Post-punk legend Jah Wobble talks remaking Metal Box, making albums on the night bus and his community project Tuned In, ahead of gig at The 1865

A friend of John Lydon – aka Johnny Rotten – in the 1970s before he was a Sex Pistol, the two joined forces along with the visionary guitarist Keith Levene in Lydon’s post-Pistols band, Public Image Limited. That band is credited with pushing rock in new directions with dubby textures, off-the-wall guitar, and avant garde adventures on a classic run of albums, including Metal Box – of which more later.

Since leaving PiL in 1980, according to Wikipedia, John has 35 solo albums to his credit, plus numerous more collaborations – from Can’s Holger Czukay, to U2’s The Edge, Brian Eno, Bjork, Sinead O’Connor and countless more. While he gave up on music for a while in the 1980s, infamously working on the London Underground for a stretch, he returned in 1988 and has never looked back.

His latest tour is ostensibly to promote either his (nearly) full-album reworking of Metal Box, or another new work, A Brief History of Now.

​When The Guide catches up with John over a Zoom call, he is in good humour – he’s in his back garden, the sun is shining and you can even hear the birds singing in the background.

"I'm so busy now aged 64 – busier than I was in my 30s when I had little purple patches, even. I think when you manage yourself it's just very busy. Somehow, with technology we all end up like clerks, processing information!”

While his music career alone would be enough to keep him busy, John has been devoting a good chunk of his time to a community music project, Tuned In in Merton, south-west London.

“Basically, I wanted something that dealt with loneliness, something kind of good. I wanted to cut to the chase, not do something on addiction or anything – there's so many people in that field. I wanted to do something to get to the heart - something based on loneliness, especially in regard to older fellas who can get so isolated. I've known a few in the last few years.

“So I had this idea, but trying to do it up north where I live (in Stockport), it was hard work getting it going, so I sought some advice from a good friend of mine called Anthony Hopkins who works for Merton, and he said: ‘Never mind giving you advice, come and do it here – this is the kind of scheme we're looking for’.”

John goes there every other week for what he describes as “a great big club.”

"We jam, we write songs, we've got instruments there, and we've also built a recording studio – Jon Klein from Siouxsie and the Banshees is very involved there, so we make recordings there. We had our big first public performance last year, we had 50 performers or something. I was very nervous before but they all really stepped up to the plate.

“Some of them had quite challenging conditions, some of them were borderline homeless, some have mental issues as many of us do, and they come along, and it's just this absolute mix of people. So that's growing and growing all the while. It's been going for years, but just recently it's really taken off.

“It's just designed so you come and get to work – you hang out, there's no pressure on you. It's a situation for people to relax in and hopefully get inspired in. I really feel part of that group.”

John has long been keen to experiment in a variety of musical forms from across the globe. He has frequently collabroated with his Chinese wife, Liao Zilan, herself a renowned guzheng player. Also released this year is Red Mist, his album with their sons Charlie and John.

"Me and my wife tried to put them off,” he chuckles, “they were always like to be musicians, but they're both really good.”

On the current tour, some of the shows are billed as Metal Box Rebuilt in Dub shows, focusing on his 2022 reworking of the landmark PiL LP. What made him return to the album wholesale?

“Cleopatra Records asked me to do it. I think they were slightly nervous in asking me and I think they thought I might say,” he makes a teeth-sucking noise: “’It's very difficult, I'll have to think about it...’ But I said: ‘Yes, and I know exactly what I'll do. When do you want me to start?’”

“So they were very surprised. We'd done some of the stuff live anyway. We'd been doing (album track) Poptones for the last few years and I'd tried different ways and different tempos, so I had a pretty clear idea of what I'd want to do with that revamped. It's funny when you play live, you get some really weird harmonics. Sometimes in a room a certain note or overtone of what you're playing is accentuating in the room. There's times I swear I'd be playing that, and I swear you'd hear a kind of string part going on that isn't there – like a phantom string part.”

John also had Jon Klein on board for the project, who has become a regular collaborator.

“He's the only guitarist I know who could handle doing Keith Levene's guitar parts and add to them. So I'm working remotely – I was asked to do this record in lockdown, and I happened to be working closely with a guy who's the very best person in the world that I know of to do the guitar parts on Metal Box in Dub, so it was like: ‘Do you realise who I'm working with?!’

“We started working on it. The first two numbers were Albatross and Poptones and I wanted to put strings and Japanese kind of sections on them, so I sent them to Jon who called me and said: ‘Are you serious?’

“I said: ‘Just trust me, it's going to be great’. I put the strings and the first changes in, I said to Jon: ‘Just do it, it will work’. He really got into and he's a real perfectionist, so he started driving ME mad!

“I could do it all again – I really enjoyed making it.”

They did drop a couple of songs from the Metal Box track listing, though, and added a couple from PiL’s self-titled debut instead.

“There are a couple of numbers I dropped off, like Bad Baby just because I thought I didn't have an exact feeling of what I wanted to do with it. I felt I could do a 'good' new version of it, but that wasn't good enough for it to make the record.”

Given the album’s status as an almost sacred text of post-punk, John was prepared for a backlash in tampering with it: “I half-expected a lot of people to say: ‘This is a hateful record, how dare you?’ But in all that time I've not seen a negative response – it's sold well, I think it surprised Cleopatra, every time they've repressed it, it's sold out!”

Looking back on that late-1970s period in PiL, John recalls: “It was a funny time. I couldn't imagine a band like that on a major – we were so lucky, we were on Virgin and they just let us do what we wanted. A lot of record companies at that time would have really gone against us and they wouldn't have wanted to release the stuff, but they went ahead with it.

“We were allowed to completely express ourselves and do what we wanted. For me it was a great period because as I came into PiL, no one ever once said to me: ‘Oh, can't you do something in this key, or I like what you've done there but would you mind flattening that note here...’ Which was great.

“After I left PiL, when I was working in situations with English public schoolboy kind of musicians, and I would be playing a nice E-minor line and of course they'd be,” the East-London accent slips into something more home counties: “’Would you mind flattening the G...?’ Because they'd want to make it more of a minor key and sweeter. It was like: ‘Oh god..’.

“Funnily enough, doing the rehearsals with Tuned In, I said to Anthony and Jon: ‘I remember why I became a benevolent dictator!’

"At Tuned In, a lot of people just see me as a nice guy who was in a band years ago – they don't know what band, they don't care, or know anything about me. They know what they want to do, which is great. But it did make me remember why I always wanted to always be in control of everything because it's kind of quicker!”

Given his track record of collaborations, is there anyone he still wants to work with?

“There isn't really. I'm very relaxed about it, whatever comes along... In the past there were people I wanted to work with – never that many though. I think I'm quietly a narcissist on the side! I wanted to work with (free jazz trumpeter) Don Cherry years ago, but never even met him, I would have loved to have worked with Miles (Davis)... I like trumpet players.

“I did a really good session on Monday with quite a high level guy that was really good fun, Richard Russell (the label founder) of XL. That was really interesting."

But by his own admission, John has stopped chasing projects, rather they come to him.

“I'm very open to whatever comes along and is interesting, but where I am now is a bit like my 30s. When I split up from my first marriage and I was back in the East End, that period was just so happy for me – before I had kids again, so that tells you something. Only joking! God bless them.

“And then I eventually met my second wife, and it was a really nice time, very relaxed. I'd come out of addiction and got myself together,” John’s been clean and sober for 37 years now. “It was a wonderful, magical period for me. The ’90s was a good decade.

“Now this last few years in my 60s, is also really good. My boys have grown up. I was a proper dad taking them to the football and boxing, and this and that. Now I'm just going to relax and I can go do what I want to do.

“I like bowling about and meeting people. I keep fit and play a bit of football still – I'm very happy and very relaxed and whatever comes into my field of consciousness, it's all good.

“I don't have any big burning desire to make a record like this or like that.”

Another album he released via his Bandcamp this year is The Bus Routes of South London, an album he created on his iPad while riding around on buses late at night.

“I was sitting there writing stuff on the bus. You just find you get a certain openness – it's a bit impressionistic or something. I was coming back the other night, and I took a photograph of me on the top deck of the bus, it was a really solitary photo, a bit noirish – this old geezer at the front of this completely empty bus. I put it on social media and people really loved it, this sensibility.

“It's just very natural. I'm not sitting there going,” he adopts a serious tone: “I need to make a dub record based on Turkish belly dance music. I don't have that burning desire, which is lovely because as an old boy, you're probably on the last furlong, so just enjoy it!

“But the funny thing is that it still feels very productive. There's more records coming in than you can shake a stick at.”

When John left PiL, his relationship with his bandmates had totally broken down over money and their respective drink and drug intakes. While he has never worked with Lydon again, he did work with Levene back in 2012. The guitarist died in November 2022 of complications from liver cancer.

Does he know what either of them thinks of the Metal Box Rebuilt album?

“I had talked to Keith, and he knew I'd done it, but we never really discussed it, funnily enough.

“He got quite ill by then, and I don't think it would have been possible to work with him anyway at that point. We'd chatted, but I think by then his health was the primary concern and getting well, rather than coming to work on a project like that.

“To be quite frank, I decided in 2012 when I worked with Keith, with no regrets, that I wanted to go out and do a few more shows with him. I knew we couldn't handle more than that – it would get difficult, which it did.

"My bass tech, he gave him a particularly hard time, and I wasn't going to have that. I had sworn off and said that was it, that was the last time. So I wouldn't have worked directly with him again. Since that time, I never went into a room and worked directly with Keith.

"I get on with his sister, and I was talking with him, it was just... he had issues, we know what a lot of those issues were over the years, and he could be a bit difficult.

“I wasn't furious with him – I went it to it with my eyes open in 2012, and if you go on YouTube, you can see it, we did great shows. We went to Japan and did the Fuji Rocks festival.”

John does express disbelief that although the shows with Keith sold out, the music press paid no attention. But a decade later, when Keith died there was universal acclaim for him.

“When he died, I had people on the phone,” he howls through pretend tears, “’I can't believe that Keith's dead!’ It's like, you're of that generation, but in 2012, we didn't get one review! No one was interested, but we sold out The Village Underground, which is a fairly big place, great show. No press interest. No media interest. But it didn't bother me and it didn't bother him – the only thing was the punters coming through the door and enjoying it.

“It's funny, it was even on BBC News about him. People might remember it that way, and that's all well and good, but 10 years before, I'm doing shows with him and he’s playing well, but nobody paid any mind to him whatsoever.”

While John is playing down the road on this tour, he played a memorably hot show at the since-closed Cellars at Eastney back in summer 2015. John says he remembers it well: “We had sea bass on the beach – curried fish cooked by a Bangladeshi guy, which was great.

“We sat and chatted with that guy all day – I think he might have been out of the East End where I'm from.

“We spent all day on the beach, then we bowled down to the place and smashed – it was a proper sweaty pub gig!

“Most places have air conditioning now, but it was like when we did a show at Northampton recently, and at the end of the first song, I had to say: I don't wish to cause offence, but the shirt's coming off!

“Certain gigs really stick in the mind... And it's the same players I've got with me, plus Jon (Klein). I'm so lucky to have them, they're good northern boys, they just get on with it.”

Jah Wobble and The Invaders of The Heart play Metal Box Rebuilt in Dub at The 1865 in Southampton on Friday, October 27. Go to the1865.store.