the Irish Post Saturday, July 19, 1997 . . . Jah Wobble turns all Celtic

MARTIN DOYLE is charmed by Jah Wobble, the former punk who has teamed up with Ronnie Drew on his new album

Cockney rebel

"Take your coat off. You'll be cold when you go out." I am sitting on Jah Wobble's sofa and this one-time side-kick of The Sex Pistols, a former boozer and brawler and ever more formidable bass player, is looking after me like my granny used to.

There are two sides to every psyche, of course, and Jah Wobble is also an auto-didact, much given to spiritual reflection and devoted to making music. His latest album, The Celtic Poets, is a fascinating marriage of Irish poetry, read by old gravel-voice himself, Ronnie Drew, and music from the Celtic parts of the globe, from the Breton bagpipes of Jean-Pierre Rasle to the Indian sitar of Baluji Shrivastav.

It's a fascinating work of art and once you get over the oddness of the spoken word and allow yourself to be transported by Jah Wobble's carpet of sound, you find yourself in a better place.

But why has this quintessential Londoner, a Cockney to the core, gone all Celtic? The influence of the poets can be connected to his previous album, The Inspiration of William Blake, on which he read Blake's poetry to his own musical setting. But The Celtic Poets is also a return, but a determinedly unsentimental one, to his own Irish roots.

"Most of me most successful collaborations have been Irish or London-Irish", he says, citing John Lydon. He has also recorded with Sinead O'Connor and Dolores O'Riordan. How Irish was his background? "It was on both my parents' sides. As far as I can ascertain they came over to Wapping about the time of the Famine. Generally speaking there's less consciousness of Irishness here. It makes me laugh. I remember an Irish union convenor going mental at the time of the dockers marching in support of Enoch about losing their British identity. He went, look at your names, where do you think you come from, do you think you go back to the Magna Carta?"

"I didn't know it at the time but you had Irish ways, a lot of it tied into Irish Catholicism. I was one of those marked people, I went to the Sisters of Mercy primary school. I know it's an effing cliché, the terrible Catholic upbringing but I can't remember one nun with an effing smile or showing mercy. I still call myself a Catholic, by the way. I loved the Latin Mass. I believed it all. Then you start to think, if you believed it you wouldn't behave as you do so I started to get very angry with it for a few years. I never called myself an atheist. I used to be a drinking man and I'd have stupid, drunken arguments, "there is an effing God. If you're an atheist why bother following any social norms, nothing means anything?", hence the Louis MacNeice poem on the album. My uncle was a priest. He's retired now.

Wobble has just written a requiem Mass, which he hopes will be played in Westminster Abbey this November, which he believes would be a symbolic ecumenical act with a resonance for Northern Ireland. "It would be nice to nail all that. It's the same effing God so what's going on? It's a platitude but the root of all great religions is compassion and forgiveness. It takes a bigger man to forgive than to pull an effing trigger.

Religion for him now is being open to what works for you. A Buddha sits on his mantelpiece, alongside an icon of the Virgin Mary, to whom he has a particular devotion. Catholicism, he feels, is too concerned with the pain of the cross. "Self-sacrifice when it's willingly done is great. That's the downside of Catholicism - it's demanded of you."

Jah Wobble: "It was music that gave me everything that I ever found out, music that was me teacher."

He sees Satanic themes in society, none greater than the sacrifice of childhood innocence in the name of profit. By coincidence, jostling for space on the mantelpiece is a drawing by one of his daughters of ... The Spice Girls. Wobble's words from earlier in our conversation chime in:"It's hard to be a father."

Wobble's Celtic project took off when Gerry O'Boyle of the bohemian filthy McNasty's pub invited him over to the In The City music festival in Dublin to take part in Vox'N'Roll, a marriage of music and literature. There he met up with Ronnie Drew, "one of the few people I respected as a kid, great voice, great-looking geezer. He was just totally nice, the great ones always are. I'd been wanting to make the connection, the whole Celtic thing, particularly Irish poetry. There's a certain nobility there that I can identify with. I really wanted to marry that up with some wild music, yet again showing the deeper side so it isn't jolly little jigs and lightweight but bringing deeper elements in, making historic connections with the Aryan tribes in India."

Wobble had been drawn to The Dubliners in the sixties not for the drinking songs like Seven Drunken Nights but the more radical ballads. You can't help drawing up a list of the similarities between him and Shane MacGowan - the London-Irish background, the early days of punk, the hard drinking, the cussed integrity. They knew each other slightly in the punk years - Wobble's ex-wife was best friends with Spider Stacey's girlfriend at the time - but their musical paths have crossed only now with Wobble recording MacGowan's bitter Famine lament, The Dunes.

If the poems chosen for this album have anything in common, it is a righteous anger, railing against Famine landlords; Paddy Kavanagh spitting in the face of a lout interrupting a woman singing; Louis MacNeice struggling with faith and materialism; or James Clarence Mangan tussling with life's elusive meaning.

Wobble has a passion for the spoken word and music. "Language has its own rhythm. When it's spoken with a certain power it's as holy as scriptures. In the Bible it says in the beginning was the Word. Music is the most sacred of the arts - I would say that because I'm a musician - it's the most formless in a way so it's the most spiritual, the most subtle, the least gross of all the arts. The word stems from the same root, in the East it's om, like the sound of the bass. That's not to say I don't love songs but there's a directness and a spirit about the spoken word. I love it when there's a purity in the text and you just reflect and honour that. Certain poems have their own internal life, there's a real weight there."

Wobble grew up listening to music eight hours a day, music that was "full on with lots of energy", bluebeat, the forerunner of ska, then reggae and Arabic music, not forgetting The Dubliners and The Chieftains.

He was interested in music in its purest forms, musical mandalas, the sonic patterns that are the same the world over at a basic level. "It was music that gave me everything that I ever found out, music that was me teacher.

"But he never dreamed he would ever play. He was amazed when his mate John Lydon told him he was in a band. Myth has it he was considered too rough to be a Sex Pistol. It's from this period that he got the name Jah Wobble, the product of a drunken Sid Vicious' slurring of his real name John Wardle. When Johnny Rotten became John Lydon, though, and formed PiL, he turned to Wobble to be his bass player. "I didn't know it but I'm a musician. I'm 38 now. It only dawned on me eight years ago that I'm a player. I always saw myself as a blagger or an amateur enthusiast.

I'm a bit bloody-minded, there was no telling me anything a lot of the time over the years, you deny yourself good teachers who are basically catalysts. I've been very fortunate to have worked with a lot of great players like Jackie and Pharaoh Saunders. To me it's similar to martial arts, you just have to open your heart."

It's been well-documented how Wobble's life went off the rails after PiL. Alcohol-induced aggro alienated a lot of people in the music business and he gave up both, becoming a tube driver on the London Underground for a while. "I think it's quite common with people of a spiritual nature, it's the Irish disease really. I just loved drinking. It's seeking for communion. It's an Arab word, alcohol, looking to be whole, but it's illusory. It seduces you, you can reinvent yourself through booze but then it empowers the shit side. I thought, I'm so scared of dying I would rather live on my knees.

RONNIE DREW: "one of the few people I respected as a kid, great voice, great-looking geezer."

"Once I took the decision to give up drinking it was a hard six months, but you've got to surrender to the will of god. Lots of things closed down to me, old drinking mates who were as crazy as a coot had to go. The worst thing about booze was not embarrassing yourself or messing up your mate's wedding but it's losing all meaning in your life."

Wobble paid off his debts, the re-established himself as a musician, enjoyed chart success, then had the confidence to turn his back on a successful association with Island records - "only the security guy has been there longer than me, off and on" - to pursue his own project. "They thought I was stupid but it's not about a career to me, that's death, this is about vitality."

I can't help puzzling, though, why a sensitive soul like Jah Wobble lives in a modern semi in Bethnal Green rather than a rural or coastal retreat. Do spirituality and urban living go together? " I think it does. I was up in the Highlands last week and you get spoiled with beauty. Here, it becomes more precious. Sometimes, walking along the canal you see a beautiful flower growing against all the odds between paving stones. Heaven and earth are inside you, the crucial thing is the meeting of the two in natural balance."