Man. This one really bums me out a lot. I guess I sort of always took for granted that there’d be another World Party album that would drop, or that Karl and Mike Scott would record something again together. Or something. I’ve found myself in the last few years listening to World Party songs far more frequently than I did even when Karl had that project fairly active.
Fuck.
And recut a new video a few years back…
Karl Wallinger could write a goddamn song.
Aw, man. The masterpiece Goodbye Jumbo was essentially the soundtrack to one of the golden periods of my life, when the world slowly opened up and my young heart felt like it alternated between elation and heartbreak every other month. I mean, Love Street and Sweet Soul Dream have to be about as good a back-to-back, one-two punch taking you from sublime happiness to heartache as has ever been recorded.
Thank you, Karl Wallinger. You elevated and eased some of the best and worst evenings of my young life. RIP.
The man was just a songwriting genius. Which kinda makes me sad that he stopped releasing new music (as far as I can tell) in 2000 or so. (I know he had a cerebral aneurysm around that time and took a few years off to recover, so maybe that’s part of it.) I’ll still hold out hope for there being some treasure trove of Wallinger home recordings that we get posthumously.
And if not, well, what a legacy of fantastic records he left behind. I mean, the dude managed to make a song about voting. And that song is brilliant.
For all I know, maybe he was able to just comfortably retire on the royalties from Robbie Williams taking “She’s the One” to a #1 single. (I still prefer Karl’s original.)
"I really believe that songs are just amazing things because they go off and they have their own life. They get played at weddings and funerals and births and deaths and everything. Happy moments or moments of doubt or moments where it just seems to be the friend you want. It’s a strange thing, the way they have their own life. I love that about them.
“They’re like kids. They’ve gone off and experienced more of life, probably, than I have. They’ve been in the background when two people are making love, or they’ve been on a car journey to Alaska. All these scenarios where they’ve been experiencing our lives, as well as we are experiencing them. It blows me away. Songs are incredible things. I love them.” --Karl Wallinger, 2022 in The Big Takeover
Ugh. Found a 2022 interview with Wallinger, where he happily announced that World Party was not only a going concern again, but that he had “about 20 years” worth of songs that he was working on in his own studio on the south coast. He said he wasn’t interested in just trying to “finish” old, existing songs that were left as they were back some time ago, but instead wanted to update them, make them fit where his mind was musically these days before putting them out.
I hope we get to hear that music some day.
RIP. This hits hard. I loved World Party back in the day. Though I admit I probably took it for granted as well … surely, I thought at the time, someone would always be knitting together countless influences into perfectly constructed pop songs like those on Goodbye Jumbo. And then you look back and realize just how special that record was.
I remember listening to this song entirely too much. It was prescient - it’s basically an anthem heralding the Age of Enshitification.
But better instead to remember him by this, the next song on the album and a song that meant a great deal to me at one point:
Although I owned Goodbye Jumbo back in college, never listened to it much, I was way into The Cure, New Order, shoegaze, old punk, etc.
But when I couldn’t get my toddler son to listen to dig music several years ago, I started playing him Put the Message in the Box and he loved it - that and Johnny Cash were his thing. Some of his first complete sentences were lyrics from those songs.
And I may be 54, just had a new son a couple months ago, so I’m sure I’ll be dialing it up again.
RIP
Damn. I had a friend who used to do acoustic covers in local bars and restaurants in Greensboro and he covered “Is It Like Today?” and I loved it. Bought some World Party CDs and saw them live in the Bay area in the mid-90s.
I remember when I used to think 66 was “old.”
RIP Karl. Thanks for the awesome tunes.
Was World Party not a big deal in the U.S. compared to UK or the rest of Europe or did I simply manage to completely miss out on them (him)?
The last couple of years of I’ve been going through Spotify listening to older artists I’d always heard of or might have heard a song or two by, but just never bothered listening to. I’ve since become a huge fan of Blue Oyster Cult, Roxy Music, Frank Zappa, and Siouxshie and the Banshees.
And yet, even though I’ve listened to a ton of music since my teens in the 80s, including some stuff considered obscure, I cannot recall ever hearing the name World Party!
“Is it Like Today?” sounds awfully familiar though, and I might have even heard “Ship of Fools”, possibly on MTV when it released (or a cover) and maybe I just didn’t care for it then.
All this to say, what a great find (albeit under unfortunate circumstances)! I listened a bit last night and I’ve had the first three albums on repeat all morning.
I’m also big Peter Gabriel fan and discovered he and Wallinger had worked together on some project in the 90s that wasn’t completed and released until 2007 (Big Blue Ball).
I really like this fairly recent acoustic version of “Is it Like Today”:
Ah, man. I don’t like this news. I may not have been as big a fan as some of y’all, but like Freezer said, Bang! was the soundtrack to a really nice time in my life, the spring semester of my senior year in college. It’s nice to revisit these tunes today.
“Ship of Fools” definitely got airplay on MTV back in the day, even if it was spotty and often segregated to a show like 120 Minutes. But that’s where I first heard them. Him. (Wallinger plays all the instruments on the first World Party album himself, including “Ship of Fools”.)
But I know Goodbye Jumbo was Q Magazines #1 album of 1990…and Wallinger was managed by Prince’s manager, and if KW and Prince weren’t exactly buddies, they were definitely friendly acquaintances and Wallinger had a fantastic band by then…and they were offered the opening slot for a US tour with Neil Young, but had to turn it down because the record label demanded a follow-up to Goodbye Jumbo.
And so add to that: Wallinger works deliberately. Slowly. Procrastinates. Tends to drop an idea in the middle or even close to finishing, but then comes back to it. That doesn’t help send you up the charts. That record that his label demanded to follow up 1990’s Goodbye Jumbo didn’t come out until 1993.
He also had some spectacularly bad luck along the way. Ed Burns commissioned him to write the song “She’s the One” for his movie of the same name that starred Jennifer Aniston. And then they got Tom Petty interested in writing multiple songs for that movie, but Petty only agreed to do the full soundtrack if his was the only music on it (like Simon & Garfunkel for “The Graduate”, or Elliott Smith for “Good Will Hunting”). So, Wallinger got “She’s the One” back with an apology, and put it on his next record, and then watched as two of his bandmates took the song to Robbie Williams – then just a boy band singer with the group Take That – and have a #1 hit single with it, and see that song win awards as Song of the Year.
And then he had an aneurysm in 2001 and needed years to recover to be able to speak and sing (and re-learn to play musical instruments) and while he toured with various incarnations of World Party over the years since and was rumored to always, always be working on a new World Party album, who knows if we’ll ever see the results of that? I sure hope so.
(Oh, and back in the day Wallinger was pretty outspoken about hating the Robbie Williams version of “She’s the One”, mostly because of the circumstances that felt like betrayal to him. More recently, he described his reaction back then as “Being a right tapir.” (He didn’t call himself a tapir.) And he’s been pretty profuse in his thanks that the money he made from that cover was available during his recovery and rehabilitation.)
Thanks for the info!
Reading that, it’s no wonder …