11 August 2005

Jah Wobble

...can't remember the year, might have been the one when Orbital and Spiritualized and Johnny Cash played...but I'm a little Coped n Fried, lying on my back at Glastonbury and Jah Wobble's Visions of You is playing on the main stage; music that drags you into positivity, Wobble's charismatic (yes, no error) bass is set on stunning and the sun is out and there's a beautiful HoneyBee sitting next to me, the kind who touches their nose when they laugh...

Maybe Sinead O' Connor is on stage with The Invaders, maybe she isn't. I swear the drugs have already worn off when everyone seems permanently on stage. It's the 90s approach to Kesey's "On the Bus" - are you on or off?

Everyone's on. Just for this moment... Visions of You. All the world's actors, condensed into the thick milky brew of Glastonbury Festival's ferrets are playing roles in sweet multi-cultural dramas; the kind you hate because you love; the kind that makes you feel like your braincells are popping and your intellect is dipping but you still can't avert your eyes because your autonomic nervous system seems less in your control than ever before.

Later Kempernorton will accidentally smoke crack and lead my future best man into the first stages of what became a long and dark psychosis but right now none of that seems to matter because Jah is not Clever but Big and he's all over this place, spreading out in wave after wave after wave...

You know I'm a sucker for ethno-nonsense with female vocals, you know it's a guilty pleasure but this, this is just a new kind of bliss...

Jah Wobble with Sinead O'Connor - Visions of You




And why now, after all this time? Well I've just been listening to the Jah Wobble anthology" I Could Have Been A Contender, having lost track of the fellow after the second Invaders of The Heart album (mostly because he hooked up with Eno for a while and there's something about Eno as a bald guy that makes my blood run cold - more on this some other day) and , well, it's nearly all excellent... the stuff with Evan Parker in particular is an unexpected pleasure; Snake Charms of sound that seems play around the skull like a Holophonic python before nestling inside the head and heading for the juicy bits...

In a good way.

For around £12 you get 3 Cds of stuff that ought to have given Jah a knighthood, if only for keeping going to more or less critical indifference and for giving that Dolores from The Cranberries a song where she doesn't sound irritating...

1 comment:

Chardman said...

I quite like his frequent collaborations with Bill Laswell, especially Radio Axiom.
Other than knowing he was a member of PIL, I was ignorant of the man's work for most of the 80's and 90's. I remember a sanctimonious friend declaring him one of the worst musicians ever, based on some solo record of his in the 80's.
I really like his bass playing and think he's one of the best Dub artists out there.

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