Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi share ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ ahead of ‘Mystic Liverpool’
Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi released “Strawberry Fields Forever” on July 14, the second single from “Mystic Liverpool”, out August 14 via Cherry Red Records.
Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi released “Strawberry Fields Forever” on July 14, 2026, the second single from their album “Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook”, due August 14 via Cherry Red Records and Wobble’s own label 30 Hertz. The track is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” reworks the Beatles’ 1967 song around Charlie Wardle’s morin khuur playing and vocals, joined by his mother Zi Lan Liao, a Royal Academy of Music-trained harpist and guzheng player, on guzheng. John T Wardle contributes drums and yangqin, and Jah Wobble plays dub bass throughout. Jah Wobble, John T and Charlie jointly produced the track, which John T recorded and mixed at Pagoda Studios in Liverpool, where Tian Qiyi is now based.
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Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
Jah Wobble called the song the record he grew up with in London’s East End and described it as the natural centrepiece of “Mystic Liverpool”: “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 centrepiece of this 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, who plays erhu and morin khuur on the track, linked the arrangement to the song’s own subject matter: “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.”
John T Wardle, who recorded and mixed the track, explained the choice to build a dense arrangement rather than a straight cover: “Everyone knows this song, 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.”
“Strawberry Fields Forever” follows the album’s lead single, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, released on June 16, 2026 with an accompanying visualizer.
Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi’s ‘Mystic Liverpool’ album
“Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook” reworks ten songs from the Beatles’ psychedelic period: “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Within You Without You”, “I Am The Walrus”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Blue Jay Way”, “The Inner Light”, “Love You To”, “Flying” and “Rain”. Jah Wobble plays dub bass throughout, John T Wardle plays drums, Chinese percussion and yangqin, and Charlie Wardle plays erhu and morin khuur and sings. Cherry Red Records and 30 Hertz release the album on August 14, 2026 as a CD digipak and digitally.
The album is dedicated to Zi Lan Liao’s father, Mr K.H. Li (Liao Gui Xiong), who arrived in Liverpool from Guangzhou in 1981 as Chinese Cultural Officer at the Pagoda and went on to found the Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra. Zi Lan Liao, now director of the Pagoda Arts Centre, runs the orchestra, in which both her sons played from the age of three.
About Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi
Jah Wobble, born John Joseph Wardle on August 11, 1958 in Stepney, East London, became the original bass player of Public Image Ltd (PiL), the band John Lydon formed after the Sex Pistols split. Wobble played on “Public Image: First Issue” (1978) and “Metal Box” (1979) before a falling-out with Lydon led to his departure in 1980. He went on to collaborate with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of CAN, U2’s The Edge and producer Francois Kevorkian on the 1983 LP “Snake Charmer”. In 1982 he formed Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, and the group’s 1991 album “Rising Above Bedlam” brought Wobble his commercial peak and a Mercury Music Prize nomination, spawning the UK top-40 single “Visions of You” featuring Sinead O’Connor. His 1994 album “Take Me to God” featured Baaba Maal, Dolores O’Riordan and Chaka Demus.
Over a five-decade career Wobble has also recorded with Massive Attack, Ginger Baker, Björk, Brian Eno and Pharoah Sanders, and in 2009 he won a Songlines Music Award with the Chinese Dub Orchestra for the album “Chinese Dub”, a collaboration with his wife, guzheng player and harpist Zi Lan Liao. He now runs his own label, 30 Hertz Records. Side-Line has followed his recent collaborations, including Horace Andy on “Timeless Roots”, Ken Boothe on “Old Fashioned Ways”, and former Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist Jon Klein on the album “Automated Paradise” (previewed by “Who Wins?”).
Tian Qiyi takes its name from the Chinese middle names of John T Wardle and Charlie Wardle, Tian Qi and Tian Yi. The Liverpool-based brothers grew up playing in their grandfather’s Pagoda Chinese Youth Orchestra and bridge British, Chinese, Mongolian and dub traditions with post-punk and experimental production. “Tomorrow Never Knows”, released June 16, 2026, was the first record to bring Jah Wobble together with his sons under the Tian Qiyi name. “Strawberry Fields Forever” is their second single together, ahead of the full “Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook” album on August 14, 2026.
Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi tour dates 2026
Jah Wobble & Tian Qiyi perform together on:
- August 15, 2026 – Suffield Summer Fiesta, The Suffield Arms (UK)
Jah Wobble and The Invaders of the Heart also tour the UK and Belgium through the rest of 2026:
- October 3 – Stourbridge, Katie Fitzgerald’s (UK)
- October 16 – Todmorden, Unitarian Church (UK)
- October 21 – Frome, The Tunnels (UK)
- October 22 – Bristol, The Fleece (UK)
- October 23 – Reading, The Face Bar (UK)
- November 7 – London, Bush Hall (UK)
- November 25 – Hasselt, Club AFF (Belgium)
- November 26 – Bruges, Cactus (Belgium)
- November 27 – Oudenaarde, Harmonie (Belgium)
Tickets are available via jahwobble.com.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
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