Jah Wobble

The Butterfly Effect

Cockney bassist takes on the world, the City and fivestar hotels.

It’s been a long, strange trip for the former John Wardle since he left Public Image almost 40 years ago, but, whether working with Ginger Baker on 1990’s thunderous Middle Passage or with his Chinese wife on the East-meetsWest collaboration that was 2008’s Chinese Dub, the sole constant has been his floorquaking bass.

On new album The Butterfly Effect it anchors a set of Wobble’s 10-year-old poems revolving around the global financial crash, all intoned in best Bow Bells tones. Those uncompromising vocals become jarring, but when he grumbles:

‘I flashed my cheeky cockney accent… she thought I was a bloody Kiwi’ on the dream-like

I Love Your Accent, he’s oddly charming. He’s at his best on the mighty title track, in which chainsaw guitars compete against clattering drums and Wobble’s delightfully bonkers musings on Fred Astaire, the Black Death, Ringo Starr and creationists. Nothing else comes close to it, and Wobble’s feistiness remains undimmed.