Songs were Karl Wallinger’s compass, melody his north star. When I interviewed him in 2012, over shepherd’s pie at the Groucho Club, he described himself as being a “song creature all my life”. The best tracks by World Party, whom he fronted, sound like a man trying to cram all the love and joy of his own fandom into four minutes, to distil the essence of Bob Dylan, Prince, the Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, perhaps above all the Beatles, into one bubbling, funky, heartfelt and slightly ramshackle homebrew.
Wallinger, who has died aged 66, pulled it off more than a few times. The big hitters in the World Party canon – Ship of Fools, Put the Message in the Box, Way Down Now, Is it Like Today?, She’s the One – sound like the best kind of pop music: ageless, beyond genre. Turn to them at any time and they will brighten any room.
Beyond these staples, though, the catalogue runs deep. World Party were sometimes dismissed as 1960s revivalists, but although the through line is Wallinger’s dedication to pop classicism, the music is more diverse than that might suggest, incorporating funk, country, synth-pop, folk, mock-opera and nu-soul.
The balm-like prayer of It Can Be Beautiful (Sometimes) and the ominous All Come True, both from the band’s debut, Private Revolution, are poles apart stylistically. World Party’s best and most successful album, Goodbye Jumbo, encompasses rolling folk-rock (Take It Up), stoned boudoir funk (Ain’t Gonna Come Till I’m Ready), Brill Building balladry (And I Fell Back Alone), crunchy psychedelia (Thank You World), and all points in between. The box set Arkeology is a colourful pick’n’mix of of scattershot creativity which also harbours brilliant songs such as Another World, a beautiful apologia from mankind to the Earth it has destroyed.
Lyrically, there was nothing nostalgic about Wallinger’s writing. “I’m not retro,” he told me in 2012. “I’m writing songs about now – in fact, the songs I wrote back then are even more relevant now than they were when I wrote them. I wasn’t trying to be ahead of the curve, I was just writing about things that seemed obvious to me at the time, and we still haven’t done anything about it.”
Indeed, Ship of Fools – a churning minor-key broadside against the “avarice and greed” of our leaders – is depressingly topical in 2024. Another World was far from the only World Party song to address impending ecological disaster – Goodbye Jumbo even seemed to bid farewell to the elephant on its cover – and Wallinger was well ahead of the times by making environmentalism a key theme. The ragged history-of-the-world philosophising of Is It Like Today? was inspired by Bertrand Russell; morality vultures were skewered on God on Your Side.
The humanity in the songs feels real precisely because it is conflicted, the love – of music, mankind, our planet – served with scathing wit and a hefty dose of north Wales scepticism. When I met Wallinger, a decade after he had suffered the brain aneurysm that almost killed him, he balanced a more reflective outlook on life with ripe disgust. “I used to think we were all right, now I think we’re a bunch of twats. Me too. I can be as much of a twat as the next guy …”
He was terrific company. Opinionated, sharp, funny, wry, angry. The same kind heart and sharp tongue he displayed in person is evident in the work. The final track on the third World Party album, Bang!, is called All I Gave. It’s a breezy George Harrison-esque tune, cheerfully asserting our individual value in the face of life’s many vagaries. “All I gave was me,” sings Wallinger on the chorus. Listening to it again this morning, it rings truer than ever.
As well as a versatile songwriter, characterful singer (he had a great falsetto), and charismatic stage performer, Wallinger was a hugely gifted multi-instrumentalist. His former bandmate in the Waterboys, Mike Scott, called him “one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known”. For a year or two, his playing graced several classic Waterboys songs, with a spectacular organ part on Rags and wonderful piano on A Pagan Place. On The Whole of the Moon, Wallinger’s synth bass and cascading vocal line near the end – influenced by David Bowie’s Fame – add considerably to the rich sonic tapestry.
On the first few World Party albums he plays pretty much everything, but technical perfection was never the aim. Wallinger worked in his own makeshift recording spaces – one, in deeply urban King’s Cross, was jokingly called Seaview – and seemed happiest bashing about. Goodbye Jumbo is by no means a pristine audio artefact, but it hums with the joy of creation. In the early 90s, that album seemed to be everywhere. Citing the law of unintended consequences, a case could be made that it heralded the coming tide of Britpop, drawing on some of the same sources with greater wit and far less self-consciousness.
Wallinger wasn’t interested in surfing that wave, or any other. Beyond the effects of his illness, which clearly slowed him down creatively, there is a suspicion that he gradually retreated from the trappings of the music industry to preserve the joy in what he did. “I just know I’m here and want to play some music and make good use of my time,” he told me. “It’s that cheesy.”
It always came back to the music. When we met, he would break off from chatting to sing melodies into his phone, manipulating them in an app using a wah-wah effect. His ringtone played Sly Stone’s Family Affair. His dog was called Ringo. Goodness, Karl Wallinger loved music. We should be thankful that he shared the love around.
