Party Time

You wouldn t think it due to his lack of public profile, but World Party s Karl Wallinger is a busy man. With his first album in ages, the brilliant Dumbing Up hitting record stores nationwide, as well as the imminent re-release of the entire World Party back cataglogue, Karl is looking after his business affairs himself, and is also embarking on a web-based TV channel, Seaview TV.

The new album was recorded in Wallinger s own Seaview Studios with Karl playing almost everything himself. Dumbing Up has been so long coming because its creator is a perfectionist. He strenuously denies the allegation.
Dumbing Up was recorded in fits and bursts, he laughs. It s not like I ve spent the last three years saying I ve got to get the last note in that song right . I ve tried to do as little as possible, to be honest. To me, the fun part of recording is when you have got the idea down on tape for the first time everything after that is work.
The songs on the new album deal primarily with relationships, love or the lack of the above, and are bloody good pop tunes to boot. It s not all boy meets girl, though. I m thinking, in particular of the album closer, the epic Always On My Mind , a state of the nation address, where the former Waterboy deals with everything from capitalism to religion.
I didn t know whether to put that on the record or not. I eventually decided, Fuck it, why give up a whole career of shooting yourself in the foot just for this one? . My feet are so full of holes they look like the side of Al Capone s limosine, he laughs wryly.
It s very in your face and a lot of people don t really want that. Because it is the antithesis of Kylie, it just appealed to me. I m not a miserable person. Just sometimes it really gets to me, the double-think needed to support sensible human existence in this world vanishes and I m left with the truth and sometimes it s not very palatable.
Songwriting is something that seems to come easy to the World Party mainman, with the result that he is becoming more famous as a songwriter than a performer in his own right. Notable compositions include the Robbie Williams hit, She s The One , and Brian Kennedy s take on Put The Message In The Box . The song which made him the most money, though, is When The Rainbow Comes as performed by Shawn Colvin on the Armageddon soundtrack.
Wallinger s own public profile has dropped somewhat in recent years from a position where he seemed certain to become a household name. 10 years ago, Goodbye Jumbo was named album of the year by the readers of Q. 1993 s follow-up, Bang, was number two in the UK charts, as well as spawning the hit single, Is It Like Today? Then it all went horribly wrong when World Party s fourth album, Egyptology, sunk without trace. Wallinger attributes its demise to lack of effort on the part of his former record company. He subsequently left the label, having secured the rights to his back catalogue, which will see all the World Party albums re-released later this year.
So how has he enjoyed his new-found independence?
I ve been in various states about it, pushing panic buttons and feeling outside the corporate bubble, but then I ve also been feeling elated at being in charge of my life again. If I want to do something crazy, no-one s there to say, Ooh, I dunno if that s such a good career move . Fuck that! It s just such a load of old pants, he chortles.
He has been frustrated, though, in his efforts to place URL links on the re-released World Party albums which would take listeners directly to his website: www.worldparty.net. There, they would be able to access not just a few free tracks that weren t very good that you stick on the end of the album, but a whole archive of text, movies, pictures, original versions and out-takes .
Unfortunately, Wallinger s retail, partners feared that this would lure the record-buying public away from their shops.
I can t put it on the website because my albums will come straight off the racks, back into a box and they ll pretend that they don t exist, he seethes. It s quite amazing the hold on my testicles that retail has got and I resent that.
Such setbacks haven t stopped Wallinger from embracing our brave new, multimedia world, and he is in the process of establishing Seaview TV, an online and extremely wacky news channel, where nothing is real and the comedy value is very high. The site (www.seaviewtv.com) currently features the byline News: 55 Hours a Day, and not much else, but Wallinger has set aside time later this year to record programmes for the site.
I don t know where it s going but I do know we have a load of cameras, a load of editing material and we think we re funny sometimes but I don t want it to be musicians in wigs being funny, I want it to be a news station that doesn t tell you anything about anyone really hopefully, people will think it s real.

Dumbing Up is out now on Seaview Records.