Blake is the English psyche. I was introduced to his poems and paintings by a friend from the East End. They are visionary and full of a qualified anger - anger that is channelled and leads you somewhere else. They remind me of the feelings I used to have as a kid, when I was constantly frightened of being absorbed into the molecular structure of the walls around me. Blake connects with both Hinduism and nuclear science in his recognition that the world is not a single structure but a state of flux. This is important to me - not being rigid. l also think it's important to allow people to be fearless. One of my favourite lines from Auguries is, "He who shall teach the child to doubt/ The rotting grave shall ne'er get out."

Spurs fan and former punk rocker Jah Wobble has just released his latest album - on which he reads poems by William Blake. Neil McCormick meets a cockney mystic.

Almost everything in the front room of Jah Wobble's small, modern house in London's East End is blue. Blue furniture, blue carpet, blue walls. Wobble himself sits in a blue armchair, wrapped in a blue towel, having just emerged from the shower in his blue bathroom. "I just like blue,' he says, in a voice so cockney it could be caricature. "It suggests the spirit and infinity. You can get lost in blue But I'm not one of those decor sort of people, particularly. As long as I've got the f***in' football, I'm happy."

He nods towards the spectacularly large television that occupies almost a third of the room, on which he watches his beloved Tottenham Hotspur.

The set could be taken t represent one pole of Wobble's complex, paradoxical personality: the earthly side The heavenly is accounted for in the form of a porcelain figure of a smiling Buddha that sits on the mantelpiece.

"I think my natural leaning was always towards spirituality," Wobble cheerfully declares. This is quite something coming from one of the original punk rockers, who raised hell as a teenager with Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols crowd, then graduated to being bassist with Johnny Rotten's Public Image Ltd; (PiL). "I was an altar boy, he says,, as if to prove his point. "I was into all that heavy Roman Catholic Stuff!"

If you crossed Danny Baker with the Dalai Lama, you would end up with Jah Wobble (Vicious's drunken distortion of Wobble's real name, John Wardle). He sit in his blue sanctuary discoursing knowledgeably on matters of the spirit with unpretentious enthusiasm illustrating complex philosophical points with football analogies and punctuating it all with liberal doses of' profanity He mixes mysticism with common sense ("To me, if it ain't practical, it ain't spiritual") and displays a working-class suspicion of anything too outlandish ("That Tantric sex stuff, that's just an excuse to bunk up with loads of birds"), but he is not beyond embracing the odd fanciful notion himself.

After humorously raising and shooting down the idea that his natural affinity for music might be proof of reincarnation, he blithely discloses that his new album "made itself". All he had to do, apparently, was be open enough to receive the grace of William Blake.

Yes, that William Blake.

Wobble is indisputably one of the most innovative and influential musicians of his generation. Through his contributions to PiL, collaborations with the Orb, Primal Scream, Bjork, Massive Attack and Brian Eno and his own adventurous solo work Wobble has been a prime mover in the integration of world music with dub. trance, ambient and experimental rock This time, however, he may find he has bitten off more than even he can chew. He has made a poetry album, on which he recites Blake's work to music.

Wobble was only introduced to the works of the 19th-century visionary last year, but felt an immediate affinity to a man he describes: on the sleeve notes for The Inspiration of William Blake as "one of a long line of cockney mystics".

"His poetry is as salient and as relevant and as spiritually aware as any Buddhist stuff I've ever read, or Hindu, or early Christian stuff," says Wobble. "It looks at the world with the illusion of separation taken away, so there's a feeling of oneness not only with other people but with inanimate objects. There's a sense of totality, a dynamic where there's not only good and evil, but good is actually part of evil and one can't exist without the other."

In last Saturday's Telegraph, rock critic James Bennett found himself unable to take the project quite so seriously, questioning Wobble's decision "to recite to music lines such as 'Wot immortal hand or eye dare fwame thy fearful symmetry?' as if he's ordering a pint in the Queen Vic"..

Wobble is all too aware that he could be setting himself up for a fall, both critically and commercially. When he first discussed the concept with his record company (All Saints) he was greeted with stony silence. And friends have been trying to talk him out of it ever since. But he found all the inspiration he needed in the poet's line "He who shall teach the child to Doubt/ The rotting Grave will ne'er get out". "In other words, do what you gotta do and don't worry," Wobble interprets. "Life's too short to spend it in a state of fear."

Positively radiating health and happiness Wobble appears more than capable of taking the bad reviews with the good. "What I'm concerned with is understanding what it is to be human." he explains. "I'm trying to understand the living of life and find meaning in life, because without meaning, what's the point? That's how I feel. It's not necessarily about being loved or somehow imbuing a sense of serenity in your life at all times. Sometimes it's about being very f***in' uncomfortable."

And then he quote his favourite lyricist once again. "Joy and Woe are woven fine/A clothing for the Soul divine."

Born an awkward no-good-nik in London's east end, John Wardle's adult life altered permanently when he fell in with a rude bunch of punky pistoleros including Johnny Rotten, via whom he met Sid Vicious. The latter's drunken slur transformed John Wardle into Jah Wobble, and ever since Jah Wobble has been unleashing godlike reverberations on his bass guitar.

Having begun his musical career as Rotten's foil in his first pot-Pistols' venture, PiL, Jah Wobble has gone on to further collaborative success, whether partnering the revered godfather of ambient music, Brian Eno, on their joint Spinner album last year, or underpinning chart hits by Bjork, Massive Attack, the Orb, and Primal Scream. Moreover, his solo career has encompassed six albums, one of which Rising Above Bedlam, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.

And now Jah Wobble has turned to one of the great of British art and literature for his latest work, The Inspiration Of William Blake, issued on the All Saints label (now re-issued on 30 Hertz Label). Yet another unlikely twist in the life story of a geezer who left school at 15 with no qualifications; retired from rock stardom in his twenties in order to be a train driver, and who'll have his first orchestral symphony premiered in Liverpool at the end of the year.

Gorblimey, and to think Jah Wobble got from here to there and back again with no schooling. Sid Vicious to William Blake: who taught you that, mate?

"I didn't make myself available to literature at school," says Jah Wobble, sweeping you up in a friendly torrent of Cockney barrow-boy non-stop spiel. "I was not a good pupil, I was a troublemaker - and the teacher were so boring."

"I went to a college of further education at 15. That didn't last long, but it's where I started reading for myself, beginning with Steinbeck. I've read a lot since, but up until two or three years ago I hadn't read any poetry , any classic English literature, any Dickens, and certainly no Blake. I was angry towards what I saw as the upper-class Establishment version of English literature - Brian Blessed reciting 'Tygah, tygah!'

"I felt that Blake's name had been taken hostage by Tory party conferences. So when a friend gave me a book of Blake's poetry and told me I had to read it, I stuck it in a plastic carrier bag and lost it for ages.

"But one of the unfinished businesses of my life is education. I've done the night-class lark. A philosophy course opened my eyes to all the culture and history I'd missed...all the stuff I'd dismissed as sentimental shit."

Hence the album, a wondrous affair which shows not for the first time that once Jah Wobble sets his mind to something, his will-power transforms it into something else entirely. After all, he dropped out of music for a long spell in the early-eighties in order to become a train driver on London's underground, working nightly on the Northern Line.

It was shortly after Jah Wobble had given up that job and returned to music-making in 1989 that I first met him in the flesh. Wearing a hangdog look, Jah Wobble was one of a host of desperate deal-seeking supplicants who'd turned up in New York at what was then the music industry's biggest talent-brokerage event, New Music Seminar'.

"I'd been relieved to be out of the music industry, and the world of the underground was one that had always fascinated me as a kid. But New Music Seminar was one of the worst experiences of my life. I'd dipped my toe back in music with a couple of tours, and so I went out to New York to see what wider interest there was... and the buzz I was getting was basically 'F... off, old man, the game's up, forget it.'

"I was taking my album around folk I'd known in the music business for years, folk I'd thought were mates, and they were all taking the piss. 'You've put on weight, you're losing your ... . the most you'll get is some production work, never a recording deal.' Me, though, I was thinking que sera, sera.

"And on the last day I flogged a little Belgian company a live LP, "Without Judgement, that I'd recorded cheaply in the Netherlands." Jan Wobble was back, although not before a spell traversing Britain's highways and by-ways as a haulage driver.

"I didn't leave that job till 1990 when I decided I really had to give music a go. It was lovely, that job, driving a big Luton van with a lovely sound system in it, listening to music all day. But I've found that if you close one door behind you, another one opens. It's true."

Jah Wobble kicked open a door in 1986. "By then, lots of people had had enough of being crushed under Thatcher. They'd hidden for seven years and started coming out again. There was a karmic perfection about a lot of art, and music which began then.

"In 1986 I was very angry, and I had a very bad drink problem - not your average entertainment industry drinks-problem bollocks. I was very unhealthy. I had to stop drinking, and being mental.

"I haven't drunk one drink since I made my decision,, since I answered one question: 'Do you want to live or die?' Now I live on life's terms."

And how has your life shaped the terms of your musicianhood?

"I never knew I'd become a musician, but I did know from the start that music took me somewhere else. I my early youth it was stuff on the Trojan label, blue beat before it became ska and eventually reggae - I remember the first record I bought when I was seven or eight was a Jim Reeves' single, Welcome To My World.

"Then I discovered a soul-import record shop, and reggae imports, and the Philadelphia sound. I've actually written a classical mass thing, all tonal and in Latin, for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to perform in December - and that grew out of the orchestrations on those Philly records."

The Inspiration Of William Blake and the accidental inspirations of Jah Wobble. Open your mind to them; you'll be inspired.

He could have been a Sex Pistol but now Jah Wobble is cont~nt working with symphony orchestras and studying the work of William Blake.

He spoke to Simon Evans.

When Sid Vicious, in his usual state of sensory derangement, introduced his friend John Wardle as Jah Wobble he probably didn't know how appropriate the name would prove to be.

For, like his adopted name, Jah Wobble, in both his music and personal life, has an abiding concern with spiritual matters that is complimented by a refreshingly no-nonsense nature. Indeed, Wobble sees even the apparently mundane as being endowed with mystica1 qualities. On I Love Everybody from his brilliant 1994 album Take Me To God Wobble has a vision in which "The Mile End Road, once a blood-stained battlefield of bacchanalian excess becomes the garden of Gethsemane. A bitter 72 year old docker becomes the ever-compassionate Buddha."

That's why Wobble still lives in the East End of London where he was born and grew up. "It's important to feel grounded," he told me. "I just love walking around Bethnal Green and Mile End, there's something very spiritual about areas in decline, like Birmingham with all the canals, they are areas that have been over-taken by technology but are still rooted in history. They have a strange quality to them which I find very appealing."

It is odd to reflect that Wobble, steeped as he is in spiritual, historical and geographical matters (he's fascinated, for instance, by the fact that Birmingham has more canals than Venice), who's just released an album devoted to the work of William Blake and was preparing when we spoke for a collaboration with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, is the same young Turk who was prevented from joining the Sex Pistols because, on his own admission, he was too yobbish.

He was an intimate of the Pistols through his friendship with John Lydon and he remembers those times, sharing a squat with Sid Vicious, living on speed and cider, with a mixture of affection and regret.

"There were some very bright people in that circle," he recalls, "and a lot of anger. We all felt excluded form things, like a group of orphans. It was a very strange life, very extreme but it was a very special time as well."

After the Pistols disintegrated Lydon invited his old friend to join the new band he was putting together, Public Image Limited, one of the most innovative bands of the early 1980s.

Wobble's deep, earthy bass playing, heavily influenced by the wide open spaces of dub reggae, was a vital ingredient. Both he and Lydon had long been fans of reggae, before it became fashionable (the punks recognised an affinity with this music of the oppressed).

"The bass guitar in dub reggae appealed to me because it's the root of everything, the foundation. It also has a trance-like quality to it, very spacey. The space in reggae is as crucial as the music itself."

Wobble later described PIL as "four emotional cripples on four different drugs" and soon tired of the emotionally-draining paranoia that surrounded the band.

So, in one of the more unusual career moves, he ran away form the music business to join the London Underground, a period he now regards as one of the most enjoyable periods of his life.

"There were some really interesting characters there and it also gave me time to study and think. I needed to get away from the madness of the music business and I needed a job! it opened my eyes though to a lot of things and helped me get a clearer perspective on my life."

Wobble returned with his band Invaders Of The Heart, and made a swirling mesmeric album, Rising Above Bedlam, that earned him a Mercury prize nomination.

The music on both Rising Above Bedlam, released in 1991, and Take Me To God draws on a variety of sources - Celtic Folk, African and Arabic music, and reggae, all underpinned by Wobble's flowing bass-lines. Both albums drew on world music long before such musical tourism became chic, and Wobble's collaborators, who have included The Cranberries' Delores O'Riordan, Sinead O'Connor, jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and Transglobal Underground vocalist Natacha Atlas, reflect his essential eclecticism.

There's nothing contrived however about Wobble's music. "It's never been a self-conscious thing, you know 'oh lets' put some music from Ghana in here', it's very much a matter of instinct, just what feels and sounds right. In doing that of course you make all sorts of connections that aren't always that obvious."

The connection between Wobble and William Blake, the subject of his most recent album The Inspiration of William Blake, would not seem to be that obvious either. But it's clear Wobble feels a close affinity with the original Cockney mystic.

"A friend said 'You should read Blake, you know, he wrote ' Tyger Tyger burning bright' and Jerusalem. My first reaction was, 'oh, **** off'. But then I started reading the Songs of Innocence and Experience and I though it was wonderful, so rich and multi-layered.

"It gets very esoteric but the beauty is you can approach it on so many different levels. I felt a kinship with him. He's from London and he seemed to think about things the same way that I do. London is a very mystical place and I can identify with the way Blake writes about it.

"Everything seemed to come together at the right time because I'd been writing this music and Blake's poetry seemed to match it perfectly. So then I took it home and worked on it, studied it and edited it. When I'd finished the album Island didn't want to release it but they let me go ahead and put it out on my own label which was good of them, they could have just said no."

Wobble has been the victim of a certain amount of snobbery however, with one critic questioning whether it was appropriate for Wobble to recite Blake as if he was ordering a pint at the Queen Vic. As Wobble observes, that attitude says more about the class-riddled nature of our culture than whether it's right to read Blake in a Cockney accent, a remarkably presumptuous posture in any case when you think about it.

"Blake has been taken over by middle classes and it's like 'what right have you to take an interest in this poetry.' I'm trying to reclaim him as one of our own, his poetry should be part of everyday coinage not the preserve of a few academics."

What the academics will make of Wobble's latest project, a collaboration with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for a concert tomorrow billed as 'Jah Wobble's Orchestral Dub', remains to be seen. The concert includes the premier of The River, a specially commissioned concerto for Chinese harp featuring Wobble's girlfriend Zi Lan Liao.

"The concert is a bit of a development for me," he admits. "But I've written a Requiem Mass which will be coming out next year so it wasn't that much of a leap to do the orchestral piece. It's a different kind of discipline to what I'd been used to but my music has been moving in that direction. I had to approach it on a very instinctive level, thinking where the different elements should fit in.

"My approach is obviously very different to a trained classical musician, it's more intuitive. But I feel I've an intimate acquaintance with music and I hope that comes through."

Jah Wobble is an unlikely person to build the new Jerusalem, writes Damien Love, but he's certainly going to give it all he's got

'When I went round the world to people who weren't as screwed up in certain respects as we are, every local mountain would have the Myth, that everybody knew. Every little river, everybody would know the story of the ghost that lived at the river. Our myths have been lost, and I think the bridge back into that is art, people like William Blake are the bridge."

Jah Wobble knows about myths, as he's skirted the mists of one or two modern fables himself. Firstly he was one of the original, legendary three Johns. J Wardle, J Ritchie and J Lydon constituted a triple-headed beast which stalked London and its environs in the mid-Seventies, until Lydon got caught up in the scams of a Chelsea T-shirt emporium manager, changed his name to Rotten and dragged the other two into the centre of Punk and the world of re-invention/funny names (Wardle became Jah Wobble while Ritchie transmuted into Sid Vicious).

Then there was Wobble's collaboration with post-Rotten Lydon in Public Image Limited, whose colossal second album, Metal Box, still stands alone on the dark outer edge of an industrial dub estate no one since has entered, like a pre-echo of the end of music.

"As Blake says, 'Joys and Woes come woven fine'. And the PiL thing was certainly a mixture of both. "I didn't realise how special it was, really. It was very intense, and it was a relief having got out of it. But it was also a pleasure, and taught me a lot. It was mental. There was no manager, it was crazy. I came out of that and I thought the way we did things was how every group was; and what do I find but all these other groups are tossers. They all want to play the game. I didn't realise just what great geezers we were. It couldn't last."

Perhaps the most famous stage in the Wobble odyssey came following PiL's initial implosion, when the bass player jacked it all in and literally retreated underground, to collect fares and drive trains on the London tube system. Since his re-emergence in the late Eighties with his collective, Invaders of the Heart, Wobble's collaborators have included Pharaoh Sanders, Brian Eno and Sinead O'Connor, as well as a long-standing relationship with the German drummer, Jackie Liebezeit. Wobble's is a kind of ambient World Music, a thousand miles from the tourism of Paul Simon's Graceland, and has increasingly resembled a spiritual exploration, the latest stage of which is his new album, The Inspiration of William Blake, wherein his muted Cockney reading of the visionary poet and artist's Songs of innocence and Experience float within a shifting backdrop of the sounds and rhythms of the earth.

Although he feels a deep connection with Blake which he expresses as "a feeling of unity and totality where the Illusion of Separation is taken", Wobble only came to the poet recently.

"Friends were saying to me: 'You should see this guy.' They saw something in the music that was similar to what they had read. And I ignored it, I just thought, as I do sometimes, 'Ahhh, they don't know what they're talking about.' But they kept on about it, and I said, 'Well, what did he do?' and they said 'Well, "Tyger Tyger"' and, truth be told, I thought, 'Bollocks.' I'd seen people reading 'Tygha, tygha, buluning bryte', these silly old duffers, and thought, William Blake - he must have been a Victorian tosser. Eventually, me mate gave me a book and - bang. How he wrote about the nature of evil and of life, eternal truths. I mean there are lots of really amazing eternal truths in Eastern mysticism - but we had a feller on this big island of ours that was such an incredible knower, and he's as relevant today. One of the basic themes with the industrial revolution and with the time before that, when he was writing, was getting separated from the land. I'm not at all saying, 'Let's go back to the land,' because, I'm afraid, I'm used to a proper karzy, now - but there is this feeling of connection."

It could be argued that there are similarities between Wobble and Blake which explain this strong identification. In both cases, although their work is concerned with themes which are universal in nature, this is filtered through an identifiably English - as opposed to British - consciousness. Wobble agrees. "He was a Cockney, you can tell he was very down to earth and there's something with the English psyche ... the thing there, though, is that the psyche of a nation changes. What it is to be British, and especially English, has been trampled on and warped over the years, especially in the Eighties."

Part of the expressed intention behind the album is to reclaim Blake from the last night of the Proms and the Tory party conference, where 'Jerusalem' is a favourite among the flag-waving set. "I mean there's this incredible, anthemic song about a nation, and it's great, wonderful, wonderful words. It's such a shame that it was completely turned on its head by people like the Tories who are so selfish and unspiritual. It's incredible. It's a right cheek!"

And then, there is also the fact that Wobble, like Blake operates at a remove from the established industry, is frequently patronised, and, basically, regarded as a bit of a nutter. Jan Wobble doing William Blake -what a laugh. "Yeah, people might just think it's stupid. But when something feels that good, you've got to do it. Motive is everything - you do it for the greater good. Blake, he just did his thing, and wasn't only treated as though he was a bit silly; he was treated like a complete fool. His stuff didn't achieve anything. And I'm sure he must have been a bit hurt. But he referred to a greater power, if you like, and thought 'well, this isn't for these tossers now. This is for eternity."'

The Inspiration of William Blake is released on 30 Hertz records