Prompted by the terribly sad news of his passing this month, I have been back on a deep re-examination and appreciation of Karl Wallinger’s music. Primarily within the working vehicle for his songs, World Party, but also covering his too brief mid-eighties contributions to the Waterboys as well as the Peter Gabriel led Big Blue Ball project wherein Wallinger left as big and lasting an imprint as Gabriel himself; it is clear that we lost a notable musical force. Ironically, the overwhelming characteristic burning through if you check out old interviews and read the many tributes in the wake of his passing, is that he rarely over promoted his efforts, preferring to demur behind a very droll English line in self-deprecating wit. You do wonder if maybe just a sprinkling of the kind of self-aggrandizement (something that his former Waterboys sparring partner Mike Scott is happy to emit when required) might not have gone amiss just occasionally, he certainly had the music to back it up. Indeed, among the first to pay tribute when the news broke was Mike Scott himself remembering Wallinger as “one of the finest musicians I ever worked with” which said a lot, especially when you consider the animosity the pair had shown each other for the majority of the previous forty years.

There remains a sense of unfinished business between Scott and Wallinger, not in terms of the sniping but more in terms of how incredible the results were when they did collaborate on The Waterboys ‘This Is The Sea.’ The only joint songwriting credit between the pair, on record, was that albums dramatic opener ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’ but the role Wallinger played in the bands biggest hit from the same album, ‘The Whole Of The Moon,’ cannot be underestimated. Scott did, at times, go to great lengths in interviews to clearly state that Wallinger played no part in the writing of the piece (although I can find no evidence of Wallinger ever claiming it as his own) but that does show how much he left his mark on the recording. It is a track full of little sonic explosions, fantastically so when the lyric sings “came like a comet, blazing your trail” and the crash of a speeding collision pre-empts the first appearance of a saxophone, demonstrating how fully locked into the studio creativity Wallinger was at this point. But it would not even last to the end of that year, as the Waterboys made a left turn into the world of Irish folk music and Karl departed to form World Party with Mike blowing a farewell kiss in his best ‘How Do You Sleep’ style with a sarcastic sounding song of the same name; “climb your own peak, find a new streak, get yourself along to the World Party”.   

During the late 80s/90s period that followed, there is a compelling argument that says Karl’s band were far more in tune with the prevailing winds of the period than Mike’s. Listening today, World Party music actually sounds ahead of its time, quite something when one recalls how back then accusations of sounding a little too retro were levelled whilst all around the faux-psychedelia of the ‘second summer of love’ and the ‘daisy age’ were in full bloom and celebrated by a music press rather more impressed by sixties-referencing music if it was stitched to a dance culture aesthetic and backed by the ubiquitous funky-drummer sample. Wallinger’s genius was evident in how he recognized production values and analogue sounds from thirty years previous as the design classic they, later in the Britpop era, became acknowledged as being and simply used that as his studio canvas. He was no mere Beatles and Dylan obsessive though, the influence of Prince always loomed large in the work of a similarly gifted multi-instrumentalist who always took care of the lions share of playing in his studio work. Lyrically too, his environmental concerns can no longer be dismissed as the hippy-leaning idealism of a man indulging in too much blue sky thinking; indeed, everything he sang about sounds like front page news in 2024.

The execution on the albums he made sounds absolutely flawless today, not least on 1990’s classic ‘Goodbye Jumbo’. It really is worthy of the word ‘classic’ too, boasting a timelessness due to the creation being undertaken with zero intention of merely photocopying sounds of the past, far more realizing the sonic treatment each and every song required and it just so happens that, unusually for any record, every song is a must hear. Recordings remain bursting with untapped potential on ‘Goodbye Jumbo’ where songs like ‘Is It Too Late?,’ ‘When The Rainbow Comes’ and the gorgeous ‘Sweet Soul Dream’ are guaranteed to enjoy extended lives in the hands of TV and film producers for years to come. As messed up as the music business can seem to be, there is a satisfying tendency for the great stuff to rise to the top eventually in many cases. Karl continued to release World Party albums for the rest of the 90s and deservedly won some financial security after Robbie Williams covered his 1997 song ‘She’s The One’, something that, regardless of his mixed feelings about the cover version, he must have felt grateful for when health issues began in 2001, pre-empting only intermittent music releasing and performing activity for the rest of his life. The catalogue he did leave behind though is overflowing with wonderful music and I cannot over emphasize this enough. Occasionally a music related death stops me in my tracks with a sense of oh no, we have lost a good one here (Elliott Smith and Lou Reed spring to mind from the past twenty or so years) and this same feeling has returned with the passing of Karl Wallinger. This month’s playlist therefore has a few representations that hint at the incredible range of his legacy…