Jah Wobble: Audience with a Geezer
‘WE LIKE TO PLAY THE IN-BETWEEN PLACES’: Jah Wobble, who is touring with The Invaders of the Heart
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Talking music, madness, and the power of the unnameable with Jah Wobble
The former PiL bass player and World Music Maestro Jah Wobble is out on tour with The Invaders of The Heart, visiting The Ropewalk in Barton-upon-Humber on October 23rd as part of a rolling UK tour. I met up with the great man in his adopted home town of Stockport. We sat outside a cafe in the sunshine as jet planes hurtled overhead and we talked for three hours about music, madness, meditation and the power of the unnameable. Here a few of the edited highlights…
You’re playing Barton upon Humber. I know you’re a fan of Get Carter. Did you pick Barton upon Humber because that’s where Ted Lewis lived?
“Was it really? I never knew that. We always try to get to kind of arts centre-type gigs in what I call the in-between places. A bit off the beaten track, not the usual destinations. But you gotta take the rough with the smooth. You can have some blinding gigs, but every so often you’ll get someone saying ‘Oh, you’re my favourite artist, apart from that Jim Davidson’. I just smile and nod politely. What else you gonna do?”
Punk. It’s provoked more commentary than possibly any other British cultural phenomenon. What do people get wrong about punk?
“Me and my mate Vince, we talk about this a lot. It started about 75, went through 76 and by the end of 77 it was all beer-boys just wearing the uniform. It had got a bit grim and it wasn’t a laugh anymore. So we just stopped going to the gigs. And our attitude was, well that was a laugh for a couple of years. But everybody now reads so much into it, and there’s an entire industry thrown up around it. Even ten years ago I was describing it as people picking the meat off the bones of the cadaver of punk, and f*** me, they’re still digging it up now! Why? I dunno. I suppose everything is a bit anodyne now.”
You’re a soul boy at heart aren’t you? The early punk music seemed to be stripped of all black influences…
“Well, I didn’t like the music, particularly. The only punk bands I liked at the time were The Buzzcocks, because the words were clever, a bit tongue in cheek, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, who were just a really good band and, to be fair, the Pistols. Back in the day, the only rock album I liked was Quadrophenia, and I did like Rod Stewart and The Faces, 'cos they leaned a bit towards the folk vibe, they had that mandolin player from Lindisfarne. But really, I was into Philly Soul, Stevie Wonder, reggae, right from the early sixties and ska – or bluebeat as we called it in the East End. We had a record shop called Paul’s and he had a bluebeat chart, which was mainly cover versions of Top 40 stuff. You’d have something like Get It On, but done with a ska beat. I liked a lot of those better than the originals.”
COMING TO A VENUE NEAR YOU: Jah Wobble and The Invaders of the Heart, who play Barton Ropewalk on October 23
Tell me about the power of bass. You talk in your book, Memoirs Of A Geezer, about the healing force of deep vibrations, and ‘riding the sonic boom to heaven’…
“I was into the deeper thing. There was something about the physical aspects of the bass that I really connected with. In order to sleep and be dreaming, I’d listen to radio static. I still listen to ambient stuff a lot … to me it’s the background presence of that thing that’s unceasing, ever-present, isn’t really a thing … what you might call the Ohm, unborn, doesn’t have a form, doesn’t have a centre, doesn’t have an edge, doesn’t have a colour … and that’s something alluded to in the Catholic faith, with the Holy Spirit, this thing that was always present and intangible. It wasn’t a distant and fierce God, Our Father up in heaven, and it wasn’t a geezer called Jesus Christ who shaped up for a fight and got put on a Cross. He died and rose again to be with the Father, but the Holy Spirit was the thing, that was the interesting thing.
“'Cos when you start to look at life, you realise everything is impermanent, everything is in a state of flux. So if everything is moving, what is it that doesn’t move? There must be something that doesn’t move – or how else would you know what movement was? So I had all these very unformed and unarticulated thoughts and questions. So when it came to music, I liked rhythmic stuff, I liked Black American music and reggae, really respected it, which is why when I went to see comics around that time – like Jim Davidson – and they’d come out with really foul scumbag racist stuff, putting on that stupid Jamaican accent and all that, I just hated it, really objected to it. And then a bit later on I got into World Music. To this day, I’m not mad on white music. I was into what they now call urban music – the music of the inner cities.”
PiL … you were kind of thrown in at the deep end weren’t you?
“Yeah. I met John Lydon and Sid Vicious at Kingsway College. We were mates, then John sort of disappeared into the Pistols. In fact, John got the gig that Sid really wanted. And the Pistols carried on until it all came apart in San Francisco, which was also the city where we played the last PiL gig, funnily enough.
“Sid had knocked John’s hat off on that tour, and so did I, a few years later. I only found this out recently. I was talking to Paul Cook (Sex Pistols’ drummer) and I said, yeah, I think the end for me with John was when I flipped his hat off his head and Paul said, well, that’s what Sid did. That was the trigger. The final straw. But yeah, I was in PiL for two years. A short period of time. But the funny thing is, when you’re younger, it’s very intense and so much can happen in that space of time. When you’re young you’re very focused and time can somehow compress. A year is a very long time. So much happened in those two years. And yeah, I was thrown in at the deep end. But I was very lucky cos I had a propensity for the instrument and I had an idea of what I wanted to do.
“Same with painting. I started painting a few years ago and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to paint town blocks and city skylines and I wanted to do geometrical shapes, just 'cos I find it relaxing. It’s like the dots on the bass, following a pattern. It’s a form of meditation and it’s attached to OCD. You make a pattern that’s pleasing and it gives you a focus and stills the mind. I was a beginner and to give John and Keith (Levene) their credit, they never said to me, ‘Could you change that note there’, or whatever. After PiL, when I made records with other people, you’d get all this, ‘Oh, could you sweeten it up a bit, play this note here instead of that one’ and it just seemed to make everything less funky, less raw, just a bit too tidied up. I didn’t get any of that with PiL.”
I read a quote from you that said the visual arts are always thirty years ahead of music. From a modern perspective, Metal Box seems to have been totally out there, in front of everything at the time. It’s an album you’ve revisited recently, with the dub version and the reunion shows with Keith…
“I went to university and studied History of Art, and I loved it, I really got into it and started checking out loads of art. And I realised, wow, all these abstract impressionists, they were all proper nihilists, really out there, Jackson Pollock and all those geezers. And I recognised that as the spirit of PiL.
“Post-Punk, it was definitely about being more abstract. Like that group from Sheffield, Cabaret Voltaire with all that collage stuff. Disco beats, but more like white boys playing rhythm guitar. I suppose it’s a bit like The Rolling Stones got it a bit wrong, but it ends up like a kind of hybrid, which even the Black Americans liked. Which is fair enough. I was never comfortable with The Rolling Stones, that was something I carried on from my old man, watching them on the TV. My old man liked The Beatles, but he didn’t like Yoko Ono, 'cos he thought she’d got them all on drugs. I really liked Strawberry Fields Forever though. That was an instance of the higher self understanding something. I never really liked Mick Jagger though. He’s an Arsenal fan.”
After PiL, you went solo and you hit the ground running…
“Yeah, I had a couple of weeks thinking about what I was gonna do. I worked for a courier firm for a bit. And people were saying to me, ‘Are you f****** mental? You’ve got a little bit of a name now!’ It was suggested that I make a record with Holger (Czukay) out of Can. So I did an EP with Holger and legendary Can drummer Jaki Leibezeit. I went out for a meal with them all and Holger later said he was a bit worried about me because I was drinking beer, but then I went on the wine and he decided that was alright. He should have been more concerned about me mixing the grain with the grape, that should have told him that there was trouble coming up the road. Which there most definitely was.
‘I NEVER REALLY LIKED MICK JAGGER. HE’S AN ARSENAL FAN’: Jah Wobble
“So, anyway, I did stuff with them in London. By this time I knew how keyboards worked, triad chords, playing root notes and simple parts. Holger played French Horn and took the tapes over to Germany. I went over there and did some more stuff with him and Jaki. I gotta say, Jaki Leibezeit was probably the greatest man I’ve ever met in my life, never mind the greatest musician. Absolutely astonishing guy. Anyway, after that I formed The Human Condition and then The Invaders Of The Heart. That first eponymously-titled album, it kind of got ignored at the time, but got used years later on various soundtracks.
“I did the album Snake Charmer with Francois Kevorkian, who was one of the first of the DJ producers, and he introduced me to all that New York Loft Scene. So I was like f****** Forrest Gump – I’m around when Punk starts, I’m there in the Loft Scene, and I’m also in the picture when Rap starts, going up the Bronx. Going through metal detectors in clubs in the Bronx. I don’t think they even had them in airports at that point. PiL was fantastic. I really had the hump with them in the end, though. I thought, ‘You’ve wasted this great opportunity, s******* money away, Keith on drugs, pretending to be an incorporated company and all that nonsense’. I was really angry with them. But in the fullness of time you look back and go, actually it was great, it got me started, got me cracking.
“And if you stay in a band like that … all those bands that stay together, they end up like old married couples sniping at each other. The marriage has all been about compromise, about them giving up the individual dream of self-realisation or whatever. Neither partner is really that happy, but they really need each other to get through it all. So not having to be in that dynamic freed me up to do whatever I needed to do. I could just go and work with who I wanted, and I developed a musical vision and a sound quite early on. There was always this sense of trying to get to this sound, very much like the spiritual path, to get to that source of it all, get to that which is unnameable. That which is not an object, but which doesn’t not exist either.”
The word inspiration comes from the Latin ‘spirus’, which means to breathe, as in ‘respire’ – to breathe again. It’s also taken from the root word for ‘spirit’… so ‘Inspiration’ literally means God is breathing within you…
“Every breath has to be in the here and now. So if you concentrate on the breath, you are in the here and now. You’re not in the past, not in the future, and the gap between the breaths, that’s where there’s no thought. And it’s from the unnameable that thought comes. You can switch on the light of ‘I am’ and then go into finite reality – which is fine, cos that’s the world we’re in – or you can switch that thought off and go back into the state of pure being. And it’s all made of the same stuff anyway, which is the unnameable.”
I was reading something by Nick Cave, where he talks about this urge for transcendence, about the difference between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’, how the former is too sprawling and vague, too hippy, whereas the latter calls for a kind of disciplined humbling of the self and is concerned with ritual. And of course lots of addicts are attracted to both transcendence and ritual…
“Yeah, the needle, right. Well, it’s Catholicism innit, the tourniquet, the flame, the water, the blood…”
You got out of the music business around 86…
“Well, I got clean in 1986. As William Blake said, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and all that, and it’s a nice way of putting it, but things can get messy on the way. The funny thing is, I’d heard of that MDMA, so in 85 I was starting to make enquiries, and it was all very designer at that stage, difficult to get hold of. Well, thank f*** I didn’t. I liked the sound of it, the way it was a bit trippy and a bit speedy at the same time, and I wanted to trip out, but being an ex-altar boy, acid was no good for me. So I thought, this could be the ultimate experience, but I will remain tethered by amphetamines.
“But it’s all utter horse-s***. We did a show at Pandora’s Box in Holland and we were all buzzing off diplomatic pouch cocaine, and it was amazing – the nuance, the subtlety … and then I heard it back. It was the s******** performance I’ve ever heard. I was amazed at how very bland it sounded.
Heroin has a similar side-effect, makes you think you’re a genius.
“When I took smack for the first and only time, it was with a guy we’d known for years, a bit of a Herbert who went onto to become a heavyweight criminal and he was kinda canvassing for recruits, you know, the first hit is for free kind of thing. So we all take it, and the rest of the boys are all spewing up and I’m sitting there in this club in the West End and he’s rabbiting on to me and I’m thinking shut up will ya, I just wanna sit here … the music’s really loud, this soul music, and it suddenly hit me – I’ve never felt comfortable in myself before like this. And I thought, this is it. This is the cotton wool.
“And I’d seen one or two people go down that path, because that was the era that the Shah of Iran got deposed, so a lot of the money came out of Iran via the heroin trade. But I suddenly went downhill very quickly with the alcohol and drugs, quite bad, around 84-85. I’d been touring America and then suddenly it caught up with me, pretty quickly. I was really in a bad way – swollen liver, going yellow.
“I came home and got a bit of work as a mini-cab driver, cos I had to provide for a young family, I had my daughter at the time. I had to pick someone up somewhere in London, and it was a little bit out of our circuit and that tells you something, it tells you that the local firms don’t wanna touch the fare. So I get there, this girl gets in, and it’s one of my first girlfriends and she’s obviously on smack. I never thought she’d end up like that. Shocking. Best thing I ever done, getting clean.”
And then you went to work on the London Underground…
“I was working on an album called Psalms. Did half of it in drink, and the other half in sobriety, which was interesting. Finished the album and went into AA. I’d burnt all of my bridges in the music game by this point. So I had to get a job. I had the choice of either working for the Post Office or the London Underground, so I shot off and did that for a while. I started in the March, then a few weeks later Nev comes round, Neville Murray, who was in the Invaders Of The Heart, and he’s asking if we could do some gigs. ‘Nev’, I said, ‘I ain’t got a band’. But it lit the spark again.
“I agreed to put another group together and expressed a desire to do some Middle Eastern stuff. Nev said he’d found a guitarist who could pull it off – the only problem was, this geezer had been to Eton. Now, I’d been down on the picket line at Wapping, I hated Thatcher. My attitude at the time, I felt like we’d lost the Spanish Civil War. It felt like we were the losing side and she’d won. Everyone was buying their council flats. I didn’t believe in that – I gave mine back to the council. I could have bought it for seven grand, but I didn’t believe in it. So anyway, I wasn’t away from it for too long and we eventually found ourselves at The Point Studio in Victoria. And that was Invaders Of The Heart Part Two. People think I was away for years, but it was actually only about five weeks.”
The 90s seemed like a golden period for you…
“It was really good. I didn’t have it easy though – I was still about four years away from any kind of major deal. I was doing another courier job and using the van to do the shows. I tour-managed us right across Holland, drove the motor, I had to do all the graft. But we got a major deal eventually. I was like, I’ll give it a year and if I’m not getting anywhere, I’ll just re-train. I didn’t wanna be one of those people into me forties, trying to keep a band going. Within weeks we had a major deal.
“I told them I needed eighty-six grand to make an album and promote it. They faxed me an offer of two grand, which I didn’t respond to. After a bit of to and fro-ing we got the full amount and signed to Oval Records. Fell out with them after they started taking liberties with tape edits and what have ya. We went off to Island, which was really good. We did Rising Above Bedlam, and then Take Me To God. I wrote Visions Of You with Sinead O’Connor in mind. She was a fan of the band and wanted to sing with us. She broke a membrane on a microphone, not through being loud, she had that deeper thing, that deep force and power.”
How do you find life as an artist in the digital age?
“For me, there’s upsides and downsides. I love the fact that I can record at home onto an iPad with a virtual studio, it’s a buzz. You can work about ten times quicker. I like the fact you can put it up on Bandcamp yourself, do your own artwork – all that side of it I love. But it all became really difficult, running a label, round about 2012, because of streaming. I sold my record label, 30 Hertz, two years later. Best thing I ever did. I thought I’d miss it, but I don’t.
“Streaming was the problem for smaller labels. 'Course, we later found out that the major labels had been investing in it, so they had a part share. They’re all happy cos they don’t have to put physical things on lorries and have them sitting there on the shelves if they don’t sell. And they’re able to sell the same old stuff they were selling in the sixties. But for me, I love the fact that I can go on Twitter and promote a tune. My two boys, my sons, they play as well and this tune they did got a million views on TikTok, so they’re getting bookings now and releasing stuff off the back of that. It’s all good. It’s just a different way of doing things.”
We talk some more about Stockport and how it’s changed in the twenty-odd years he’s been here, about the Hull City / Tottenham Hotspur cross-over, and he tells me about Tuned In, the musical community initiative he started to help people over 50 combat loneliness. Forty years in the game and Jah Wobble is as switched on ever, still pushing forward and using the power of music as a positive force. My train is due and it’s time to wrap up, but I have one last question…
What’s your definition of a geezer?
“Oh well, a geezer is a bloke of a certain standing. A man of true substance and style. And he always gets the first round in.”
With that, he stands up and points to my empty cup. “Fancy another cuppa?” He disappears into the cafe. Jah Wobble – a man of fearless substance and exemplary style. A proper trailblazing artist, feet on the ground and head in the stars. The original diamond geezer. Go and see him play in Barton this October. I’ll be at the bar, getting the first round in.
Become a Patron of The Hull Story. For just £2.50 a month you can help support this independent journalism project. Find out more here