This is the story of a man who has transformed and transcended. The distance from where John Wardle began to where he is now is considerable: perhaps think of this book as a modern morality tale where the protagonist, like John Bunyan’s pilgrim, travels through the travails of the world – and indeed the Slough of Despond – before he finds deliverance: in love, music, hope and spirituality. The fact that this happened to a working-class boy from the inner East End is even more extraordinary.

John’s stage name is Jah Wobble, given to him in the mid-seventies by Sid Vicious, who, along with other key punk protagonists, makes a cameo appearance here. He was one of a loose group of friends who met at Kingsway College of Further Education: John Lydon, John Beverley, John Gray and John Wardle. Apart from Gray, who would remain Lydon’s éminence grise, all gained fame and attention – if not notoriety – during the height of British punk rock and its aftermath.

As one of the four Johns, Wobble saw the development of punk from its very beginnings, when his friend John Lydon joined the Sex Pistols in autumn 1975. As he writes: ‘Once they had been going for a few weeks John invited me, along with John Gray, to see them rehearse at their premises in Tin Pan Alley. I don’t think he realised how excited I was. I had never been in a rehearsal room before. Steve Jones really was a very powerful guitarist.’

Wobble recognised himself and the group as part of what he calls the ‘end of the line generation; the last lot to grow up in a society still relatively untarnished by free-market economics and monetarism. We had our adolescence at a particularly turbulent time, politically speaking, in this nation’s post-war history. The ruling classes were very concerned by the growing power of the unions. They also feared and suspected many in the Labour Party.’

‘All the people I knew had a lot in common. They had all grown up in poky council flats, were brighter than average, and had a certain je ne sais quoi. There was a sense with all of us that we somehow wanted to escape the rather sedate destiny that had already been mapped out for us by square society. We were also far too sussed and bright to believe anything that trendy Hampstead intellectuals or hippies had to say. There was a “quotient x” present among us all that was among other things wilful, angry, narcissistic, courageous and bold.’

Punk was a misfits’ charter, that pulled in disaffected and underprivileged teens from all over the country. The young John Wardle was a classic example of an adolescent who deserved better: his relationship with his parents wasn’t good – his father was damaged by his service in the Second World War – and his schooling failed to engage his restless intelligence. He was, in retrospect, perfectly situated to accept the punk challenge to get active; do it yourself – an exhortation that pulled in a generation of working-class autodidacts.

He writes well about the music of his early teenage years: Tamla Motown, the Sound of Philly, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Manu Dibango and one Beatles song, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Unsatisfied with mainstream culture, he started listening to short-wave radio oscillations which put him into a trance. At the same time, he read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Camus, Greene, D. H. Lawrence, Zola, Ballard and Orwell, the late Sanskrit texts the Upanishads. ‘Even at that age’, he remembers, ‘I had a strong spiritual bent.’

This began to come out in a more focused way. Sitting in a Southwark squat for long periods in 1977, he began focusing on the bass guitar: ‘the desire to get a bass wasn’t contingent or dependent on anything other than I wanted to play the bass. The initial attraction was a sonic one; primarily I was fascinated and captivated by low frequencies. Heavy bass had an effect on me that was essentially visceral; I felt and perceived it at gut level. It took the emphasis away from my head and “thinking”. ’

‘Even today as I sit here, my heart skips a beat at the thought of “BASS”. I now realise that when you truly accept bass as (essentially) an emanation of God (at gut level), as the “ground” of existence, let alone music, you make a friend of impermanence, everything vibrates, moves, is in a state of flux, therefore the fear of losing what you have, or of not getting what (you think) you want, diminishes. You will truly ride the rhythm. You will reside in the resonance of Om. To you the open E string becomes spiritually vehicular. You can ride the sonic boom to heaven.’

That sonic boom is the first thing you hear on the first single by Public Image Limited, ‘Public Image’. As a core member of John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols group, Wobble was initially given as much freedom as he wanted and, indeed, his fundamental bass lines anchored Keith Levene’s psychedelic guitar and John Lydon’s muezzin wails. PiL set him free: it promised much – a promise completely fulfilled on 1979’s extraordinary Metal Box – but he became disillusioned with the hard drug use, poor business ethics and narcissistic attitudes of his fellow members.

Public Image Limited thrust Wobble into the spotlight, but, as the book makes clear, he has rarely stopped making music – right up to the present day, forty-five years after he joined the group. There are so many variations: the solo years, the Human Condition, Invaders of the Heart, Psychic Life, the Chinese Dub Orchestra. He has collaborated with musicians as diverse as Pharoah Sanders, Bill Laswell, the Edge, Evan Parker, Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream, Jaki Liebezeit, Holger Czukay, Baaba Maal, Chaka Demus and Sinead O’Connor.

In the middle of this was a descent into hell. Apart from the vicissitudes and vicious class politics of the music industry – sabbaticals from full-time music included periods as a warehouse keeper, a ticket collector and a train driver – Wobble was afflicted by severe alcoholism, which harmed his first marriage and fuelled a tendency to violence. As he writes, ‘the scene in the latter stages of GoodFellas where Ray Liotta’s coke-addled character Henry is trying to keep it all together in the middle of domestic life really reminds me of my life in the mid-eighties’.

Wobble became sober on 23 October 1986. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous he began to address the issues underlying his drinking, which meant changing his outlook on life: ‘I think that most psychiatrists working in the field would agree that gross emotional immaturity is one of the most noticeable aspects of alcoholics. I realise now that I had gone backwards in regard to emotional development at that time. In many respects I was more sensible at eighteen than I was at twenty-five.’

Perhaps his most famous song, ‘Visions of You’, describes the process of getting clear and psychologically healthy: ‘I was really feeling the benefits of that process, spiritually, mentally and physically. I tended towards a feeling of well-being for much of the time. I felt incredibly vital and alive. Consequently my lyrics refer to no longer being “numbed out”. It felt at that time as though my feelings were thawing. I also talked of no longer being “drenched in shame”. ’

He writes about a ‘possible outcome avoided’, the fate of his close friend Ronnie Britton, with whom he’d walk the night-time city in the mid-seventies. Meeting him again after several years, he found Britton homeless and poorly: ‘he spoke in a fractured way that didn’t make complete sense. He was telling me that he regularly talked to the Queen and John Major … I realised that this was more than just crazy drug talk; Ron had some other issues going on … Sadly Ronnie passed away just before Christmas 2008. His liver and kidneys packed up.’

After becoming sober, Wobble began filling in the gaps of a turbulent adolescence: seeing a therapist, going into higher education (a BA in humanities at Birkbeck College), remarrying and raising a second family, writing reviews for the Independent on Sunday and publishing this book in 2009. By that time he had released over twenty-five albums, solo and in collaboration, including Snake Charmer (1983), Rising Above Bedlam (1991), The Inspiration of William Blake (1996), Deep Space (1999), Radioaxiom (2001) and Chinese Dub (2009).

In the fourteen years since publication, there have been a dozen more albums, including Psychic Life (with Lonelady, 2011), Maghrebi Jazz (2018) and Metal Box in Dub (2021). John continues his spiritual practice and his AA involvement, while still continuing to musically develop and innovate: his current shows mix up forty-five years of musical experience, ranging from dub, jazz, Far Eastern, trance – all pulled together by a genial, comedic and uplifting presence.

This is a frank and unsentimental memoir. John does not spare many of those he has encountered over the years in the music and media industries, but he spares himself even less: his accounts of his alcoholism and violence are...