However, this was not the case for a long line of pop types, who have taken Blake's words as a touchstone for their own, sometimes flawed, millenarian fantasies. Just what is it about William Blake, poet, auto-didactic engraver, and prime British mystic, that inspires musicians?

Is it the penurious, perpetually at odds with the establishment lifestyle that Blake led, culminating in his 1804 trial for sedition, that appeals to the self-mythologising set? Or is it the general 'out-there' nature of his writings, with their themes of anti-authoritarian, Utopian innocence, that strikes a deep chord? Or was it, as seems most likely considering pop types, the receiving of visitors in the buff (Blake, not the visitors)? Whichever way, musical inter-precautions of Blake have ranged from the deadly earnest to the off-the-peg 'weirdness' of the Julian Cope 'look at me I'm a holy fool no really you're not paying me enough ATTENTION!' approach. Let's look through the cracked window...

The first overt reference to Blake I could discover, beyond the general atmosphere of child-Iike, and wide-eyed innocence that pervaded British psychedelic, is a rather too prominent placing of the 'Complete Works', on the cover of Tyrannosaurus Rex's 'Unicorn'. This is followed by the utter loopiness of fabled Electric Prunes producer David Axelrod's two, rare as hen's teeth, Blake-inspired LP's, 'Songs Of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience'. After that the scene remained fairly fallow (unless you consider an Atomic Rooster cover fertile) until the more self-consciously conscious punks began dropping the odd reference to Blake. However, the best was yet to come. In 1984, ex-Pop Group singer and conspiracy buff Mark Stewart hid a bleakly metallic version of Parry's setting of 'Jerusalem' on side two of his album 'Learning to Cope With Cowardice...'.

Curiously enough, dance culture, with it's emphasis on the Utopian, has never really adopted Blake, although the trance/hippy/traveller community is drawn to the same 'world-tuned-upside-down', mystical anarchist strand which links Blake to that non-political tradition of British dissent which began in the middle ages. And, if you really wanted to push it, you could argue that drum 'n' bass is the sound of the Giant Albion shaking off his chains and manning the Technics... But we don't want to push it, do we?

Which leads us to Wobble-which end of the scale does he sit on? Well, it's been obvious for some time now that he's been heading into the mystic, and this, coupled with his passion for London-centric, psycho-geographical musings, a Ia Sinclair, Ackroyd and Moorcock, would lead him inexorably on to Blake, who, after all, was born in Soho, the heart of that new Baby-Ion; the music business.

The first track' 'Songs of Innocence', begins with a selection of spare, elegiac arrangements of extracts from the 'Songs Of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience' before Wobble's trademark subterranean bass rears it's rubbery head, and the familiar globe-trotting grooves strike-up. Next up, 'Lonely London' uses Blake's own words to cast a jaundiced eye over our city, before segueing into a curiously, and perhaps consciously, Lydonesque snarl through some of the mere colourful of the 'Proverbs Of Hell'.

It's not all sweet William though. 'Banana's' is a typically pan-cultural collage, and the floating triad of 'Breathing Out Of The World', 'Swallow In The World' and 'Swallow In The World (reprise)' are text-book exercises in the use of dub space. Of the other directly Blakean stuff, the ever familiar 'Tyger Tyger' gets a stately, rootsical treatment, and is surely destined for single release, while 'Auguries Of Innocence' is a sulphurous, vituperative rant. Throughout, Wobble is backed by a sterling team including the clinically metronomic drumming of ex-Can man Jaki Liebzeit.

The LP works on several levels, like Blake's own work. On the one hand it's a perfectly good Jah Wobble piece, while on the other it places him in the tradition of 'cockney mystics' to which Blake belonged, according to Wobble's sleeve-notes, and asserts the redemptive qualities of innocent, unconditional love. Moreover, it mythologises place, layering city upon city, Zion upon Jerusalem upon Babylon. However, the bad news is that a similar exercise was undertaken in 1980 by jazzer Mike Westbrook, whose 'Bright As Fire' was a setting of Blake's texts distilled from a stage biography. Still... chalk and cheese eh? Or' as Mr B put it, 'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life'.