BOOK OF THE DAY: Memoirs Of A Geezer: The Autobiography of Jah WobbleBy Jah Wobble Serpent's Tail 344 pp, £12.99
TOWARDS THE end of this sharp, funny and always searingly honest account of his life to date, musician John Wardle comes up with a line which may well be fit for purpose as his epitaph when that day comes.
“I’m Jah Wobble, a geezer,” he states firmly. “I come from Stepney in East London; I’m one of the chaps.” There isn’t much room for airs and graces with Wardle.
His life so far has taken in many strands. Born into an east London family with strong Irish roots, he attributes his early love affair with music to what he was hearing at home and in his impoverished neighbourhood. It’s music which draws him to John Lydon (they head to a Hawkwind concert together soon after meeting at Kingsway school) and John “Sid Vicious” Beverley.
When both friends join the Sex Pistols, Wardle has an ideal perch from which to document the punk scene, though he admits he was absolutely bored with it by 1977. Musically, he was already checking out dub and reggae and learning how to play the bass. By then too, a drunken Vicious had renamed him and Wardle became Wobble.
He liked the name because he knew people wouldn’t forget it in a hurry.
It was his old pal Lydon who first put him in a band, recruiting Wardle for Public Image Ltd (PiL) after the demise of the Pistols in 1978.
After playing the bass on his own in his squat, Wardle suddenly found himself thrust in the limelight. Luckily, he turned out to be a natural and his dub-centric style was perfect for the band’s dark, challenging and experimental sound.
Life was good for Wardle: he was in an exciting band with his mate and he was getting paid a decent wage. But as would happen over and over again, it didn’t last.
Despite having “severe doubts” about how the band was being run (for instance, one of Lydon’s mates kept the band’s money in a shoebox under his bed), Wardle decided to make the best of the situation.
In between touring and recording with PiL, he made solo records and forged connections with people like Can’s Holger Czukay. Post-PiL, he’s spent his career doing more or less just that over and over again.
Wardle is utterly frank when it comes to telling the story of his personal ups and downs. He may have wanted to just concentrate on making music, but bills had to be paid and if that meant taking a job with London Underground or driving a van, he did so without complaint.
For every successful record he made, like the Mercury Music Prize-nominated Rising Above Bedlamalbum in 1991 (which featured Visions Of Youwith Sinéad O'Connor), Wardle also had occasions when he was very much on his uppers, such as his lengthy battle with booze.
He’s certainly not one to suffer fools gladly and is quite withering about various record label executives he comes across, especially those public schoolboys and toffs he finds at world music labels.
Yet you also get the sense that his bark is worse than his bite, with Wardle becoming quite philosophical about his struggles.
As Wardle puts it himself, he could have been a contender if he had been able to deal with the “corrupt and disreputable”people he encountered in the music business – but he just didn’t have the temperament for that.
Jim Carroll writes about music for The Irish Times