Legendary bassist and producer Jah Wobble and Liverpool-based duo John T Wardle and Charlie Wardle have released Strawberry Fields Forever, ushering in their new album Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles Psychedelic Psongbook, a deeply personal reimagining of The Beatles’ psychedelic period framed within a soundscape of Chinese, Mongolian and dub traditions. The album will be released on 14 August.
These songs may have been written by Lennon and McCartney but Jah Wobble (aka John Wardle) and his sons John T Wardle and Charlie Wardle (aka Tian Qiyi) have made them uniquely their own. Mystic Liverpool draws on Wobble’s signature dub bass, John T’s drums, Chinese percussion and yangqin, and Charlie’s erhu and vocals, while Strawberry Fields Forever sees Charlie play morin khuur with the boys’ mother Zi Lan Liao – a Royal Academy of Music trained harpist and the most recognised guzheng performer worldwide – joining on guzheng.
Talking about Strawberry Fields Forever, Jah Wobble says: “This is the one that started everything for me – the song that opened my psyche as a small boy in the East End – so it was always going to be the centre piece of the record. It’s a family track in every sense with Charlie on erhu, morin khuur and vocals, John T on drums and yangqin, and Zi Lan on guzheng The dub sensibility runs right through it – there’s a lot of space in the mix, a lot of trust in the listener. I don’t think we’ve tried to compete with the original. What we’ve done, I hope, is honour the mystery of it – let it breathe in a slightly different room with different instruments, and see what happens. It still feels like more than music to me.”
Charlie Wardle adds: “This is a song about a real place Lennon remembered from childhood, and the erhu suits that kind of homesickness really well. We didn’t try to be clever with it – we just played the melody like we meant it.”
“Everyone knows this song,” says John T Wardle, “so there was no point in doing a straight cover. We made a conscious choice to go for a massive, hypnotic wall of sound. We brought our mum in to layer up these beautiful, cascading textures on the guzheng, Charlie’s driving the melody on his strings, and then dad and I just locked in to create this heavy, deep groove on the bass and drums. It’s less of a tribute and more of a dark, trippy, out-there collision of our family’s two musical worlds.”
The album journeys through The Beatles’ psychedelic-era songbook, treating the material as the genuinely mystical music it always was rather than simply nostalgic covers. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour are particular touchstones. Pre-order Mystic Liverpool HERE