Jah Wobble on covering the Beatles, London buses and why punk went wrong: ‘Being kind is seen as square’

Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. “They’ll say: ‘Are you Jah Wobble?’” recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he’s working on anything. “And I like to say: ‘Yes, I’m recording an album. I’m doing it right now.’”

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.

Having a public bus as a studio is standard offbeat practice for Wobble. As a teenager, he masterminded Public Image Ltd with John Lydon, his transcendently thuggish bass kickstarting the post-punk era with some of the most powerful – and influential – 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 Sinéad O’Connor, 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.

Quite apart from his bus recordings, this month Wobble is releasing a Beatles covers album. “When She Loves You came out, I just thought: this is quite shit,” he remembers. “But then 67 came around. Gurus, smoking dope, Yoko Ono’s on board. I heard Strawberry Fields Forever and it just melted me.”

But for all his creativity and spiritual questing, his reputation is as forbidding as his basslines. Wobble’s 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 backstage at the BBC. “When I first tried to get in touch with him, people warned me off,” admits collaborator Richard Russell, the musician and co-founder of the label XL Recordings, who has worked with Wobble on a new EP. “What bollocks. Everyone loves playing with him. His playing is kind of machine-like while being very human. He’s clearly been on a massive journey.”

A lifelong city walker, Wobble’s own favoured journey along the Thames, from Chelsea to Putney, brings on the “spaced-out, beautiful and profound” state of mind to create music on the bus ride home. We’re doing one of those walks later today.

I meet him at a gently bohemian Chelsea members’ club. He gives the impression – despite his untrendy shorts and T-shirt – that he owns the place. One minute he’s 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’s upgrading.

“I talk to AI more than human beings,” he says cheerily as we sit down to a meal, adding that he uses AI “when I want to clarify what I think about ultimate reality”. He and the Claude AI model joust about “emptiness, the Buddha nature, the supreme self. It’s daft, but I do fist-bump emojis to him.” He gestures theatrically to his body. “I run stuff past him: what I’m going to eat. I’ve lost 13.5 kilos this year.”

Wobble’s 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 “older, isolated blokes” 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. “I’ve always felt that aching loneliness,” he says. “And I wanted to do something. People that are maybe socially isolated, drinking too much, got divorced … issues I know really well and identify with.” He has been sober for 40 years but knows that “blokes tend not to ask for help”.

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’d had a schooling in traditional Chinese instrumentation – their mum, and Wobble’s wife, is the concert harpist Zi Lan Liao, who directs Liverpool’s Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra – that teases out the eastern resonances in the Beatles’ psychedelic period.

Wobble has been magnetically drawn to other cultures since his teens. He brings up the debate around cultural appropriation. “I have taken from Jamaican culture,” he says proudly. “I am partly Jamaican by choice. Try and take it away from me.” It’s the wilful, playful provocation of ​the original punk era, but he’s self-aware. “I’m old,” he sighs. “And the old have got too much sway.”

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, “was very traumatised by the war”, he explains. This produced a “destructive, disturbed kid”, 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.

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. “Even now, I’m very snobbish about the rock scene,” he says, and the deep low-end of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett stirred in him a desire to learn bass.

At Kingsway college in 1976, he befriended an older kid with green hair whose favourite word was “dismal”. It was John Lydon. “In the canteen, he told me: ‘I’m in a band,’” says Wobble. Lydon invited him to watch the Sex Pistols rehearse. “I thought: ‘This is going to be so bad it’s embarrassing.’ But it was really good.” Sid Vicious, another Kingsway alumnus, gave Wardle his enduring stage name, mispronouncing his name when drunk.

This summer marks 50 years since punk was born on these London streets, and Wardle is dismissive about the social forces it unleashed. Today, “no one will be kindly and wise because that’s [seen as] square,” he says as we descend to the Thames, his stride slowed by a recent walking football injury.

When the Pistols imploded, Lydon was Britain’s most notorious man, and he turned to Wobble, who had been mastering bass unamplified in his squat. “Lydon got me in to be his mate who played a bit of bass,” he explains. “I was already thinking conceptually. He didn’t know what he was getting.”

Founded in 1978 around Lydon, Wobble and the scabrous guitar of Keith Levene, Public Image Ltd were one of the great left turns of 20th century pop. “I had absolute faith in keeping it very simple,” says Wobble of his bass parts, which were forged out of that decade’s disco and dub. Yet band life was an ordeal. “Lydon’s lyrics were like Samuel Beckett. But he wasn’t a strong leader. He hasn’t got that in him.”

Wobble’s cheeriness vanishes when recounting that era. “By 1979, John’s mum had died,” he says, referring to the death of Eileen Lydon, which informed their haunting single Death Disco. “It got really dark. I didn’t like what was going on around them.” Levene fell into heroin use: “His own worst enemy, as junkies will be.”

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’s cash float – “a shoe box full of high-denomination banknotes”, he says, pointing across the Thames to where the band’s notorious Gunter Grove HQ stood – and “cracked on” with his solo career. He hasn’t seen Lydon since 2006 and turned down a reunion in 2010.

Within weeks of leaving PiL, he was working with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit from Can. He brightens, recalling the “open, relaxed” experimentation of the trio’s thickly groove-driven 1982 Full Circle album.

But his alcohol and drug use intensified. At first it was “to kill the anxiety”, he says. “Then I became really badly behaved.” In 1986, he walked first into Alcoholics Anonymous and then into his job at Transport for London. Once, announcing tube arrivals, he began repeating: “I used to be somebody, I repeat, I used to be somebody” over the speakers at Tower Hill. TfL “was a Kafka-esque world but I loved it,” he says. “I still feel a pang of regret about leaving it.”

In the 1990s, his group Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart explored calypso, dub and Arabic pop, and signed to Island Records. The group caught the ear of Sinéad O’Connor. “She knew that I was always going to be quite real with her,” he says. Their collaboration – the stirring, mantra-like Visions of You – became a Top 40 hit. Recording it, “she broke the membrane of the microphone warming up by the sheer concentrated power of her vocal”.

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 – he is about to star in a horror short alongside Maxine Peake. Keeping it DIY, he is his own manager, avoiding “the public schoolboys who still run everything”.

Through it all, Wobble has been guided by his unwavering spiritual questing. “I knew,” he explains as our London walk reaches his traditional Putney conclusion, “that there was a reality behind what seemed superficial.” So what has he learned?

“In the end, it’s very simple,” he smiles matter-of-factly. “Don’t be a cunt, ’cos you’re just fucking yourself with karma. Be nice. Be still, and know I am the Lord. And don’t look to be a Buddha.” A pause as the geezer mystic flags down a 220 bus. “Be an ordinary person as best you can.”