The New Cue #365 March 11: Jah Wobble
"My natural default is to be concerned with me, me and only me..."
Good morning!
No messing about, no asking how your weekend was, none of that. Lots to get through. Straight into it.
First of all, did you know we’ve started a monthly New Cue radio show on Boogaloo Radio, recorded in the shed at the back of the Boogaloo pub in Highgate, North London? Well, we have. We did the pilot on Thursday and you can listen to Ted and Niall fluffing their lines but playing good new music for two hours on the Mixcloud recording of the show below. Is it enjoyable recording a radio show in a pub, with ice cold Moretti on tap? Yes. Does it help the broadcasting process? Yes, and no. Will we drink another brand of lager for sponsorship? Of course, apply within. The Mixcloud is linked here.
In today’s edition we speak to the great Jah Wobble, 65-year old bass guitar titan famous for his work with Public Image Limited and his Invaders of The Heart, amongst many other acts. He’s probably the greatest, most recognisable bassist of his punk and post-punk generation.
Last week Wobble published an expanded version of his 2009 autobiography Memoirs of a Geezer, now retitled Dark Luminosity. It’s published by Faber and takes us on a journey from his tough upbringing in the East End of London when he was known as John Wardle, through punk, Sid Vicious, alcoholism, PiL, a subsequent forty-year solo career where he’s played with all the main faces, from Brian Eno to Can, as well as navigated various stretches of inertia, failure, rebirth and revelation. It’s one of the truly great music memoirs, rightly described in MOJO as the post-punk version of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles.
We’re excited about hosting an event with Jah Wobble at The Social on Friday March 22nd, from 6.30 to 8:00, where he’ll be reading from his book. Ted will also interview him as best he can. We’re excited to add that the brilliant Liverpudlian spoken word artist ROY will now be supporting Wobble, so do not come late, but do come correct. It will be unmissable. A few tickets remain for sale here, at thenewcue.co.uk.
Anyway, enough of my yakking. Enjoy the edition.
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Jah Wobble
Hi John, how are you?
Oh Ted, I totally forgot we’re meant to do this. I was just on the patio in the gaff I stay in when I’m down here doing a seated interval training session. It’s good to get away from it, actually. How are you?
I hear you were at AFC Wimbledon’s nil-nil draw with Grimsby last night. Sounds fun.
A pretty shit game. I saw them away at Accrington a few weeks ago too, they got beat 2-0, which was also poor, but I have seen them play some nice football. I saw them play at Stockport County, who are my local team and they were very good. I’ve got a lot of mates at AFC Wimbledon, so going down there is mainly just to see them. And there’s great food there. I stuffed my face. QPR’s old manager Gareth Ainsworth was there too actually, he’s a good bloke, I like him, know him a bit. It didn’t really work for him at Rangers though, and it seems you’ve turned the corner without him.
We’ve got a lot of fancy pants players and that wasn’t really for him. It was a bad fit.
I love passing football, of course I do, but a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. My youngest boy was [in the academy] at Wigan. It was great, but everything was so on-brand. ‘We have our philosophy’. It reminds me of people who have a philosophy about interior design. ‘I would never use a pastel!’ I bet you would if the wind turned. Your philosophy should be informed by life. Sometimes you have to dig in and it’s not easy. We can all play nice football when the pitch is right and everything’s going for us, but sometimes you need to dig in and find another way.
I’ve had a very enjoyable morning reading Dark Luminosity while also listening to Dark Luminosity, your compilation from last year.
I wasn’t sure about the anthology. There was so much stuff to cover. John Reed at Cherry Red had a big say in how we put it together and people say they like it, that it flows into one and another.
It’s good reading music.
Oh, right. That’s great. I’d love my music to be used as ambience. If you turn it down low enough, anything is ambient. It’s supposed to be about losing yourself in this absolute, this calm state within which you can observe movement - or even read.
Where’s the term Dark Luminosity come from?
I do a bit of art as well and I love twilight. Crepuscular, pertaining to the twilight. When I used to live in London, I loved walking down to the Thames, 5pm-ish. Especially in spring and autumn. The sun is quite low as it sets and you get some incredible dark luminosity. It’s as if the actual darkness glows, which is obviously impossible, but that’s how I see it. I love being down by the river then, gives off a Whistler vibe. You get tranquillity by rivers generally, but especially the Thames. I think that runs in my blood.
I love the story in the new Epilogue to the book where both your dad and your son Charlie taught themselves German piano pieces in moments of acute stress many decades apart without Charlie even knowing his grandad had done so. Charlie because his football career was stressful; your dad because he’s seen unspeakable stuff in World War 2.
I know, very strange and a bit spooky. My dad’s family were all very brooding and tended to be quite bright. To me, there’s an element of considering themselves a cut above everyone else. That was epitomised with the old man. I only found out about the strength of his issues post-war a few years ago. One of the ways he coped with that post-war stress was by teaching himself to play piano, literally locking himself away and learning it. I knew he played it but I never got an answer from him either way – ‘Oh, shut up about it.’ People even used to ask me, ‘Have you got any musicians in the family.’ ‘Well, I think my dad plays a bit but I don’t know’. Whereas on my mum’s side we had the whole Irish Catholic thing of marching bands through the East End.
Very strong genes in your family.
Well, I tell you I had a genealogist who did a great job with that. People say don’t it – they can clone you. What a horrible thought. But I got it done. My old man had the weirdest sequence, it’s JN127, I can’t quite remember it entirely but it’s handed down from father to father. She – the genealogist – was like, ‘Good news. Your dad is your dad, and so is his dad.’ It’s funny, because it’s mainly found in Chechnya and the North West of England. So it was either brought over by Gypsies or, more likely, Roman mercenaries.
(above) Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey or Pompey the Great, a general and statesman of the Roman Republic - or is it Jah Wobble?
As soon as you say that, I see you as a Roman mercenary.
Yes, that’s me. Feeling sorry for myself in cold, wet places when I’m meant to be in the Middle East having a great time in the warm. There was a big-old mix-up on my old man’s side: Russian, even some Jewish, which didn’t surprise me. I look at pictures of me in PiL and it’s, fuck me, ‘I look like a Jew!’ No offence to anyone, but I have that look. I have a Slavic thing too, clearly. You see a lot of artists do this: I’m so exotic. But actually, it’s just very typical of London. Who’d have thought that a massive chunk of Irish, bit of Jewish, a bit Slavic would all mix together in a port city?
Why did you expand the original Memoirs of a Geezer into Dark Luminosity?
The only reason this has happened is because of Dan Papps at Faber and Jon Savage, the writer. Jon told Dan that the rights were available again. Which, as you know, is very unusual. Normally you sign the rights away – that’s a whole other story. I also bought all the remaining stock for fifty pence, which meant I actually made money on a book. I originally did the book to compare the literary world with the music world and at first it’s lovely summer-time literary parties with the women all in flowery dresses and the men are all in crumpled linen suits and all that caper. It’s all very civilised. But business is business and so, I got my stock, sold that out and realised I still had something to write. I met Dan, we saw eye to eye on everything and I agreed to flesh it out a bit.
The only thing I hated about the original was the title, Memoirs of a Geezer, which only came about because I couldn’t think of anything that sums everything up. My flute player at the time, Clive Bell, said why don’t you call it Memoirs of a Geezer – a pun on Memoirs of a Geisha. I foolishly said it to Serpents Tail, the publisher, thinking they’d agree with me that it was silly, but they loved it and I was stuck with it. I knew it wouldn’t age well, told them so, but they said if I changed all the team would be demotivated, etc…so God. Was stuck with it. Dan Papps very tentatively suggested we might change it, half expecting me to flounce. But instead, ‘YES!! Yes! Yes please.’ Then he gave me quite a bit of leeway with the text, so I’ve expanded a few sections. Keith Levene died, so I could write about that. More time has passed, so I could reflect more on all sorts, like PiL.
What I like about your book is the power of your voice. I really hear you in my head when reading it.
It’s terse. I kept that. And I also had a little tussle about keeping the italics with the editor, because I like that. I nicked the idea from the guy who wrote that book about Clough, um…
David Peace, The Damned United.
That’s him. I loved that. The italics, it gives you a parallel narration. It’s a great idea. But I had to convince people that it gives the reader a chance to step back with me, the narrator.
There’s a lot of bereavement in the new Epilogue.
There is, I realised that when I’d finished it. I should have called it Impermanence (Death). It’s basically a death list from the first version. It’s probably just meant to bring people up to date with everyone in it and with what I’ve been doing in my life. As I went into my forties, everything became a graft. I was a dad and I didn’t want to mess up the way I had the first time around. My natural default position as a musician is to piss off and not take any responsibility for anything. My natural default is to be living in a flat overlooking the Thames and be concerned with me, me and only me. But instead I’ve wound up in Stockport, the most demographically typical of all places. I went from Tower Hamlets in the new East End, where it’s a melting pot, to Stockport which is demographically the most typical place. So my forties and fifties, it was different, but it was great as well. I still swanned about and had reflexology, but I was grafting as well. I was recording a lot of music, had my label 30 Hertz, there was a lot of contemplative walks with my companion Tyson (his dog), but it was a time of graft and application. But now my boys have grown up, they’re good players. I’m working on a reggae production for a well-known artist and I’ve got my boy John playing on it so I’m happy with that. And yet, as much as I love them and am happy to be working with them, I’m glad they’ve moved out.
They’re accomplished young men, aren’t they?
They are. Charlie, he was a good footballer, he was making a name for himself in men’s football, professionally, but he came to me and said, ‘I’ve made a decision to concentrate on music because I can’t do both.’ Fair enough. No problem. The thing I’m proudest of is Charlie getting his certificate with the Open University, because I asked him to do that when he was playing. He really enjoyed the education. John didn’t have Maths GSCE at that point and I managed to hustle him into the boxing college he wanted to go to, so I really managed to help them in the education corner. It wasn’t the Partridge Family, ‘Oh, I’m so nice’, but my natural default position isn’t to be functioning. So I am so relieved that we did it. That was a big issue for me, the fatherhood stuff, in the epilogue. And the label, 30 Hertz, selling that. Brexit, too, I hope I haven’t banged on about it too much but it’s important from the first version, the disaffection of the blue-collar class and of course that continued at a pace. I never thought it would end up in Brexit, those disaffected old Labour voters who feel they don’t have a voice, but it’s continued. The so-called Red Wall and the Reform Party. These denizens of Clacton and Jaywick and mill towns in the North, they still feel hugely disaffected.
And of course you document the end of your own footballing career.
Yes, I was asked to come out of retirement but I think people were just being nice. I played football golf yesterday for the first time in months. My mate Steve there, who’s 70, ex-building trade, martial artist, lovely bloke, he was telling me he had had grief playing with some other 70 year-old and I just thought, no, we’re really too old for this. It can bring out the worst in you. And I was having a lot of injuries, so I was happy to leave it. Football is frustrating, too, on every level. My last game was at Plough Lane, as well, and I scored the winning goal from the penalty spot in last minute – great, obviously. It was 4-4 when I took it and everyone was afterwards how cool I was, because I was just mucking about chatting. But that’s because I thought it was 4-3 to us already.
I saw a photo of PJ - the spoken-word artist known as ROY – with you at Everton v Spurs the other week.
(PJ Smith aka ROY, light jacket left; Wobble far right)
That’s right. I like Everton, it reminds me of the old White Hart Lane. I like the fans, they’ve been beaten into a sort of brutal realism which is unusual in Premier League fans. They don’t fall for the hype. For Spurs, I am part of the Ange revolution and to not succeed with him is unthinkable, so I’ll stick with it, but that day was a classic Same Old Tottenham performance. Capitulated in the North West of England: if I had pound for every time I’ve seen that I’d have £143, possibly more.
And of course PJ aka ROY will be supporting you at our event at The Social on March 22. What’s your impression of him?
I don’t know him that well but he seems really down to earth, cares for other people, has a realistic attitude. Nice little of mob guys with him. I know Liverpool well anyway, my elder boy John lives there. John still boxes there. Scousers are the nearest thing to the East End as it was. Great humour, kind, friendly but like the East End I grew up in, you don’t want it to kick off because if it does it will be extremely bad. I’m very comfortable in Liverpool. My missus is too, she went there when she was 13, 14. She has a slight Scouse accent, which makes me laugh.
OK John, well, looking forward to talking properly onstage on March 22. We’ll talk about your book, you can do a reading, we’ll take audience questions, and I think we’ll probably do a lucky-dip biscuit tin question thing too…
Ted, all good with me mate. And I won’t get forget! Can’t believe I forgot you were calling. I’m looking forward to hearing PJ/Roy reading, never heard it before.
Oh, he’s really intense, and funny. You’ll love it, I think.
Blinding. Well, see you then.
TK