| Jah Wobbles but he don't fall down |
[Sep. 19th, 2009|08:16 am] |
It's rare that I'll read a book from cover to cover in one go, but I've just done that with Jah Wobble's autobiography. It arrived yesterday afternoon. By midnight I'd seen it off.
So, what's it like, I hear you ask. Well...
Fresh off the press (Wobble says he wrote the book just after his Chinese Dub tour) the book takes us from Wobble's birth in the bomb-scarred badlands of London's East End right up to his present-day life as the much-respected maverick of experimental bass grooves...and resident of the Manchester suburbs, where he now lives as a contented family man. But Wobble's journey from London to Manchester, from the riotous days of punk rock to suburban bliss, has certainly been via the scenic route.
At the risk of employing the kind of cliché that Wobble himself would abhor, it's a rollercoaster ride, and, like many autobiographies, it speeds up as it goes along.
There are meticulous chronicles of Wobble's childhood, his punk rock teenage tearaway years, and his early excursions into music with Public Image Limited [that link goes to the new, official, PiL site: try the Fodderstompf fan site for much more info]. We get detailed accounts of particular events that took place at studio sessions and gigs - Wob is assisted in his detailed recall by the fact that PiL hardly played live at this time, of course. There's plenty of rock 'n' roll bad behaviour, too. Certain pages of the book are positively awash with booze - Wobble ended up as a pretty serious alcoholic, and his battle to reform himself is an affecting theme that runs through much of his story.
My favourite bit of mayhem is when Wobble (literally) slaps down Sean Hughes in the Never Mind The Buzzcocks TV studio. Hughes winds Wobble up. Wob warns him he'll get a slap. 'You can't do that, you're spiritual,' says Hughes. 'In an Old Testament sort of way,' sez Wobble, and promptly wades in.
Later, he zips through whole decades at a gallop, leaving out much detail. Entire albums - entire bands - go unmentioned. Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound empire is duly namechecked (we even learn that Wobble and Sherwood 'shared the same dealer', which I'm sure was handy) but there's no mention of the fact that it was Adrian Sherwood who reunited Wobble and original PiL guitarist Keith Levene as members of Dub Syndicate after many years of estrangement.
Levene, in fact, gets short shrift. He's more or less dismissed as a chronic junkie whose best work is far behind him. That may be true - let's face it, Levene has hardly raised his head above the parapet for years. If he does have any creativity left in him, he keeps it well hidden. But Wobble, as ever, doesn't wrap his opinions in tact or namby-pamby politeness. He delivers his views pugnaciously and straight from the shoulder. You should see what he has to say about the people behind WOMAD, when a friend who worked for the organisation introduced him around: 'It was so horribly upper middle class...the impression I got was that the senior people that I met simply assumed that Womad's only black employee had got some cockney bloke in for a chat, and so fucking what.' Wobble later became quite a star of the Womad festivals, so he got the last laugh there, at any rate.
There's also no mention of The Damage Manual, the supergroup put together in 2000 by ex-PiL drummer Martin Atkins, with Wobble on bass and Geordie from Killing Joke on guitar. Perhaps Wobble wanted his book to concentrate on his own bands, his own music - he blips past those post-PiL times when he's played for, or been a member of, other people's bands. But I can't help feeling there are stories here which have not been told, characters who should've got more than a walk-on part. Poor old Martin Atkins, who Wobble seems to get along with quite well in general, is described rather dismissively during the PiL era as 'a young, ambitious drummer on the make', which is a bit rich given that at the time Wobble himself was a young, ambitious bassist on the make.
There are also mistakes - odd glitches which make the reader pause and think, 'Huh? What?' Possibly the most glaring error is the repeated references (including in the index) to the first PiL album as 'First Edition' - it was, as any fule kno, First Issue. Maybe the book was rushed out just a little too quickly - someone really should have nailed that one. Curiously, I just noticed a similar odd error on the biog page on Wobble's website, linked above. The single Bomba (I've got it: it's good) is referred to as 'Bomb 12'. Maybe that's only a typo (it was, after all, a 12" single) but if Wobble wants a proof reader, I'm here to tell him my rates are low. Possibly not as low as 30 Hertz, but down there somewhere.
The book is a bit like sitting in a pub with Wobble, having him bend yer ear about his life. It's somewhat like John Lydon's autobiography in that respect. But while Lydon's book was basically one long aggrieved wail about how the world at large was always wrong and he, Lydon, was always right (I thought the book was like a punk rock Portnoy's Complaint as much as anything), Wobble is much more convivial company. He's ever-ready with a funny story or a self-deprecating aside. He's the kind of bloke you'd like to have a beer with - or, these days, a herbal tea. It's also worth noting that while Lydon's autobiography was actually an extended interview, transcribed by two American music writers, Wobble's book is the real thing. He wrote the lot himself.
It's just a pity he's not part of the recently reformed Public Image Limited. Quite apart from his definitive bass sound, I reckon the looming presence of Jah Wobble would liven things up no end. |
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