Cherry Red Records and 30 Hertz release the album on August 14th
Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi are streaming on Retrofuturista ahead of the album’s wider release. Mystic Liverpool, The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook arrives August 14th via Cherry Red Records and Wobble’s own 30 Hertz, preceded by the singles “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
Artist: Jah Wobble Tian Qiyi
Release Date: 2026-08-14
Genres: Alternative Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Label: 30 Hertz, Cherry Red Records
Description: Jah Wobble and sons Tian Qiyi rework The Beatles' psychedelic songs with dub bass, erhu and gu-zheng. Out August 14th on Cherry Red Records.
The ten tracks draw on The Beatles’ most exploratory stretch, with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour” named as reference points. Rather than covers, the songs become a meeting point between Liverpool, China and Mongolia, and between a family’s inherited traditions and the dub sensibility running through Wobble’s own work.
The record was produced jointly by Jah Wobble (read our interview with Jah Wobble) and his sons John T Wardle and Charlie Wardle, who record as Tian Qiyi, recorded and mixed by John T at Pagoda Studios in Liverpool. Instrumentation carries the family’s signature: Wobble’s dub bass, John T’s drums with Chinese percussion and yangqin, Charlie’s vocals, erhu and morin khuur. Zi Lan Liao, the brothers’ mother and a Royal Academy of Music-trained harpist regarded as the most recognized gu-zheng performer worldwide, plays gu-zheng on “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Wobble describes the psychedelic years as the point where the group stopped being a pop act and became something else, calling the project overdue given two sons raised between Chinese classical training and dub, a wife trained at the Royal Academy, and a father-in-law who owned every Beatles record on vinyl. The tracklist settled around songs reaching for something genuinely mystical, among them “Within You Without You,” credited in part to producer George Martin’s studio work. The family calls the approach neither fusion nor homage, simply playing the material with the instruments they have and mixing by ear.
The Liverpool connection runs through Zi Lan Liao‘s father, K.H. Li (Liao Gui Xiong), who arrived from Guangzhou in 1981 as Chinese Cultural Officer at the Pagoda and founded the Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra, where both sons played from age three. The album is dedicated to him.
John T points to a household where Chinese classical, dub, jazz, rock and hip-hop carried equal weight, finding that same spiritual lineage in George Harrison’s music. Charlie says the record was made for the city itself, for the fog, the river and the iron figures standing in the water behind Liverpool’s pop reputation.
Jah Wobble co-founded Public Image Ltd and formed Invaders of the Heart in 1982, with a Mercury Music Prize nomination and collaborators including Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, The Edge, Sinéad O’Connor, Massive Attack, Björk and Brian Eno, alongside recent work with Horace Andy, Ken Boothe and Jon Klein. Tian Qiyi takes its name from the brothers’ Chinese middle names, moving across British, Chinese, Mongolian and dub traditions with a pull that comes from real tension between old and new.
The album will also be issued as a CD Digipack. Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi perform on release day at Suffield Summer ¡Fiesta! 2026, with Wobble and The Invaders Of The Heart touring through the rest of the year.
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