East London icon Jah Wobble and Liverpool duo Tian Qiyi are bending The Beatles’ psychedelic legacy into something distinctly their own with Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook, arriving August 14 via Cherry Red Records and Wobble’s 30 Hertz label. Following reimagined takes on “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the album digs into the stranger, more mystical side of The Beatles’ catalogue, drawing particular inspiration from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.
But Mystic Liverpool isn’t a nostalgia trip. Across 10 tracks, Wobble and Tian Qiyi treat The Beatles’ songs as raw material, stripping them from their familiar context and rebuilding them through a distinctly cross-cultural lens. Liverpool collides with China and Mongolia, psychedelic rock meets dub, and generations of musical influence fold into one another. The result is less a collection of covers than a conversation between eras, cultures, and family histories.
The project was produced by Jah Wobble (John Wardle) alongside his sons John T. Wardle and Charlie Wardle, aka Tian Qiyi, and recorded and mixed by John T. at Pagoda Studios in Liverpool. Wobble’s cavernous dub bass provides the foundation, while John T.’s drums, Chinese percussion, and yangqin expand the rhythmic palette. Charlie adds vocals alongside erhu and morin khuur, bringing Mongolian and Chinese textures into the psychedelic framework. Their mother, Zi Lan Liao, a Royal Academy of Music-trained harpist and internationally renowned gu-zheng performer, further deepens the family connection with her gu-zheng playing on “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Mystic Liverpool ultimately feels like a meeting point between inheritance and reinvention: The Beatles as heard through the ears of a family whose musical vocabulary extends far beyond Liverpool, pushing these songs somewhere unexpected without losing sight of the weirdness that made them timeless in the first place.
On August 14th, the ‘Mystic Liverpool’ is available from digital music platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify, where ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ can also be found.
