Before we start, Jah Wobble wants to get a few things straight. First, he had no involvement in sinking Richard Branson’s houseboat. Nor did he hit Sid Vicious with an axe, since he was “comatose upstairs” at the time. Besides, Sid was only “prodded” with the axe. And forget those stories that he set fire to the drummer Karl Burns — those singed curtains were merely part of an LSD-fuelled game of live-action Space Invaders that got out of hand. Obviously.

“And another thing,” says Wobble. “I was not with Sid the night he attacked Whispering Bob Harris at the Speakeasy. Why the hell would you want to attack Bob Harris? You might point and laugh, but you wouldn’t attack him.”

Even now, 30 years after anarchy swept the UK, and two decades since he gave up drinking, Wobble has a lingering reputation as a boozy East End bootboy. In fact, the 48-year-old father of four who greets me at his home in Manchester’s leafy southern suburbs is affable, avuncular and highly articulate.

Being typecast as the postpunk Vinnie Jones, Wobble argues, is just another reflection of the class-ridden music industry. “I’m still ye olde noble savage,” he says with a shrug. “The credit you’re given is often that you have got this intuitive knowledge, never the fact that you’ve spent years honing and working at something. A bloke like me, you feel you’ve got to work twice as hard and be twice as prolific.”

Wobble certainly has been prolific since the punk era, when Vicious christened him by drunkenly slurring his real name, John Wardle. He has released some 30 solo albums and collaborations in the past 25 years, and his canon includes dub reggae, avant-garde jazz-rock, English folk, multicultural fusion and the writings of William Blake.

Many of these diverse musical moods resurface on Wobble’s latest album, Heart and Soul. From postpunk sneers to sumptuous Middle Eastern soundscapes, it is probably his richest and most accessible solo work to date. There is also a sweet symmetry in releasing the album on the legendary reggae label Trojan, recently reactivated and enjoying its 40th anniversary.

“It does mean a lot to me,” Wobble says. “There is a continuity there. I bought Trojan records when I was 9 or 10, and I stayed with the reggae. It was a perfect completion of the circle to be on the label so many years later.”

Born and raised in the docklands of the East End of London, the young Wardle was something of a teenage tearaway. But he was also a bright spark, voracious reader and knowledge junkie. Which helps to explain why his conversation, like his music, is a vivid patchwork of diverse cultural references. Plato is a favourite, cropping up repeatedly in our interview, between Descartes and Derrida, David Cameron and Richard Dawkins.

Wobble’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur is another recurring theme. If he managed a Premiership team, he argues, he would “car bomb” overpaid prima donna players and force the rest into barracks on starvation wages. “They would live more like warrior poets,” he says. “And they’d have to study Plato.” Splendid stuff. You don’t get this kind of insight from meeting Joss Stone.

A former altar boy from a staunch London-Irish family, Wobble was schooled by the Sisters of Mercy, “the Waffen SS of Catholic nuns”. Although he rejected Catholicism in his teens, he retained a lifelong fascination with the magical and metaphysical. “I still feel when I play [that] the Holy Spirit is present,” he says.

The former Sex Pistol John Lydon, another mouthy autodidact from a similar working-class London-Irish background, gave Wobble his bass-playing break at the age of 20. But these childhood friends fell out bitterly. It is 25 years since Wobble walked out on Lydon’s ground-breaking postPistols band, Public Image Ltd. Knowing that the singer kept his cash in a shoebox in a neighbouring flat, he helped himself to an unauthorised pay-off, then strode off into the sunset.

“I didn’t see John for ten years,” he says. “I f***ing hated him, couldn’t wait to get away. The music in PiL was good, but everything outside of that was complete trouble. The business was badly run; there was extensive heroin use within the band. One of my big arguments with John is that it was his responsibility to sort that out. People say PiL had this fascination with drugs and darkness, but I think we were good in spite of all that bollocks rather than because of it.”

Lydon and Wobble eventually patched up their differences, and still occasionally meet up.

Meanwhile, the bass virtuoso enjoyed a creative spurt after PiL, but drugs and drink clobbered him in the Eighties. He took speed, even dabbled in heroin, but booze was his main poison. “I never had anything but a pathological relationship with alcohol,” he says. “It was the elixir of the gods; it just took me somewhere. I had to have more and more.”

In 1986 Wobble entered an Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme. He has been clean and sober ever since. Married with two young daughters, he then made ends meet by working for London Underground. During this “Kafkaesque” period he baffled rush-hour commuters at Tower Hill by declaring “I used to be somebody” over the intercom.

But he would soon be somebody again. Wobble bounced back in the early Nineties, enjoying chart success with his multicultural dub-pop outfit Invaders of the Heart. He also worked with younger acolytes such as Primal Scream, Sinéad O’Connor and Björk.

Inevitably, perhaps, Wobble’s wayward style soon rubbed up against major label politics.

“Everyone used to tell me I did too many records, but I always thought that was mad,” he says. “No one would say about Picasso: ‘He was f***ing good but he did too much’. ”

Wobble founded his own independent label, 30 Hertz, in 1996. Soon afterwards he finally left the East End and settled in suburban Stockport, partly because his second wife, the Chinese-born harpist Zi Lan Liao, has local family connections. Detached from the mainstream music industry, he now enjoys a flexibility and autonomy unthinkable in his years as a hired hand.

“If I had an idea for another album right now, I could start it today,” Wobble says. “I’m reminded of the William Blake quote: ‘If you don’t have your own system, you will be enslaved by another man’s.’ I was able to have my own system, which feels fantastic. I’m not complacent about that because I know I could be wired up to a machine in hospital tomorrow. But right now, I’ve never had it so good.”

Heart and Soul is out on Trojan

Explore Music

• Proms

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles
• Mamma Mia! The first review
• Times critics' 20 best films for kids