JAH WOBBLE
The ex-PiL bass master heads to NY to beat down ho-hum dublite on his new album. Plus, word of another LP featuring Keith Levene and Mark Stewart!
“Maybe it’s an age thing, but everything I do now it’s because I might not get the opportunity again,” says Jah Wobble, contemplating the album by his band The Invaders Of The Heart and New Jersey-based bassist Bill Laswell. “The way things are on both sides of the
Atlantic, the whole hassle of getting work visas, it’s getting harder to travel.”
Ironically, American work visas were the catalyst for Realm Of Spells. Determined to
make the most of their three years’ duration, the Invaders nudged their boss into organising a trip to New Jersey last October to collaborate with Laswell, a long-term friend of Wobble with whom the band had hung out after a gig in New York in 2016.
“I was aware of Bill from the word go,” says Wobble. “In the early 1980s, I was doing a very heavy, subterranean, London-ish, post-punk thing with Public Image; he had that flange-effect bass sound, spongy and funky, really New York. I used to joke that he was who I wanted producing me, but I never thought I’d meet him.” The two bonded, however, over mutual love of Miles Davis’s Dark Magus, which brings him back to their current project, recorded at Laswell’s Orange Music Sound Studios in West Orange.
“I get fed up with lowest common denominator dub and airy-fairy new-age jazz, I wanted to make something intense. To get a gutsy, Fender Precision bass sound like I had on [1979 PiL classic] Poptones… and that was like meeting a sweetheart you hadn’t seen since school. If you listen to Miles’s electric period, those records had such detail in them, and that was what I really zoned in on, the licks and those incredible hi-hat patterns. They were really well recorded by Teo Macero, with the volume and dynamic of rock.”
Realm Of Spells comes at a time Wobble declares “a bit of a purple patch”. “We’ve noticed we’re doing bigger venues, not massive places, but suddenly we’re selling rooms out, even in smaller provincial towns. I delay giving my stuff over to digital platforms until I’ve exhausted the physical side of things, but I love the ‘ping, ping, ping’ on my phone of albums selling on Bandcamp. Streaming is fucking useless, though.”
He already has another album in the can, which contains his already notorious Brexit-tackling A Very British Coup, recorded with Youth, Mark Stewart, Andrew Weatherall and Keith Levene. “It’s acid meets punk meets post-punk reggae meets dub. Avant-garde but commercial. It was going to come out earlier in the year but, like Brexit, we’ve got a stay of execution. It’s about public schools, and how they run rings round us. We’ve got
a system of educational apartheid here, and you can quote me on that.”
“That flange-effect bass sound… spongey and funky.” JAH WOBBLE