Jah Wobble is why God made woofers.
Not only was the clean, full-bodied, three-dimensional throb of his Fender Precision bass the first sound people heard when they dropped the needle on Public Image Ltd.’s debut single “Public Image” in 1978, it was also the first sound emerging from PiL’s post-punk line-in-the-sand Metal Box a year later.
“Some of the heavier tracks on Metal Box, they’re not really linear,” observes the man born and still legally known as John Wardle. “They’re kind of big slabs of music. Sonically, they’re like expressionist painting, you know?”
Wobble has a new collaborative album with two of his sons and a new-ish album with the ex-Siouxsie & the Banshees guitarist Jon Klein to talk up. But fond 47-year-old memories of Metal Box have diverted him onto one of his pet theories.
“For some reason,” he muses, “fine-art movements always come before the musical counterpart. It amazes me no one else has been able to see that post-punk was our version of the abstract expressionists of the ’50s. We were very similar: hedonists, bourgeois, nihilist, badly behaved, brattish, horrible, narcissistic—all that stuff, you know?”
Now 68, with an awe-inspiring solo or co-billed catalog of over 60 albums, 30-plus documented appearances on other people’s projects, a stem-winding autobiography (Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer), and 40 years of uninterrupted sobriety, Wobble no longer comes off all that hedonistic, bourgeois, nihilistic, badly behaved, brattish, horrible, or narcissistic—quite the opposite, in fact. He and his wife, the guzheng virtuoso Zilan Liao, have been married since 1997, and their sons John T. (23) and Charlie (21) are making them proud by carrying on a fascinating hybrid of their parents’ musical traditions as the duo Tian Qiyi. If anything, Wobble seems like a man in full, and an especially busy man in full at that.
“I just did a thing with Steve Hillage,” he says, “a gig with some really nice people in Hungary. And this weekend I played with Richard Russell, the guy that owns XL [Recordings].” Specifically, Wobble joined Russell’s Everything Is Recorded at the Green Man Festival to perform “Cut Off Your Nose,” the Wobble-rapped punk-meets-“Subterranean Homesick Blues” title cut of the new Everything Is Recorded EP. “I went and performed that song yesterday and played on another couple of tunes. Every week there’s been something different.” He’s even made a short film with the British actress Maxine Peake. “So it’s been a busy few weeks.”
It’s been a busy few months. In March, he released his latest Klein collaboration and his first album of 2026, Automated Paradise (Dimple Disc). At just over 30 minutes, it finds Wobble inveighing against our contemporary dystopia from multiple angles—ruminative singing (“Fading Away”), ruminative recitations (“Read Between the Lines”), mad ranting while ducking Klein-generated shrapnel (“Make It Stop,” “Who Wins”), less-ruminative recitations (“Endless Sky”), and more mad ranting (“Terminal Terminal the End). Through it all throbs the sound that God made woofers for.
“It was done very quickly,” Wobble says casually, “just in some dead time that we had. And there were drummers about, you know.”
Yeah, happens all the time. Two post-punk stalwarts are just taking a breather when, lo and behold, there’s a drummer! Hey, let’s crank out a few bangers about the madness all around! Whoa, we have an album!
“It was a really good vibe,” says Wobble, “very relaxed and ‘Let’s just make something happen.’ And with Jon you always tend to think ‘OK, let’s lean it towards post-punk’ because he’s got that guitar style down. And, lyrically, it was like ‘Let’s just put it all in there—ecological disaster, financial collapse, the disease of social media, the horror that is the addiction to mobile phones that we’ve all got. Let’s just chuck it in there and have a bit of fun.’”
His definition of “fun” has expanded significantly over the decades. No sooner had Wobble exited PiL in 1980 than he got in on the ground floor of what would come to be known as “world music,” eventually forming Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart and enjoying Modern Rock Tracks hits in the ’90s with “Visions of You” (featuring Sinéad O’Connor) and “The Sun Does Rise” (featuring the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan). In fact, a comprehensive survey of the recordings on which Wobble has played reveals a Zelig-like knack for throbbing his way into practically every semi-popular genre ever to matter. His statement that he has “never made a fake record” (“even in the ’80s when we were making stuff using those cardboard-box-sounding drum machines”) will strike anyone who has spent time with his discography as understatement writ large.
And now with his brand new—and second—album of 2026, Wobble’s definition of fun has expanded all the way to encompass John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Before you trot out the stat that there have already been over 500 albums full of Beatles songs done in non-Beatley ways and thereby imply that the last thing anybody needs is another one, be apprised that Wobble and Sons—er Tian Qiyi—have come up with a sound that’s extra Beatley, at least if by “Beatley” one means the South Asian shimmer that the Liverpool lads began incorporating when LSD and the Maharishi came into the picture.
On Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles Psychedelic Psongbook (30 Hertz/Cherry Red), Wobble and Tian Qiyi take 10 of the Fab Four’s most Eastern-leaning deep cuts and singles (B-sides mostly) and reinterpret them with Chinese percussion and yangqin (played by John T.), erhu and morin khuur (played by Charlie), and guzheng (on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” courtesy of Liao). And, of course, at the heart of each song throbs the dub-wise bass of the album’s top-billed geezer.
“This record is dedicated to my late father-in-law, Mr. K.H. Li (Liao Gui Xiong),” Wobble writes in the liner notes. “He was a massive Beatles fan and…would have been so proud of his grandsons—and of his daughter of course.”
Neither Wobble nor John T. knows for sure, by the way, how Mr. K.H. Li was able to leave mainland China for Hong Kong en route to England in the early 1980s. But John T. does know why his grandfather dug the Beatles.
“He was interested in how they’d get these really classic, British-sounding orchestrations to fit in with a rock-band or a pop context, and he was even interested in some of the psychedelic stuff,” he explains. “I think that’s really what fascinated him.”
Apparently, it’s a fascination one can inherit, and Wobble shares it. He even has two prior recordings of Beatles’ songs as proof—“Come Together” with the reggae singer Horace Andy and (foreshadowing the version on Mystic Liverpool) “Within You Without You” with his fellow PiL alumnus Keith Levene. Wobble has recorded with Tian Qiyi before too, first in 2023 on the otherworldly-meets Eastern-worldly Red Mist, then again in 2025 on the even further out there Songs for Workers.
Unlike those undertakings, however, Mystic Liverpool was Wobble’s idea. “At first,” says John T., “I think both me and Charlie were sort of like ‘The Beatles? What are we meant to do with this?’ Because it never occurred to us how much Eastern-sounding stuff they’d done. And then when we were listening, we said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this. I remember that one.’ Then we started thinking, ‘This really makes sense. It sort of complements our sound well.’
Understatement, along with Beatles fascination, obviously runs in the family. In addition to Wobble’s sons’ bringing out the aforementioned South Asian shimmer in songs such as “Norwegian Wood,” “Rain,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” there’s Charlie’s singing. As half of Mystic Liverpool’s songs were originally lead sung by John Lennon and the other half by George Harrison, it’s appropriate that Charlie sounds like a now-you-hear-it, now-you-really-hear it blend of the two.
“He’s got a good voice,” Wobble understates. “He’s got what you call a Mancunian accent, which is not a million miles away from Scousing in a way, you know?”
Scousing, incidentally, means “speaking with a Liverpool accent.” Also incidentally, Wobble is currently one of only three recording artists (R. Stevie Moore and Les Fradkin are the others) who’ve recorded two studio versions of “Within You Without You.” “Sergeant Pepper‘s my favorite Beatles album by a mile,” he says, even if only one of its songs ended up meeting all three criteria for inclusion on Mystic Liverpool: Beatles, Eastern, psychedelic.
“It’s ‘Within You Without You,’” Wobble says. “It’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ It’s this taking a very simple thing where we don’t have to try too hard, where we can play the Beatles stuff but be ourselves, you know. And the boys can be themselves. And it’ll work.”