First on RetroFuturista: Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi Announce Mystic Liverpool on Cherry Red Records

Retrofuturista premieres ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the new single by Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi. The track arrives on digital platforms on July 14th and precedes ‘Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook’, an album due August 14th through Cherry Red Records and 30 Hertz, Wobble’s own label, in digital form and as a CD Digipack. A first single, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, is already available.

Title: Mystic Liverpool
Artist: Jah Wobble Tian Qiyi
Genres: Dub, Experimental Music, Post-punk, Psychedelic Rock
Label: Cherry Red Records
Description: Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi rework Strawberry Fields Forever with guzheng and dub bass. Mystic Liverpool is out August 14th on Cherry Red Records.

The project is a family affair in the most literal sense. Tian Qiyi are John T Wardle and Charlie Wardle, the sons of Jah Wobble (John Wardle); the duo’s name comes from their Chinese middle names, Tian Qi and Tian Yi. On the album, Wobble plays dub bass, John T handles drums, Chinese percussion and yangqin, and Charlie contributes erhu and vocals. On ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Charlie also picks up the morin khuur, while the brothers’ mother, Zi Lan Liao, a harpist trained at the Royal Academy of Music and director of Pagoda Arts Centre in Liverpool, adds guzheng. The record was produced jointly by the three Wardles and recorded and mixed by John T at Pagoda Studios in Liverpool, where Tian Qiyi is based.

The material comes from The Beatles’ psychedelic period, with ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ as reference points, approached as mystical music in its own right instead of nostalgic covers, and reset within Chinese, Mongolian and dub traditions.

For Jah Wobble, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is the song that “opened my psyche as a small boy in the East End”, which made it the inevitable centrepiece of the record; he describes it as “a family track in every sense”, built on space in the mix and trust in the listener, with no attempt to compete with the original but to “honour the mystery of it” through different instruments. John T Wardle explains that a straight cover made no sense for a song everyone knows, so they went for “a massive, hypnotic wall of sound”; guzheng textures from their mother, Charlie’s strings on the melody, father and son locked into bass and drums, “less of a tribute and more of a dark, trippy, out-there collision of our family’s two musical worlds”. Charlie Wardle notes that the song describes a real place Lennon remembered from childhood, a homesickness the erhu suits well: “we just played the melody like we meant it”.

Jah Wobble, born John Joseph Wardle in Stepney, East London, in 1958, was the original bass player of Public Image Ltd, which he left after two albums, and formed Invaders of the Heart in 1982. His fifty years of activity include chart success, a Mercury Music Prize nomination and collaborations with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, The Edge, François Kevorkian, Sinéad O’Connor, Massive Attack, Ginger Baker, Björk, Brian Eno and Pharoah Sanders, plus recent work with Horace Andy on ‘Timeless Roots’, Ken Boothe on ‘Old Fashioned Ways’ and Jon Klein on ‘Automated Paradise’. His autobiography, ‘Memoirs of a Geezer’, was published in 2009.

Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi play Suffield Summer ¡Fiesta! 2026 on the day of the album’s release, and Jah Wobble and The Invaders Of The Heart tour the UK throughout 2026.

Jah Wobble has spoken with Retrofuturista before: read our interview with Jah Wobble and Jon Klein on AI, social collapse and making post-punk fast and our conversation with Jah Wobble on the solo dub album ‘Dub Volume 1’.

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