Exclusive: World Party’s Karl Wallinger’s final interview about new music, change and life by the sea

20 years after aneurysm that almost killed him singer-songwriter poised to release original material

[Wallinger spent three years with The Waterboys before launching World Party. Image: Facebook]

Karl Wallinger, the founder and life-force of the band World Party, had created his first new music in more than 20 years and was planning to release it at the time of his death.

In an interview in February, just a month before he died after suffering a stroke at home in Hastings in southern England, the 66-year-old confirmed this was the first original material since he had an aneurysm in 2001. 

That episode had almost killed him, and while over time he would relearn how to play the guitar and piano and was able to go on tour, there was a certain disappointment among fans that he was only playing his back catalogue.

One of the breakthroughs, Wallinger told me over the phone, was the decision six years ago to get out of London and move to East Sussex. He had always lived and worked in north London, but the shift to Hastings gave him more “bang for the buck” to build a studio. 

It also, he said, finally provided him with a sea view. The studio in London’s Crouch End where he had produced that wealth of music, some of it ground breaking, some less so, had been called Sea View. Wallinger said he’d named it for the often stunning London skyline, that vista representing “the sea of man”.

For the last half-a-dozen years, he’d had an actual sea view, a garden, and a community of musicians with whom he would jam.

“I’ve met more musicians here….than I did living in London,” said Wallinger, the writer of songs such as Put the Message in the Box and Is It Too Late?

“It is kind of quite separate, [it’s] quite insular in London and down here it’s much more open.”

It is impossible to be entirely dispassionate about Wallinger. I first saw him the mid-80s when he played Lancaster University while promoting 1986’s Private Revolution and its single Ship of Fools. While the track has become known as World Party’s most famous track, in terms of chart success it did not do well in either the US or UK.

(To Wallinger’s lingering resentment, it would be Robbie Williams’s version of She's the One, from the 1997 album Egyptology, that topped the charts and brought him the adulation and big bucks.)

I saw Wallinger play live maybe half a dozen times, at The Fiddler in Kilburn, Ronny Scott’s, in New York City, and in New Jersey. I interviewed him on four ocassions. For me, the most significant was in 1990 when he good-naturedly agreed to chat backstage after a gig in Bristol.

For a wanna-be journalist lacking the “clippings” demanded by journalism school, our conversation piqued the interest enough of the music editor of a Bristol magazine, Venue, who sent me out for a few months to cover live music in Bath and Bristol and helped ease the way. (I had the chance to thank Wallinger a couple of times for this leg-up.)

New music is one thing, but new material that is good and that sounds authentic is another. As it happens, one reason for Wallinger’s cautious progress is that he had been trying to build a studio setup he was content with. 

He had recently shelled out for a mixing deck from 1973 that had taken time to bed in. And while Wallinger had not quite completed his new material, he was prepared to play it over the phone as I sat and listened in Seattle, pinching myself just a little bit.

The track he had the nearest for release was “a kind of funky thing” called Change.

There was a beat, there were some backing vocals and since the main vocals had not been completed, Wallinger sang them to me.

“Change, You got to change, Change the way you move, change the way you groove,” he sang. “You know, that kind of thing. Call and response.”

I told him it sounded both “new” and “like you”.

Is that the change you've already done or is the change that is yet to come, or both, I asked.

“It’s more that we’ve got to change than I’ve got to change,” he said. 

“But maybe it is. You often find that songs you thought were about other things come back to [being] autobiographical. So there probably is something in that.”

Given this would be his first new music in 22 years, how did that make him feel? Was he nervous or anxious? Did he feel a little of both?

“I’m will only put something out if it's good, and if it’s good I won't be anxious,” he said

“If it’s an old dog's ear and I'm trying to pass it off as a work of genius, I'd be very nervous because I can't do things like that. Just I'd rather say well, this is a dog’s crap.”

[Wallinger’s first World Party album was 1986’s ‘Private Revolution’. Image: Instagram/Nancy Zamit]

Wallinger was married to the sculptor Suzie Zamit, and they had two children, Louis Wallinger and Nancy Zamit, and two grandchildren. Nancy is a founding member of the comedy troupe Mischief Theatre, which is based in London, and it was she who had broken the news of her father’s death.

There was immediately an outpouring of shock and grief, many from fellow musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Midge Ure, who said Wallinger had never received sufficient recognition for his genre-blending originality. He certainly never received the commercial success he might have, though one senses this is not something he’d have wanted if it meant he had to stop being himself. 

One of the most poignant came from Mike Scott, whose band The Waterboys  Wallinger had played with in the mid-80s. There were reports he left amid disagreements over being insufficiently acknowledged for his input, but Scott says Wallinger had been credited and simply wanted to “lead his own band”.

(He was replaced on keyboards by Guy Chambers, who later produced several songs for Robbie Williams, including She’s the One.)

“Travel on well my old friend,” Scott wrote on social media. “You are one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known.”

Many British people instinctively use humour when confronting hardships, dark humour in particular. Over the years, Wallinger would make light of the aneurysm he suffered in 2001 after cycling with his son at Center Parcs in Suffolk. (Wallinger claimed he’d been stuck in the studio smoking for two months prior to the family holiday.)

Yet it was a near fatal incident. He lay down on the bed and told someone to call an ambulance. Medics would save his life and perform surgery close to his optic nerve. He lost a good chunk of his vision on the right side of both of his eyes. 

[Wallinger said with a laugh he wanted to create his own Abbey Road'. Image: Facebook]

It took him five years to relearn how to play his instruments again.

“I had to learn to play a lot of things again. Where I'd looked on the piano, I no longer looked at that, because I couldn't see it without moving my head to an uncomfortable angle,” he said.

“So I then started looking at the left hand a lot more. And all of a sudden, all my music’s got lots of more left hand in it. There's all these things going on, which had been sort of strange, and so you feel like you're somebody else when you're playing these instruments.”

By this point in his life, Wallinger appeared to be someone who felt no need to rush things. He was making new music but wanted it to be as good if not better as anything he had done.

“I’m sort of making my Abbey Road - haha - and I'm talking about quality,” he said with a chuckle.” “I’m talking about quality. I'm trying to make a  sonically interesting, and well-honed record basically.”

Wallinger said he hoped the new material would be released soon. While the work he had completed so far only featured him, he hoped that former members of World Party - he did not specify who - could be involved as he pressed forward.

“I plan to try and get as many people who played on World Party records as possible on this one because who knows what happens,” he said. “It’d be nice  to do that. And I've already been in touch with a few people. So there'll be on there. There'll be people from World Party’s line-up that will be appearing. Yeah, definitely.”

It is unclear whether any other material he had near to completion could be finished and released by any of his musical friends. 

When we spoke, he was very much focussed on the present and the future.

That is one of the reasons it has taken all this time

“It’s just that you're a different person. And you have to live a new life now. You can't go back because you can't become the other person again, because you haven't got those  connections,” he says.

“Those neurons or whatever, with the memories or the experiences, all sort of got banged up, and they don't work properly anymore. So you are who you are.”

He added: “That's a different thing altogether but in some ways it’s good.

It’s been very good in some ways, because you don't often get a chance to be two people in your life.”