Jah Wobble recalls post-punk origins and solo dub return

Transmission 226: Interview with Jah Wobble

Jah Wobble is a British bassist and composer born in London in 1958. Emerging in the late 1970s as a founding member of Public Image Ltd., he played on First Issue and Metal Box before departing in 1980. Since then, he has pursued a wide-ranging solo career that includes collaborations with artists such as Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, François Kevorkian, The Edge, and The Orb. His work has often intersected with dub, post-punk, industrial, and global traditional music, spanning projects like Invaders of the Heart, The Damage Manual, and the East–West fusion album Chinese Dub with Zi Lan Liao.

Title: Dub Volume 1
Artist: Jah Wobble
Genres: Dub, Post-punk
Label: Dimple Discs
Description: Jah Wobble interview: The bass legend discusses Dub Volume 1, his creative evolution, and the power of the low-end.

On 18 July 2025, Wobble will release Dub Volume 1 through London-based label Dimple Discs. Written, performed, and recorded entirely solo, the eight-track album incorporates layered rhythms, heavy reverb, and tape delay, drawing on techniques associated with early dub production. It was mastered by Anthony Chapman (Collapsed Lung) and will be issued on clear vinyl with yellow and red colour drops.

Dub Volume 1 is entirely solo—what drew you back to working alone after so many collaborative projects?

Well, I’m often recording, working on projects. I’ve been doing a lot recently with John Klein, who was in the Siouxsie and the Banshees. I’m working a lot with John at the moment.

I also work a lot with my band and even with my sons. Sometimes it’s lovely to be relaxed and not bother about anyone or anything—just make yourself happy. Today, actually, I’m in my garden.

It’s quiet. I love to be on my own at times, and collect my thoughts. When I make music that way, I’m very happy. The making of music becomes an extension of that.

I also like making records. I like working at home like that—very relaxed. Sometimes in the garden. A lot of the Dub Volume 1 album was done right where I’m sitting now. I also like working on my own when I’m traveling on buses and trains.

You’ve painted the artwork for the album—do the visuals correspond to specific tracks or moods within the record?

Not really, not specifically that I can recall. But I do a lot of geometrical shapes—I’m always thinking of geometry, symmetries, anti-symmetries, asymmetrical stuff. I think of music in that way too. It’s a symmetrical thing that relates to the visual—repeating patterns, hypnotic elements.

One thing I like about the Muslim tradition—like in Islam or Granada—is the calligraphy, that style of painting. Or Mondrian even. The use of geometrical shapes and patterns as a kind of art—it takes you into a kind of infinity.

So that’s the way it connects, really.

Was the album recorded in one concentrated session, or did it come together gradually over time?

Fairly gradually. It can be quite erratic, really. If I’ve got two or three days—like I have at the moment, with nice weather and I’m relaxed—I’ll just work on track after track. You might get two or three done in one go.

Then I might get busy, because I run a community project with John Klein as well. We do that every two weeks, so that might interrupt things.

But it’s like a hobby, really—something you come back to. Very much like a hobby, like a sort of happy amateur making music.

Are there any books, films, or even physical environments that influenced how you approached the album?

Well, I love the sense of space. Dub, for me, with the echoes and reverbs, always suggests space. It’s very spatial music. It suggests an inner space—so really, that inner space should be everywhere.

I have to ask myself what is changeless about me. It’s very easy to see what’s changeable—my moods, my feelings, my perceptions are all contingent on everything around them. They have no inherent autonomous existence.

What makes sense is trying to find the thing that doesn’t change, something that goes beyond—something spacious, absolutely infinite. That’s where the music comes from, I think—from that changeless place.

Have you already begun laying down Volume two?

Yes, yeah—there are already four or five tracks down. At the moment, the theme might change, but it’s kind of a dub, and for some reason it also sounds like TV theme tunes.

One of the tracks is called Mystery Murder Suspense. It’s like those—maybe it’s just a British genre—murder mystery shows where somebody gets killed at a hotel, and everyone at the hotel is a suspect. Those kinds of programs tend to have a certain kind of theme, and I’ve been doing that, but in a dub style. So yes, I’m already underway with it.

When will it be out?

I would think probably in about six months, something like that. I’m also working on another dub record with my elder son, which is pretty heavy. He’s a very good drummer, so that one’s got quite a heavy sound.

That will have a more oriental feel.

What pushed you toward the bass rather than guitar, drums, or vocals when you first picked up an instrument?

On a practical level, I’ve got big hands, and making chords on the guitar is kind of fiddly. With a bass, you just have four strings, and plucking or pulling them definitely suits me more than trying to form those funny little guitar chords—which I still find tricky.

On a deeper level, it’s the depth of the bass that takes me into another world. It resonates in the abdominal cavity—in your guts. That area is a whole nexus of nerves, the heart of the being.

To me, it’s a bit like when the Buddhists say om, om—that low sound that unifies.

Growing up in the East End, what were the first sounds or atmospheres that really struck you?

Probably the first atmosphere would have been the Catholic Mass. We were very strong Catholics, and I grew up in a time when you could still hear the Latin Mass. My dad’s brother was a priest.

So you’d hear the Mass recited in Latin, with choral singing in Latin. I still think it’s very beautiful. That was one of the first atmospheres that really affected me.

The atmosphere in the church was kind of scary. I was an altar server, and sometimes I’d be left in the church on my own, preparing the altar for Mass—and sometimes for a funeral. So I’d be alone in the church with a coffin.

The East End is like an Italian city—very noisy. Probably like in a lot of Italian cities, the quietest places were the church and the library. So there was a sense of peace there, somehow.

That was the atmosphere. In terms of music, I was lucky to grow up during a time when blue beat—or ska, early reggae—was the popular urban music. That was some of the first music I fell in love with.

What first made you want to make music—was it instinct, escape, rebellion, or something else?

No, I never had any plans to. I didn’t really have any plans for anything. Then punk happened.

I was friends with Johnny Rotten—Johnny Lydon—and punk started in 1975. He was older than me. We were friends. We were at a college of further education, a kind of college for kids who’d flunked school for whatever reason. I was kicked out of school; he had been ill—he’d had meningitis, a brain inflammation.

He met McLaren and disappeared for a while. Then he came back and saw me. I asked, “Where have you been?” and he said, “I’m in a band. Do you want to come and see us rehearse?”

I thought, this is unbelievable—how could he be in a band? If he’d told me he was training to be a priest, I would’ve believed that more. Working-class people didn’t really have bands then. We all listened to recorded music.

But punk gave everyone permission to pick up instruments. So I picked up a bass. I already had an abstract way of thinking. I wasn’t happy with punk music itself. Punk was supposed to be anti-bourgeois, revolutionary in some way, but I found it very strictly conformist. I didn’t actually like punk music.

I was more into patterns, textures, using collages—what later became post-punk.

Metal Box is what you’d call a post-punk record. That’s more what I brought to the table.

It was really circumstance that led me to play bass. I’m very grateful, because I took to bass like a duck to water.

At the start of PiL, did it feel like you were creating something new, or just finding your own space in the chaos?

I think both. You’re starting out, you’re just overjoyed to play—so you’re finding your way. But then a feeling comes in that this is actually good, and it’s a very fresh sound.

Especially as we moved very quickly from the first album into Metal Box.

For me, it was the sense that, OK, if you have a normal career, you make one album, then a very commercial album, then the awkward third album, and eventually the far-out crazy album.

But my feeling was: let’s just be what we are and make the extreme album—which was Metal Box.

Let’s just do that. You could already hear the seeds of Metal Box in the first album anyway.

How did it happen to collaborate with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit?

I was, and still am, very good friends with Angus MacKinnon, a journalist from the NME at that time. I met him when I did an interview about Metal Box. He knew Holger, Jaki, and all of them—he knew Hildegard, their manager.

He said, “You must meet these people—you have to work with them, you’ll love them.” So I met Holger, and we got along.

We recorded in London with an Italian guy named Mark Lusardi—who’s still a good friend of mine. He was famous—he’s the brother of the model Linda Lusardi. Then I went to Germany and worked with them in Cologne.

I was so fortunate. They were wise and completely validated the way I was seeing and wanting to play music.

I remember going into studios at the time—the attitude of sound technicians and producers didn’t last long with us. We were sent one famous producer, John Leckie, and I think I mugged him and took his wallet in the studio, which was a bad thing to do, obviously. You shouldn’t do things like that.

But it was like walking into a scientific lab. Everyone was so careful: “First, we have to mic the drums… then spend two days getting a drum sound, then another half-day getting a bass sound.” It was all very careful.

I got fed up with that in PiL. We kicked against it.

When I went to work with Can, it was fantastic. They couldn’t be bothered with any of that nonsense. They had a studio in an old cinema. A couple of overheads over the drums, no dividing wall between the desk and the room—it wasn’t even a control room.

You just recorded. You didn’t try to get a drum sound. You didn’t talk.

As Holger used to say: play first, talk later.

Photos courtesy of Jah Wobble

Matteo Damiani

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