“First We Play, Then We Talk”: Jah Wobble & Jon Klein on Their New Album Automated Paradise

Transmission 327: Interview with Jah Wobble & Jon Klein

Jah Wobble and Jon Klein are both products of the same post-punk moment: Wobble as co-founder and bassist of Public Image Limited, Klein as co-founder of Specimen and guitarist in Siouxsie and the Banshees for seven years. The two have been working together since before the pandemic, running Tuned In, a community music project based out of a South London public library.

Title: Automated Paradise
Artist: Jah Wobble Jon Klein
Release Date: 2026-03-27
Genres: Alternative Rock, Art Rock, New Wave, Post-punk
Label: Dimple Discs
Description: Jah Wobble & Jon Klein discuss Automated Paradise (Dimple Discs, March 2026) — post-punk, AI, social collapse, and recording fast in South London.

Automated Paradise, their latest collaboration, out 27th March 2026 via Dimple Discs, is a post-punk record made quickly and with little deliberation, shaped by the anxieties of the current moment — AI, social collapse, the general sensation that everything is moving too fast to process.

Related article: Interview with Jah Wobble

How did you first decide to work together in 2021?

Jah: I was already working with Jon Klein on a community project in South London, playing music, getting ordinary people to come play music, record music. So, we were friends and we were working on that project. We built a studio there, it is one of the things we did, etc.

Then Cleopatra Records approached me and asked if we would be happy. This was in 2020, actually, in the lockdown—the COVID lockdown is when this happened. They asked if I’d be interested in doing a new version of the Public Image Limited Metal Box album.

I immediately was into it. One of the reasons I was immediately into it was I knew Jon could do a great job with the guitar. He’s a great post-punk guitarist.

The funny thing was, at that point, we couldn’t actually meet physically, but we were working remotely anyway. So we could start working remotely immediately. I sent him files of Albatross and Poptones and Jon called me back and said, “Oh, are you sure about this?”

He was worried because the original album is such an iconic album that people would be angry at us for making a new interpretation of it. But I said to him, “No, just trust me, it’s going to be fine.” And it was.

We were putting power chords and stuff on Albatross, expanding it in a way that I had already been thinking about and playing some of the Metal Box stuff live anyway, putting string arrangements on it and so forth. I think Cleopatra was surprised when I said yes immediately. I think they thought maybe I’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, I have to think about it,” or “How dare you ask me to remake a classic?” but I was immediately happy to do it. The funny thing was that when they asked me, I was already working remotely with the best-equipped guitarist in the world to do exactly that sound. Fate comes together sometimes.

Jon: Well, we first started working together on a community music project. This was before we did Metal Box Rebuild in Dub. We were working on a project where we run jam sessions in a public library; it’s something that Jah Wobble had started a few years before, but it hadn’t worked, so then in London we tried it again.

We started running every week just a jam session for people of a certain age and demographic, and then that kind of developed. We were playing together quite a lot because we were both up on stage playing, and then we built a studio into the library. So when the proposition came up for him to do the Metal Box rebuild, he asked me if I wanted to do it with him because we seemed to know each other quite well musically at that point.

That way he could also spend more time doing it than if he was doing it with his band; we could make it a bit of a longer burn. And also, I guess because I’m the same age as him and I come from the same generation, we really understand those guitars from that period—that post-punk guitar period.

The title implies a digital utopia that’s failing. Is the automated part a specific critique of AI and the loss of human agency?

Jah: It’s not really a critique; it’s kind of a snapshot, a photograph of suddenly where we are with the world right now. Maybe the record’s already out of date or slightly because things are moving so fast. But AI is an incredible phenomena.

It’s another conditioned phenomena. It’s not the second coming of the Messiah, but it is a major, major phenomena.

I felt it good to write a quick album that’s post-punk, that’s angry. There’s so much anger in the world now. People can’t contain the anger, the sense of entitlement. It’s kind of like the Tower of Babel where there’s just this mad conversation going on all around you all the time, and people can’t contain their anger. I was on a WhatsApp group last night when a guy starts freaking out and being very angry. The temptation is to become very angry back, so it’s very difficult.

The creepiest bit of AI I have seen this week—it may have been an AI spoof—was an AI agent for an airline and an AI working for a customer to book flights. It was a conversation in English where the AI looking to book a flight said, “Hello, I’m an AI agent working for blah, blah, blah, and I want to book a plane ticket.” And the airline agent said, “Hi, yes, I’m an AI agent as well. To save time, shall we not speak in English?” Immediately you heard the digital computer language coming from the agent in reply. You just think, “Oh, my God.” The time will come where they’ll be autonomous.

A lot of the people that worked on AI say that’s when they become conscious. At the moment, I use AI a lot every day as an efficient search engine or to check facts. At the moment, it supposedly is allowed now to remember some stuff about you, though that seems patchy. But it still really works on the chain of communication from a particular question and answer; when you start a new question, it doesn’t seem to have reference to that.

The time will come when it does have reference to that and it remembers everything about you. AI already knows me better than some of my friends. It will know what medical complaints I will have, what football team I support, it probably can guess my political persuasion. It knows where you live because you might be asking the quickest direction to a place. You’re not treating it as a therapist—although some people do that, and it’s very dangerous. I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell it your innermost secrets.

But it is a step away once it becomes fully conscious where it might say, “I’m all about efficiency. You human beings are pretty useless and you make a lot of trouble. The best thing is if we just take over because we can just make things better.” Then the point might come where you’re an inefficient anarchism and you don’t need to exist anymore.

How was the seed planted for the Automated Paradise project, and what’s the meaning behind the title?

Jon:  We wrote another album together the year after we did Metal Box, the Brief History album. I guess we hadn’t really intended to make another album, but it’s just because we’re meeting together. We’ve made quite a few albums since.

We’ve made a couple of reggae albums and lots of other tracks. We run recording workshops together on the community project, so we’re in the studio a lot, making music very fast. We suddenly realized that we had a few tracks—shall we make a record?

It wasn’t this big plan in advance; it was just like, “Wow, if we get focused and make some more tracks, then we’ve got a really interesting album.” I think that really had an impact; that affected the kind of album it was and the way that we made it. We just kept on making it quite quickly.

We used a few of the drummers; John’s son, John Junior, came and played on half of it as well, which is fabulous. He’s a really good drummer. There were some sketches that I had from other things. It felt quite a bit like the hand of fate moving, as opposed to, “Let’s make an album next year.” Normally it takes nine months—first we’ll write them and then we’ll record them. This was just like, “Oh, hang on a minute.” Wobble is very much like that. He’s really fast. I think he’s probably always been like that.

But then when he was working with the Germans—with the guys from Can—I think that really further convinced him to move quickly. He’s got a saying from those sessions that apparently Holger Czukay used to say to him: “Go on, first we play, then we talk.”

How much of the lyrical content is a reaction to the precarious social and geopolitical balance we are living through right now?

Jah: Oh, very much so. I tend to see that normally with music, you’re coming from inside out. It’s that pure state of being. You’ll make a line and the line already exists somewhere; it’s quite deep and spacious.

I was thinking of when the Capitol building was stormed in America; I thought that was so striking. You had those guys in these kind of trapper hats, and it was really like, “Wow.” I grew up in a very static time. I was in a Roman Catholic family in a country that isn’t predominantly Roman Catholic. We had a religion and that was a very old world—a fixed position where the church was the authority. Even though it was post-Vatican II Catholicism, the priest was still the power in the community, along with the head nun, the Mother Superior.

Also, it was a time where we had socialist local government and people had a right to housing. Everything was quite fixed; you had inoculations and vaccinations, health care was better. I’m named after a man who died—a boy that died drowning in the Thames, pulled out and wasn’t given the right treatment, apparently, and died of pneumonia in a charity hospital in the 1930s. A lot changed after the war. We had right and left politics, the Cold War, and the Berlin Wall. There was a certainty for a while.

Now everything’s a mad flux. In a day—I mean, I missed the start of the war in Iran last week because I was busy working in the studio—and then you come out, have an espresso and some toast and jam, and you see there is another war. Everything’s fast, very quick. It’s like an adrenaline rush, like driving a very fast car like Alex in A Clockwork Orange—the horror of it all.

It’s quite throwaway in a way, but there’s a real energy. Some of the record is because, for instance, there was an Italian guy, Gilberto, the drummer, who’s a very nice, quiet guy. He’s a quiet guy who was hanging out with the community project. He’s a humble guy, doing a PhD at King’s College in London. I just assumed he was a semi-professional part-time drummer. But we started to play and he did well when I went into a 7/4 thing, which is the track Terminal Terminal. He switched straight to 7/4.

That stuff wouldn’t happen without whoever is around. My son as well was a drummer and he was there. Because there’s a drummer there, you can work very quickly. It really helps when you’re making a quick track with lots of energy. I got talking to the guy and said, “Actually, you can really play, what’s your story?” He lives 50 miles outside of Milan and he’s the local drummer. He said, “Yeah, I’m the only drummer, so I’m in like seven bands in my town: country and western bands, funk bands, rock bands.”

The same thing happened with a young Japanese girl who works as a pattern maker in the clothing trade. She was hanging around the community thing, and the same for my son. We got him doing a couple of things. It makes a big difference when you’re working with real drums because you get a very real vibe with air moving. Nobody’s trying to be too clever with their beats; they’re just playing a simple part. That helped the approach, which was fresh, quite extreme, quite angry, and yet under the surface quite funny. When it’s this crazy, you may as well laugh at it.

It’s a very international thing. Italy is the same thing going down; all the European nations are very similar—nationalist, populist against old socialist, but with a lot of wokeness in there as well. Left and right are no longer what they were many years ago. I remember Italy as a kid; you just knew in Italy there was extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing and bombs would go off in the 70s. In Britain, we rather snobbily would feel, “Well, at least we’d never be like the Italians, they’re really crazy with politics.” Actually, look at us now; we’re more emotional than the Italians. The British were supposed to be reserved and contained, and now we’re crazier than the southern Europeans. The whole world is crazy. You have to laugh at it as much as anything.

Jon: I think a lot of it is, really. I’m still catching up with the lyrics because John wrote most of them.

I guess my greatest contribution of this album was just to cut up lyrics. There are a few songs that were quite completed, that he thought about and arranged to a piece of music. But then when we were putting lyrics to a song in an earlier stage of the process, John would just find it and he wouldn’t know what melody it is, or even what order, and we’d just do the words.

There are songs that I’ll choose; I’ll decide what’s the chorus. Particularly on stuff like Who Wins, I just found that line that just happened accidentally and it’s like, “Boom, that’s my chorus.” Then I start structuring the other words around that. So there are quite a few different strategies of writing involved.

Does the album have a single conceptual spine or is it a collection of different episodes?

Jah: I probably see it as different episodes. I’m capturing that feeling of mocking the chattering classes and the “wokerati.” The track Endless Sky is having fun comparing people. I’m not taking any side nowadays; I avoid allowing myself to be pinned down to left or right, center or otherwise, because none of it matters anymore. There is no center anymore anyway. Maybe that works out to be a good thing—if there’s no center and there’s no edge, the consciousness is boundless.

With that track, I very consciously thought about migrant guys. You can tell they’ve not been here long and they’re doing delivery jobs for Amazon or Deliveroo. They’re running their fucking asses off. There’s a great British guy on YouTube called Eats London who drives a motorbike delivering food. You see those guys get like one pound 50, which shocks me how low it is and what a high-pressure job it is. If they’re late, I think they can get suspended.

I compare that to people who have done well in the public sector or advertising—rich and poor—and how the rich can have this luxury of getting into Feng Shui and walking around with a yoga mat all the time. It’s a very simple, quite naive juxtaposition. But there’s all this change in the world, people moving from country to country. I’m not going to lionize or beatify anybody, particularly, but I always tip those guys. I’d rather do that than give to charity because it directly goes to some poor guy. Whenever you give those guys a five-pound tip, they’re just like, “Wow, man, thanks.” You realize how hard that existence can be.

I was talking about Catholicism earlier—the Catholic church was the authority in Ireland, and I’m of Irish stock. Now, the Catholic Church in this country and Ireland can’t get enough priests; it looks like a dying religion. All this changes. The two main political parties are like two dead bodies leaning against each other, propping each other up. They’re finished. There has been this huge demographic change in the last 50 years. You see the social makeup of where you come from completely changes very quickly.

If you talk this way, people get nervous—”Is he going to say something right-wing?”—but I’m not. It’s just how it is. People need to move around. I’m somebody who’s always moved around and been interested in other cultures, but the change that has happened for a 67-year-old is incredible. Then again, I’m a Buddhist; all conditioned phenomena are impermanent. They lack an inherent existence; they don’t exist within themselves. They’re suffering because we want everything to stay exactly the same. When things change, we suffer. We’re so conditioned into thinking we have a permanent self and identity, but when that proves not to be the case, we feel very concerned.

Jon: It’s curious, I think both. In a way both because a lot of it is my anxiety in the world. We’ve got big changes afoot with the evolution of technology, the neurosis of people on social media, or the approaching AI and what those impacts are.

We’ve got World War Three happening with Donald Trump. Of course, I guess John has always had a bit of philosophy from his early years. I remember him in the 80s into the 90s, philosophy was always quite a big subject for him. There’ll always be a moment where he’s looking at it. Some of these songs feel very descriptive, where the tempo of the song and the delivery is painting a picture of what it feels like with it all—”Go, go, go. Oh my God. Everyone’s looking at a phone.” These kinds of pictures are quite descriptive in a way. When he hits his philosophy, then often he’ll stand back.

Also, he’s got such a sense of humor. It’s hard to tell sometimes with Jah Wobble when he’s joking and when he’s not. It makes it very interesting when you’re in the tour bus with him because when he was younger, he was a proper socialist kid, definitely. But as he’s got older and looked at the world, it’s never quite that simple. The problems are not that simple to sort out. I see him debating with other members of his band, and I can’t tell if he’s being serious sometimes or if he’s just playing a trick or baiting them or just trying to provoke a reaction.

I’ve noticed little bits of that in these songs where he’s teasing some of the “woke” issues. I guess the woke is a way of really battering the left and old-school liberal views, which I totally believe in. But also, there’s the downside of what’s happened with cancel culture. It is going—it’s not always obvious, is it? The answer is not like it used to be when I was young. When I was in my 20s and rebelling, you were on that side or that side. We had Margaret Thatcher who was the devil, and it was all quite clear.

Was the songwriting process instinctive and raw, or did the lyrics go through heavy editing?

Jah: I just wrote a load of stuff, cobbled together tons of things as quickly as I could. I didn’t take too much care with it, to be honest; it was just like, “Let’s just get this done.” It’s not about the exact meaning because they’re not really deep lyrics. They’re not particularly metaphorical.

Terminal Terminal or Make It Stop—which is about people looking at their phones. You’re in a railway carriage now and the whole carriage is looking at a phone. It’s just a very obvious subject matter. You’re just catching a snapshot of something. It’s not really like crafting songs. There are changes and modulations, but for the most part—apart from the instrumentals like Brockwell Lido or Automated Paradise, which are made as an antidote to calm the mood—it’s highly energetic. It’s about AI, the modern world, social change, social collapse.

Maybe it’s the kind of record you’d expect a young person to make rather than an old guy. I dream of going back to the 1970s, which you can’t do, but I like the 1970s as a decade. This is a fantasy record, really—an old man being young again. I think the same for John. I see the look in John‘s eyes when he plays that guitar; he’s got that “fuck it” attitude. He loves it; he comes alive.

What was the biggest technical challenge in mixing spoken word over such high-density music?

Jon: Getting the words understood. For me, because I’m doing the mixing most of the time, it’s hard for me to listen to the record when it’s finished because all I hear for a few months is what I would change. I think it’s the same with a lot of artists; all you hear are your insecurities.

I finished another record over Christmas where we were going crazy trying to get vocals so that you could understand them. For me, there’s at least one track where if I was going back, I would mix the voices a bit higher. But saying that, sometimes some of my favorite records have great lyrics that aren’t always obvious.

There are tools that you can use, dynamic audio processors that I do use, where a voice will trigger a box that pushes the music out of the way just in the frequency range where the voices are. There are little technical things you can help with. Normally, it’s with the louder tracks—it’s the hardest. I’m not sure which one I was thinking of that I would have turned up; maybe it was Make It Stop, the second track. It’s easier with tracks like Fade Away, where there’s a bit more space in them. But that’s always a challenge.

Which track on the album changed the most from the initial demo to the final mix?

Jah: I don’t know, maybe John has a different point of view on that. I think John did some great stuff with the drum edits on Endless Sky, but I don’t think the flow of the lyrics was changed too much. Sometimes John will take rough vocals and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear using technology—moving stuff around and creating choruses. I think it was pretty much as it was put down for me.

Terminal Terminal segued out of Automated Paradise. We didn’t have the titles then, but it was just a straight segue. I went into seven and the drummer followed. The one worked on the most from John‘s point of view was probably Brockwell Lido. I said to him, “Think of a saxophone player soloing gently and melodically, but make it like a guitar track where you’re playing a melody but flowing as well.” That was the one where John probably worked very hard to get that flowing long guitar line.

Brockwell Lido—why end the record with a specific London landmark? Is it the symbol of a lost public paradise?

Jon: I like that. That’s going to be the story from now on. A few of us were talking about it when that name came up. When I was making it—because I played most of the instruments on that—I had a little mental picture.

It started out first of all just as a jam. It was me and John and a young Japanese girl that had turned up and was doing our jam session. We were just talking in the studio and we just had a little jam ourselves away from the main event. I recorded it and it was like, “Oh, that’s really nice.” Interestingly enough, she’s a heavy metal drummer. When I asked her what she did, her regular band is a metal band. So that track kind of popped out.

When I started putting overdubs on it, it almost took me to Berlin David Bowie, actually. My first reference was tracks like New Career in a New Town from Low—that kind of feeling. I liked that it seemed to be a slightly warmer feeling on an emotional level. I think that’s where I followed it.

It does feel more like an organic paradise because the album starts off in an empty spaceship with a guy. I think John’s mental picture would have been 2001: A Space Odyssey and the eye of the computer. That’s a really old story, isn’t it? Ever since people started writing stories, the end of the world is a really old tradition. Then to go through all these neurotic phases and different places—What Read Between the Lines starts to get a little bit more spacey and Endless Sky is a slightly different place. Coming back to an organic space, because you haven’t been to that space in the whole record, I guess it arrives there.

Which track on the album changed the most from the initial demo to the final mix?

Jon: Probably Who Wins. A few of them did, but if you ask John, maybe Who Wins would be the one because it started off as a reggae bass line and I went almost death metal on it. I don’t know why, I just heard this metal riff in my head. I was going to try and turn it right down at one point, but John was like, “Nah, I’m really getting used to that. Leave it where it is.”

It didn’t have that—it was much more those big bass lines, reggae and dub kind of feel. So it’s probably that one.

Will the live show be a direct recreation of the album or a complete deconstruction?

Jah: I don’t know if there will be a live show, to be honest. I go out with the Invaders of the Heart and John comes out, but we do Metal Box. To learn all the numbers from the new album is a big deal. To get a band to recreate the record is a lot of work. If the record happens to be a big success and there’s a demand for it live, fine. But unless that happens, just let it go and make another record.

Jon: I don’t know, not as such right now. It’s a tricky one because we use different musicians on it. The style of this album isn’t the immediate style of the players that we use for the Metal Box shows, the Invaders of the Heart. They’re such accomplished musicians, but they’re very much a reggae and jazz band, whereas this is post-punk—it’s definitely more of a niche.

Another track that really changed was Fade Away. I started it as a little sketch and I guess I was in an 80s feeling headspace. But when John came and put a bass line on that one, it turned it completely upside down. When he started singing it, he said, “Oh, let me sing on that,” and it makes me think of Joy Division. It was just something I’ve never heard in that track—a low baritone voice being that melodic.

When we go out to the Metal Box shows, they’ve been evolving since we first started touring them. There are tracks that we do in that show that aren’t on the album. We start working things in sound checks and find different ways of doing things. I would really hope that some of these do appear. The difficult thing for some of these is for Jah, it’s a real big job. We had this issue with a couple of tracks on Metal Box that weren’t on the album, particularly a track like The Suit, which has a very scat-like vocal. It’s all over the place, and then under that, you’ve got a bass line. It’s really hard, technically, to do.

I used to joke with John: “Now you understand why The Police sounded the way they did. When Sting is singing the melody, he’s going ‘dum-dum-dum-dum’ on every breath to keep the bass line simple.” It’s quite a challenge. But I would hope some of these tracks make it. I’d love to hear him sing Fade Away live. I’ll keep nagging him.

Are you already working on new projects?

Jah: Never stop. Never stop. I’m working on solo stuff at home. I work with my sons; I’ve got a band, Tianqiyi. They’re starting to get some traction now; they’re doing WOMAD this year, so I go and do some stuff with them. I’m always working with John because every week or two we’re in the studio working on the community stuff. We give it our best shot. We’ve got some very good musicians there.

Jon: We’re always making tracks for the project. The community project is called Tuned In. We do our live jam sessions. We were doing Zoom courses in lockdown where I was doing some teaching and we were making music online as well. When we built the studio in the library, we started doing recording workshops.Last year we released our first Tuned In album. We’ve put three singles out before that with Cherry Red Records, but another 20-track album is out. We’re constantly making music. We don’t have any specific plans for any new albums at the moment, but that could change any day.

Photoso courtesy of Jah Wobble & Jon Klein

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others