Karl Wallinger
Inventive folk-rock musician and songwriter who found fame with the Waterboys and World Party
KARL WALLINGER, who has died aged 66, helped to shape the folk-rock sound of the Waterboys in the 1980s before fronting his own band, World Party. Although they were never a major chart act, their LP Goodbye Jumbo (1990) was Q magazine’s album of the year and is now regarded as a creative high point in a pre-britpop era otherwise dominated by acid house and its offshoots.
Something of a wandering minstrel in the best tradition of the British music scene, Wallinger drew for his layered melodies on an eclectic range of influences, notably The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Sly Stone, and made them his own: Prince, by way of Godalming.
His lyrics were often classified as being similarly retro-hippy in their concerns. In fact, their warnings of the dangers of environmental abuse and corporate materialism were prescient. It was an irony of which he was only too aware that his best-known song should be an opportunistic cover version by Robbie Williams of Wallinger’s ballad She’s the One.
It reached No 1 in 1999.
Inspired by Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells,
Wallinger played most of the instruments himself on World Party’s debut, Private Revolution (1986). He recorded it in a makeshift studio he was renting on the Woburn Abbey estate. The rousing single Ship of Fools, the video for which showcased Wallinger in Lennon-style round glasses and Nehru jacket, reached No 27 in the US and became a college radio anthem.
The follow-up, Goodbye Jumbo, marked the apogee of Wallinger’s inventiveness – long hours at the mixing desk buoyed, he admitted, by a copious supply of reefer. Tracks such as Put the Message in the Box and Way Down Now blended social observation with pop harmonies, while Ain’t Gonna Come Till I’m Ready was selfexplanatory stoner funk.
The album barely troubled the Top 40 in the UK but it received a Grammy nomination, and Wallinger was delighted to receive Paul Mccartney’s approval at the Q awards ceremony. For Wallinger, however, any head of steam it had built up was dissipated by his record label’s insistence that he abandon the prospect of a North American tour supporting Neil Young to record a new album. It was three years before Bang! was released, and although it charted at No 2 in Britain, popular taste had begun to shift.
Relations with his label, Chrysalis, deteriorated further. Matters were not helped by its decision to let Williams – by now working with Wallinger’s former collaborator, Guy Chambers – record She’s the One, without notifying Wallinger and using his musicians and slightly different words. Although taken from World Party’s LP Egyptology (1997), there was no mention of Wallinger when the track won the Brit award for song of the year in 2000.
Wallinger had a history of fallings-out, but by then he had more serious problems to worry about. While bicycling with his son at Center Parcs in Suffolk in 2001, he suffered a brain aneurysm. After his recovery, he lost the peripheral right-sided vision in both eyes. He had to relearn his instruments – although right-handed, he had always played his guitar upside down and left-handed – and it was five years before he was ready to make music again.
This prompted a change of heart about the success of Williams’s She’s the One. “It saved my arse financially for a few years while I was holding on to the handrail,” Wallinger told The Daily Telegraph in 2012. “He kept my kids in school and me in Seaview [his recording studio], and for that I thank him.”
The youngest child of four, Karl Edmund De Vere Wallinger was born at Prestatyn in north Wales on October 19 1957. His father was an architect who undertook public works.
From an early age, Karl had an affinity with music. “I saw my sisters pushing the sofas back and dancing round the room to the Beatles, or Buddy Holly or Junior
Walker or whatever it was,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘That looks like good fun’.”
At nine, he would try to recreate the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP note for note with his mouth, discovering that the gap between his front teeth could produce “a really great distorted guitar sound”.
His own musical ability was already flourishing. After a spell at Eton’s choir school, he won a music scholarship in piano and oboe to Charterhouse. (Peter Gabriel, with whom he would later collaborate, and the other members of Genesis, had recently left.) Wallinger came to believe that the strain imposed by blowing into woodwind instruments contributed to his aneurysm.
His parents hoped he would join an orchestra. Instead, he began to make music with local Welsh rock bands. They included Quasimodo, featuring Nigel Twist and Dave
Sharp, later of the Alarm. He then moved to London, working first as a royalties clerk for Atv/northern Songs, originally the publisher of the Beatles’ songs: “I used to write ‘pay John Lennon £160,000’.”
He played the piano at lunchtime, which led him to being invited to songwriters’ meetings, but these turned out to be for “cheesy pop acts”. Wallinger left to become musical director of The Rocky Horror Show,
at the time starring Tracey Ullman and Gary Olsen.
In 1984, Wallinger joined the Waterboys, initially as a keyboards player for Mike Scott’s band. Scott soon recognised his abilities as songwriter and producer, and Wallinger helped to fashion the group’s “Big Music” sound, so named after a track on their LP A Pagan Place (1984).
Wallinger’s influence was at its peak on the follow-up, This Is the Sea (1985), which blended his stirring orchestration with Scott’s mining of Yeats and Joyce. The pair co-wrote the opening track, Don’t Bang the
Drum. While the album only crept into the Top 40 it did yield the band’s first hit single, The Whole of the Moon. This reached No 3 when re-released in 1991. Frustrated by Scott’s dominance of the group, Wallinger had by then struck out on his own, being replaced by Guy Chambers.
World Party released an album of B-sides and outtakes in 2012, Arkeolog y. “I’m a different person, probably a better person,” said Wallinger at the time. “I’m not a control freak any more. I probably was. That’s gone. I realise the futility of it.”
Karl Wallinger is survived by his wife Suzie Zamit, a sculptor, and by their son and daughter.
Karl Wallinger, born October 19 1957, died March 10 2024