IT was Sid Vicious who, in 1977, took his friend, John Walton, to a party in Kilburn. (From Warrington Guardian)

IT was Sid Vicious who, in 1977, took his friend, John Walton, to a party in Kilburn.

Mr Vicious, remaining true to his legacy of continual and overt inebriation, struggled to pronounce his friend's name and introduced him in a slurred speech that slipped out of his mouth to form the words, 'Jah Wobble'.

Jah Wobble? What a perfect name for a bassist with a heart of dub and a head dipped in the avant gard.

Thus was born the pseudonym of one of the great though undervalued musicians of the past 30 years. Although John Lydon's ego might suggest otherwise, it was Wobble who fused the distant influences of Can and Lee Scratch Perry - to name but two - and added that special ingredient that transformed Public Image into, arguably, the greatest of the post-punk pioneers. Following Wobble's departure, that particular band staggered slowly back to a rock mundanity while Wobble forged an unprecedented solo career that balanced on the very edge of the contemporary structure, enjoying alliances with the likes of Sinead O'Connor, Brian Eno, The Edge, Peter Gabriel and Holgar Czukay.

Until recently, discovering the work of Jah Wobble in any local 'megastore' was decidedly hit and miss. Indeed, his music has been bouncing around the categories as if a pinball over the years. I've found him languishing in reggae, dub, ambient, trance, dance, rave, punk and world! This is a huge problem for any artist who refuses to sit within the increasingly tight confines commercial bracketing. However, a stunning three CD collection of Jah Wobble's three decades of work, is currently hovering uneasily and the New Releases. Priced at a mere £11.99 and named I Could Have Been a Contender, proudly out in the Trojan label. Snap it up before it dives into the darkest recesses of HMV.

Jah Wobble plays St Helens Citadel on October 23.

To their fans, from Seattle to Dresden, The Fall are the only band in the world. While I have been a fan since 1977 and have probably published more words on them than any other living human being, I don't quite share the extremism of that viewpoint. (There are other bands ... I have heard them).

Nevertheless, I do realise that, should you play all the Fall's 31 studio albums, compilations, live albums and oddities back to back, then you will probably emerge as a bumbling wreck sometime around the year 2016. This is partly because of the band's seemingly eternal prolificacy and partly because, one senses, Mark E Smith has spent many evening signing dubious publishing deals with dubious publishers in dubious pubs - hence the regular emergence of largely unlistenable Fall Live in Poland albums and compilations gathered under some unfathomable concept. The fact is that, no one in their right mind would wish to own every single Fall release, let alone actually listen to them. There are Fall albums out there, right now, that even Mark has yet to see, let alone hear.

Through that murk however, sits a body of work that remains quite unparalleled in terms of genuine artistic achievement, innovation and gut level garage rock'n'roll.

The beast at the heart of this aesthetic activity is the rampant, surging muse of Mark E Smith. This beast is, as John Peel famously noted, "Always different, always the same." What the 65-year-old Suffolk miserablist means by that is simple. The Fall have no peers. Not perhaps the only band in the world ... but certainly the only band in their world.

As I write, a new and genuine Fall product is emerging darkly on the horizon. Following last year's stunning Country on the Click album, the newie seems set to carry the name Interim although, as ever, this is subject to change, as everything is with The Fall and always will be. Encoded on this disc will be a curious mixture of new songs - including Blindness, the newest fave of their current live set - and reworkings of various oldies. In addition, two double dvds will capture the band in ferocious form earlier in the year.

All this activity is dizzying enough, but gathers around the news that, sandwiched between tours of Russia and Germany, the band are to finally play live at Liverpool's Carling Academy on October 1. In the unlikely event that Mark doesn't throw one of his infamous 'wobblers' and sack the entire band before recruiting a Slovenian rap act as a new version of The Fall, then one of the finest, most ferocious of Fall line ups will emerge tentatively on that stage.

Should you wish for a taster, then Mark is making one of his irregular appearances on Steve Barker's legendary One the Wire shows on Radio Lancashire on September 18.

Expect streams of entertainingly incomprehensible consciousness punctuated by slabs of rare Fall recordings.

All of which neatly allows me to bounce from one northern institution to another. In a parallel and more interesting universe, One The Wire might well exist as the only radio show. This is a universe where the constraints of contemporary music in the conventional sense are crushed by Barker's eclectic taste. It's a land where dub is allowed to warp the pavements, where a typical play-list might swing from John Coltrane to Tackhead, Augustos Pablo to London punks, The Rocks, from Captain Beefheart to The Fall to Wilco. Let me put it more appealingly. It is a place where Oasis, Keane, Coldplay, David Gray, The Darkness and all band's who display a similarly derivative nature have been taken out and publicly executed. The only unifying factor of Steve Barker's is aesthetic freshness and ... what's that forgotten concept? Oh yes ... talent!

On The Wire will be 20 years old on September 16, 2004. Catch it Saturdays 10pm on 105.9, 95.5 and 104.5.