If Jah Wobble had done nothing more than compose the throbbing, dub-enormous bass line to PiL’s “Public Image” — something he did in 1978, shortly after picking the instrument up — he’d still be worth his weight in gold. But he’s done plenty: hits with Sinéad O’Connor, collaborations with Brian Eno and Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, an album of Blake’s poetry, all the while mining deeper into his eccentric, whimsically globalized groove. And now, God bless him, he’s turned his large and restless mind to folk. His English Roots Band, who played January 27 at the Middle East downstairs, consisted of Wobble on bass, a guitarist and drummer, and two female folksingers. There was supposed to be a piper, too, but he got held up at immigration — or so Wobble told us at the end of the set, acknowledging that the presence of a piper was “right important for a folk band, but there we are.”
Wobble music, with its exotic tints and maternal bottom end, seems to have had some success with the jam-band crowd: there were some silly hats in the audience, some writhing Deadheads, a couple of apprentice bellydancers. The Wob himself, by pleasing contrast, was all poise and nattiness — silver-gray suit, tipped-back Trilby, lusciously Windsor-knotted tie. His bass lines are immanent, part of the world. Softly the triplets boomed out — buh-buh-buh, buh-buh-buh — and Wobble’s little punk-rock eyes, set deep in a broad and mask-like face, would close as he passed through boredom into nirvana. And when he stepped up to the mike for “Visions of You” and gave forth in his own celestially inadequate voice (a flat snarl, with the cockney vowels combed into a strange Easternness) with “No lahn-gah drrrenched in shame! Ah’m not numbed out any-more!”, there was no choice but to applaud wildly.
The results of the Roots Band’s dub-folk experiment were more mixed. Liz Carter, who took most of the vocals, is not a strong presence — she sings with a thin, creaking rusticity that would sound great unaccompanied at the back of a pub or in some knotty glade but struggled to be heard against a full band. Occasionally the frail folk tones hoisted themselves aloft and a phrase emerged — one was about “milk from a maiden’s breast.” I think. String me up, folkies, hang me high: these were traditional tunes and I couldn’t make a positive ID of a single one. A version of Dawn Penn’s reggae standard “No, No, No” became — I think — “The Unquiet Grave,” with Wobble still bottlenosing through dub space. Fascinating.
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, Sinead O'Connor, Brian Eno, Jah Wobble
