RIP Karl Wallinger

March 13, 2024 2:16 PM

RIP Karl Wallinger. [NYT, ungated] Keyboardist for The Waterboys [Wikipedia] and creative force behind World Party [Wikipedia], he passed of undisclosed reasons this past Sunday at 66. He was well known for Put The Message In The Box, Private Revolution, and Ship Of Fools. The Guardian has a truly lovely write-up about Wallinger.

I wrote this post for BlahLaLa in exchange for a donation to MetaFilter. They provided many of the links, and they also included a list of favorite songs:
And I Fell Back Alone
Sweet Soul Dream
Love Street
It Can Be Beautiful (Sometimes)

Wallinger also wrote She's The One, which Robbie Williams took to the top of the UK charts, earning Wallinger hefty royalty payments.

posted by hippybear (39 comments total)

Ship of Fools was such a nice underplayed cut to add to my library, like The Plimsouls A Million Miles Away, referenced in Ready Player One
posted by torokunai at 2:28 PM on March 13 [4 favorites]

This is a great loss. A fine, creative, and uncompromising musician (whose name, I believe, is Karl, not Kurt).
posted by Dr. Wu at 2:32 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Jeebus. Thanks for pointing that out.
posted by hippybear at 2:34 PM on March 13

Thanks Hippybear for another terrific music post.

Wallinger was just a remarkably talented musician. Saw him in 1990 and was amazed. Everything he put out was wonderful, and Goodbye Jumbo is magisterial. Really sucks that he died, and too soon...
posted by WatTylerJr at 2:47 PM on March 13

Well, I've asked the mods to fix the name in the title and the post. We'll see how long before that happens. Sorry about that.
posted by hippybear at 2:48 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

"Ship of Fools" was the track that first brought him to my attention but I followed his career thereafter. His albums were uneven in quality but there were generally a few gems to be found.

How could it come to this?
We're really living in a landslide
How could it come to this?
Yeah we really wanna know about this

posted by Nerd of the North at 2:50 PM on March 13 [7 favorites]

Is it weird that I find his singing voice to be eerily similar to Jemaine Clement's?
posted by downtohisturtles at 2:55 PM on March 13

Throwing in links for a couple of tracks I haven't seen mentioned yet:

• Beautiful Dream
• Love is Best

posted by Nerd of the North at 2:59 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

Lovelovelove his voice and music. What a loss: his stuff is as fresh and fun today as it was when he released it.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:01 PM on March 13

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posted by WalkingAround at 3:11 PM on March 13

. And thank you for the links.
posted by paduasoy at 3:20 PM on March 13

That is indeed a lovely Guardian piece. Goodbye Jumbo was great, but my favourite was Bang!, which is wall-to-wall goodness.

(I left some thoughts on his albums in the comments about "She's the One" at Popular. Blimey, that was a decade ago... is it like today?)

Gone too soon.
posted by rory at 3:25 PM on March 13

Thank you, hippybear, for making this post for me. I really loved his music, and I didn't want his death to go un-remarked upon -- as an American fan, I know he wasn't super well known here.

I had the great pleasure of seeing him twice, the second time a really lovely show at the Troubadour. That's the show that convinced me I never needed to see any artist in a huge venue like a stadium or even a large theater anymore. It's those small shows, where the stage is *right there* that really allow the beauty to flow.

I don't even have anything poetic to say except that he made beautiful music, and I'm so happy I got to be a fan of his for such a good long time.

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posted by BlahLaLa at 3:37 PM on March 13 [10 favorites]

it's always, "under-rated genius, karl wallinger."

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posted by j_curiouser at 3:41 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

Bummer. I listened to Private Revolution A LOT in college, a few years after it came out.
posted by mollweide at 3:48 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

When he was in The Waterboys he co-wrote (with Mike Scott) Don't Bang The Drum, a favorite of Iain Banks who included it on his public mix CD.
Here's what he wrote in the sleevenotes:

"The Waterboys - Don't Bang The Drum (from This Is The Sea). Cars again. I had this idea for a film once - basically a romantic comedy/road movie in which the central character was a drug dealer, but a nice drug dealer. It started, pre-titles, with a lot of dark, slow monochrome shots of lonely Highland roads, mountains and lochs, with suitable music behind all this, then at a break in the music cut to a bright red Lotus Esprit Turbo with lights blazing cutting through the gloom and whizzing along the roads across Black Mount by Rannoch Moor and into Glen Coe. Titles over this sequence, cut to the beat shameless, really, and maybe more like an advert than any sort of remotely serious film, but this stunning piece of music was the sound track for that sequence. A narrow escape for the Waterboys, then. But a great way to start an album."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:19 PM on March 13 [3 favorites]

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posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:26 PM on March 13

My favorite Waterboys stuff is from after Wallinger departed following This is the Sea but it is interesting to hear his influence on the couple of albums he was a part of.

Back when I used to do a time slot on the local public radio station it was a toss-up which would pepper my playlists more frequently but both World Party and the post-Wallinger Waterboys got a fair bit more play on my shows than they tended to get on American radio in general. Wallinger was especially good at condensing a song down into a really listenable radio-friendly three to four minute nugget without losing its core.
posted by Nerd of the North at 4:54 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

To be fair, the list of people who have been in The Waterboys, on that Wikipedia page, is longer than even Yes.
posted by hippybear at 4:58 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

I'm way down now.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:13 PM on March 13 [6 favorites]

Always a stalwart in my rotation. Whenever I had any trouble deciding what to listen to, World Party was always a right answer.

There was a lot of Lennon in Karl. I like to think that if John had stuck around, he’d sound a lot like Karl.

Godspeed, man. Thank you.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:43 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

I wasn't a huge fan, but the era of Way Down Now was magic, and I still remember the video of his bespectacled poofy haired head.

It was that joyous rock and roll retro clangy guitar revival (I think The La's were out around then too). RIP.
posted by symbioid at 5:55 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

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posted by pt68 at 6:18 PM on March 13

I remember Ship of Fools from MTV in the 80s. What an excellent song.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:54 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

Oh, man. I was a huge Waterboys fan back in the early 90s. Saw them two nights in a row at the Orpheum in Boston in 89 or 90. What a loss.
posted by suelac at 7:00 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Those first three World Party albums are all desert island discs for me. I couldn't stay in a bad mood after spending time with them.

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posted by vverse23 at 7:25 PM on March 13 [7 favorites]

Yeah wow, how sad. WP are one of those bands that i forget how much i liked them in the day and then i put them on and just love them all over again, sad way to be reminded but thanks for the post.

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posted by OHenryPacey at 7:30 PM on March 13 [5 favorites]

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posted by mpark at 10:03 PM on March 13

Ugh. This is a tough one. World Party were one of my faves, with Goodbye Jumbo probably a top ten album of all time. I feel like it was just a couple of months ago that I was looking at the WP website hoping for a tour.

I was lucky enough to see him play a complete run through of Goodbye Jumbo at George Martin’s Lyndhurst Hall AIR studio back in the early nineties in front of perhaps 30 people. I think it was Goodbye Jumbo. It might have been Bang! That time period is a bit of a blur now. Either way it was an extraordinary experience. To be in that studio and to hear him play in such an intimate setting.

RIP Karl. I’m not sure your talents were ever truly recognized to the degree they should have been. But boy could you write a song.
posted by grumblemf at 10:56 PM on March 13 [6 favorites]

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posted by Joey Michaels at 12:51 AM on March 14

When I heard about this on Sunday, all I could think of was the World Party song "Thank You World" and how apt it was for his death.

Colors scents and symphonies
Fall on me like tears
And time around me stretches back
And forth across the years
Was I sent to see your beauty
Just to please my aching heart
Well I want to say good morning
But I don't know where to start
Thank you world
posted by Kitteh at 3:50 AM on March 14 [5 favorites]

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posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:51 AM on March 14

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posted by andraste at 4:57 AM on March 14

I didn't know him or his work at all, but I am grateful to hippybear and BlahLaLa for making me aware of a great artist. I have really been enjoying his music. I am sorry to have only found him once he was gone, but I am glad I didn't entirely miss out.

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posted by The Manwich Horror at 6:53 AM on March 14 [2 favorites]

Fantastic songwriter and musician. Rest in peace.
posted by elmono at 7:15 AM on March 14

TIL the album title Bang! comes from when he whispers "bang" near the end of "Is It Like Today?"
posted by kirkaracha at 7:46 AM on March 14 [2 favorites]

Photographer Lynn Goldsmith put up a lovely remembrance on Instagram as well.
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:58 AM on March 14 [3 favorites]

Oh no. This made me really sad.

I revisit World Party every couple of years. It's always a great visit. I actually forgot about the Waterboys connection, so there's two major holes in my life today.
posted by patternocker at 9:45 AM on March 14 [1 favorite]

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posted by helpthebear at 7:32 AM on March 15