THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In 1990, WORLD PARTY’s Goodbye Jumbo heralded a restoration of ’60s pop values and promised the big time for its eccentric auteur, KARL WALLINGER. But the obsessiveness that made a masterpiece could have cost him his life, and a “horribly clandestine” flit by his band didn’t help. Thirty years on, can MOJO detect new, faint strains of genius at work? “It’s useless to try and find out what I’m up to,” he warns JAMES McNAIR.

“PAY, YOU WILL PAY TOMORROW”, warned World Party’s debut single Ship Of Fools. Its soulful, perfect pop was a Trojan Horse for a stark environmental message, and in April 1987, it was the minor US hit no one saw coming. Industry suitors were quick to react, though, and high-tailed it to Bedfordshire, England. It was there, in a dilapidated rectory, that Karl Wallinger had made World Party’s Private Revolution almost single-handedly, pseudonymously crediting his guitars to “Rufus Dove”, and his harp-playing to “Martin Finnucane”, a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. “They’d heard there was a dumb kid in Woburn writing hits,” says Wallinger today. “There was this beauty parade of visiting managers.” Among them was Steve Fargnoli, then already employed by another, rather more famous multi-instrumentalist. “I was…

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MOJO (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2021

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