OK, this will be just a short one to let you all know I’m still alive. Apologies for the long wait since my last dispatch. You may not be surprised to hear that I kind of overdid things at Bilbao Big Week and made myself sick, and then things just kinda spiraled from there. The good news is that I have several other irons on the fire (which is also part of the reason why I haven’t finished anything lately), so there should be more new stuff coming soon.

Last Thursday I went to see Jah Wobble and Invaders of the Heart at Money’s Music Club, which, as I’ve mentioned here before, is one of my favorite venues in Hamburg. This was, I must admit, a show for which I had very little context going in. It was my birthday last week, and I was stressing a bit getting ready for weekend visitors, so I didn’t find the time to do all the research that I normally would before going to review a show. Basically all I knew going in was that Wobble was the original bass player of Public image Ltd. (PiL), the group that John Lydon started when he was done being Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols.

Public image Limited: Keith Levene, Jim Walker, Jah Wobble, and John Lydon

To be entirely honest, although I’ve listened to and enjoyed a reasonable number of PiL songs, they’re still really a band that I know better from their reputation and influence than from their actual music. This is true of The Sex Pistols as well. Theirs just something about Lydon that I find a bit exhausting. He seems to be positively exploding with rage, which isn’t a bad thing, but somehow to me it usually comes across as something closer to the anger of a bitter uncle than anything I can relate to directly. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a US UK thing, or maybe he’s just a dick. I’m not sure, but I do know that he’s talked a fair amount of shit about The Ramones, so I’m gravitating towards C.

Since the show I’ve managed to do a bit of research on Wobble in order to provide you with some background info. It turns out that he and Lydon go way back. Apparently they met in school and became part of a group of friends known as the four Johns, which also included the future Sid Vicious, whose real name was Simon John Ritchie (he was renamed Sid after being attacked by Lydon’s hamster, who was named after Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd) and who gave Wobble his stage name by drunkenly mispronouncing his real name, John Wardle.

It was apparently the somewhat older Lydon who started taking Wobble around to shows and clubs, and although the rock music being played didn’t really appeal to Wobble, who was more of a reggae and soul music fan, the energy of a live show, and in particular the feeling of the bass guitar, had an immediate appeal for him. Then, in the summer of 1975, Wobble saw Bob Marley and his bass player/band leader Aston “Family Man” Barrett in what he has called “the best show I’ve ever seen by a country mile.” Describing the experience of seeing and hearing Barrett play, he has said, “it went beyond being an instrument. It was, you got this guy standing up on stage with this piece of wood with four strings. It’s like, you got the power of the universe occurring, you know? You just, it’s not an instrument. It’s too, too otherworldly, too powerful.”

This way of conceiving of musical performance as a kind of pseudo-spiritual meditative experience of connection with the universe seems to have characterized Wobble’s understanding ever since. After the Marley show he started borrowing basses whenever he could and working out ideas in private until, three years later, Lydon, who had similarly eclectic music tastes and was looking to follow up The Sex Pistols with a more musically adventurous “anti rock” project, asked him to be a member of Public image Limited. He stayed with the group for their first two albums until he was kicked out for using some of their material without permission on his first solo album. Since then he’s been very busy, touring constantly with his group, The Invaders of the Heart, collaborating with everyone from Pharoah Sanders to Primal Scream to Sinéad O’Connor, creating fusions between widely disparate music cultures (especially since his marriage to his second wife, guzheng (Chinese zither) player, harpist, and Chinese traditional dancer Liao Zilan), and releasing SO many records.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I walked into Monkeys. I only knew that he was the bass player of PiL, a post-punk band known for extremely deep and dominant bass playing. So, you can imagine my surprise when I walked in the door (slightly late, for reasons I won’t go into) and was greeted by what was clearly the sound of a modern jazz combo. Now, jazz is not really my area, and what I do know about it is mostly focussed on the 1920s and already getting pretty sketchy by the 1950s, so I’m not really the person to be categorizing what I heard, but I’d be tempted to call it “Hard Bop.” Considering what I knew about both the artist and the venue, this was surprising, but I just figured, OK, I guess this is what’s happening.

As it turned out, it wasn’t. Within a few minutes of my arrival, this overtly jazzy texture seemed to gradually break down into a bass-heavy, minimalist groove. This turned out to be how the whole night would proceed, a constant pulse of excursions into stylistically charged areas including punk, disco, metal, east-Asian styles, and, of course, reggae, each followed by a return to the home base of this spacious but disciplined texture.

Talking about dub reggae in an interview last year, Wobble said that “it went beyond music, especially when you heard it through the big sound systems, you know. It’s such a sense of space. It was all about deconstruction; so deconstruction is about space. It’s about making everything uncluttered. It’s about making space. And when you have a sense of spaciousness, musically or otherwise, it’s synonymous with silence, so you’re kind of in the meditational wilderness. You’re the calm within the storm, in a way, when you’re listening to Dub music.”

This quote was extremely helpful to me in understanding what I had witnessed at this show. Just as Jamaican engineers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry worked to clear away the clutter from reggae songs and get down to the basic skeleton of bass and rhythm in order to create the best and rawest experience for dancers at outdoor sound system parties, Wobble and his extremely capable band are exploring musical styles and then systematically “decluttering” them down to an essential foundation, where the the superficial differences between them seem to disappear. Of course, all this happened in the context of songs, including several PiL songs, other things from Wobble’s long career, and The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” but the constant ebb and flow of building and deconstructing styles seemed, to me anyway, to serve a more important purpose in defining the structure of the show.

All this was interesting and entertaining to listen too, especially when, I’m not sure if intentionally or not, familiar sounds like the score from the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice or the heavy vamp from Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” seemed to emerge from the texture of their experimentation. I think, though, that for Wobble the concept of Dub as a decluttered and universalized musical space, all built around the supremely physical sensation of his deep and powerful bass, has a significance that goes beyond entertainment. Even as far back as 1984 he was saying that he had, “always wanted to make music… …in a ritualistic way… …where you’re uplifting peoples hearts, in almost a religious way, without being a cosmic prat about it or anything,” and that certainly seems to resonate with what he’s doing now.

Lest you think that this kind of ritualistic, meditative exploration of cosmic dub sounds like a bit of a drag, I should also mention that Wobble is super funny, which is an especially good thing because he kind of looks like a stone cold killer. Throughout the performance there were moments when he would suddenly raise his hand and close it into a fist, signaling the band to come to a sudden stop. Then they would freeze and just wait until confused members of the audience started to applaud awkwardly, only to immediately jump back into what they had been doing, with Wobble grinning like a four year old who’s pulled one over on his parents. At another point, between songs, Wobble treated the audience to a complete recitation of the “Now is the winter of our discontent” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Richard III with the total deadpan of someone who believes this is a completely normal thing to do in the middle of a show.

My favorite humorous moment came towards the end, when the band finished a song and Wobble said, “What next?… I think we should play ‘Socialist’ by PiL, but we should do it up-tempo, in a drum and bass fashion, and we should add in some heavy metal chords.” I have no idea whether this was a well-trodden bit or a legitimately spontaneous idea, but the timing of his delivery was impeccable, and the fact that he and his band followed it up by doing exactly what he said they were going to do made it one of the most memorable moments I’ve experienced at a show all year.

I should also mention that there were two younger guys who weren’t featured on the poster there, one of whom played various percussion instruments and the other a Chinese fiddle, played off the hip (some kind of Huqin, I think, maybe a Erhu). My friend Rich, who knows more about these things than I do, suggested that they might be Wobble’s sons. I don’t know if their presence is a normal part of this tour, but they were both quite good, and having them there definitely made the show more interesting. In particular, it was fascinating to see the fiddler’s ability to code switch on his instruments, sometimes giving the whole texture of what the band was doing a decidedly east-Asian tinge, and then turning on dime and suddenly blending so well with a western R&B band format that if you closed your eyes, you would swear he was playing a harmonica.

So yeah, long story short, if Jah Wobble comes to your town, it’s definitely worth going and checking him out, even if you aren’t a big fan of PiL. It’s not in any sense a typical rock show, and you should be ready for that, but he’s clearly an amazing musician with an highly skilled band and a lot of big ideas, and incredibly, he somehow manages to present those ideas to an audience in a compelling and convincing way.

-Peter Lawson - November 2025

Jah Wobble and The Invaders of the Heart at Monkeys Music Bar

Bilbao Big Week Diary