear something like “Expansions” by Lonnie Liston Smith, and in record shops I’d started to have a look because I was fascinated with that record. And then you see, “Oh, this guy plays with a bloke called Pharaoh Saunders,” and then you hear “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Then you’d go on to, say John Handy3, I first heard a fantastic sort of soul single that he played on. Donald Byrd was another one, and then I’d heard of The Blackbyrds, and then Places and Spaces came out, which is a classic album, and so you started getting to hear some of the serious jazz players. There was obviously something there – Marvin Gaye, Let’s Get It On – you know, the album where the bass from James Jamerson is just so incredible and very flowing on that album. With a real spirit of the time, anti-Vietnam and anti-war, and I loved all that.
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