A rock survivor

THE LAST time Jah Wobble got into a public punch-up was half a decade ago, squaring up to a street gang on his East End home turf. But it was purely a case of wrong place, wrong time, insists the cosmic cockney bass maestro. He was not looking for trouble, but he stood his ground and walked away with just a minor cut on his head.

“I was checking for stab wounds,” recalls Wobble, a gangly and charming motormouth whose reputation as the Vinnie Jones of punk rock has stayed with him, a little unfairly, for decades. “It was actually quite nasty, but the gods were with me. I was lucky someone didn’t shoot me, which could happen now quite feasibly.”

In truth, Wobble is a serenely peaceful, Zen-like figure these days. A 46-year-old family man with voracious intellectual curiosity, he has played bass with everyone from John Lydon to Brian Eno, Sin?ad O’Connor to Bj?rk, Primal Scream to Pharoah Sanders.

And now he has collected the highlights for I Could Have Been a Contender, a triple-disc retrospective on the legendary dub-reggae label Trojan.

“The whole dub thing is very much connected with medieval music and Ancient Greece,” gushes Wobble. “With the modes Plato talks about in The Republic, I just get a strong intuitive sense that Plato would have liked Jah Wobble music. I would not have been chucked out the city gates.”

You get a lot of this kind of banter from Wobble, and his tongue is only partially in his cheek. Born John Wardle in Stepney in 1958, the self-taught East End mystic grew up in a working-class Docklands family of Irish Catholic descent. The recurring threads of spirituality and divinity that run through his music are, he admits, rooted in his childhood experience as an altar boy. “Simply being brought up in an atmosphere where you believe in the Holy Ghost,” he says, “it ’s magic, as much as anything else. But it gave me a good foundation for otherworldliness.”

It is refreshingly unusual to interview a pop musician who can trace a link between the Reformation, Cartesian dualism and postmodernism, never mind a former hooligan who was expelled from school before becoming a kind of thuggish sidekick to the punk pioneers John Lydon and Sid Vicious. Indeed, it was Vicious who famously christened Wobble by drunkenly slurring his real name. The bass virtuoso returned the favour by trying to teach Sid to play. Alas, his efforts were in vain.

Wobble’s own bass-playing career began when Lydon corralled him into his innovative post-Sex Pistols group Public Image Ltd, in 1978. Wobble later described PiL as “four emotional cripples on four different drugs”, and likened working with Lydon to being inside Hitler’s bunker. The band were both acclaimed and reviled in their late 1970s heyday, although critical hindsight has endowed them with profound and lasting significance.

“People forget what it was like,” shrugs Wobble. “PiL were actually slagged off when we first started, a lot of people just weren’t going to have it, they called it stupid. If you look at the number of records sold it wasn’t a big thing at all.”

In 1980 Wobble left PiL for a shaky solo career of collaborations and session work, but drink and drugs dominated his crazed, angry days. By the mid-1980s he was washed up, and resorted to working night shifts as a minicab driver. “It was definitely a Travis Bickle thing,” he says, “feeling like a ghost driving through the city.”

Next came a bizarre stint as a London Underground station supervisor, which coincided with Wobble renouncing both drink and drugs. That was 18 years ago, and he has not touched a drop or a line since.

Cleaning up his act helped Wobble to relaunch his career as Britain’s most in-demand bass player. In the 1990s he also released a string of acclaimed albums encompassing everything from world music to ambient jazz, Celtic folk to William Blake poetry. Along the way he earned a Mercury Music Prize nomination, founded his own record label, graduated with a humanities degree and married his Anglo-Chinese musician girlfriend, Zi Lan Liao.

Five years ago, they moved with their two young sons from the East End to leafy suburban Cheshire. “I know the inner city, I know those estates, and it ain’t got no better,” Wobble says. “I wouldn’t like to be an old person living in Bethnal Green.”

After almost 30 years as a musical contender, Wobble insist he has no regrets beyond “being a prick at times”.

But does he still see the man who started it all, John Lydon? “No, but we say nice things about each other,” Wobble grins. “John can be manipulative and charming. I’ve known him since before the Sex Pistols and he never was a thoroughly nice person, but he’s the geezer who got me into being a musician. Because of John, doors opened for me. The way PiL was run was total crap, but I still feel affection for him. I just can’t help it.”