A FEW YEARS AGO, John Wardle, the UK-based bassist/composer better known to the world as Jah Wobble, decided to take up painting. There was no grand desire to show his work in galleries or sell them to the highest bidder. He just wanted to try it out. He wound up with dozens of canvases featuring paintings of apartment towers and abstract geometric shapes.
“They were hypnotic to me, but very simple,” Wardle says, speaking from his home in London. “It’s much as I did with the bass. I would just sit down with a simple idea and try to make something happen. A lot of other musicians or artists might think that what I do is very primitive or limited or uninteresting. But I’m not bothered because there’s an energy and a genuineness about them.”
It’s as perfect a description of Wardle’s instrumental skills as you’re likely to hear. Since his earliest days playing alongside his friend John Lydon in legendary post-punk group Public Image Limited, Wardle’s bass playing has remained deceptively simple and crisply effective. And it’s a sound that’s immediately recognizable: Through hundreds of recording sessions and dozens of collaborations, that rich, booming bass tone, inspired by a longtime love of reggae and dub, bounds out of every song he plays on.