A Conversation with World Party’s Karl Wallinger – HuffPost 5.30.14
Mike Ragogna: Rumor has it you’re going to be touring the States. Is there any truth to that?
Karl Wallinger: Yeah, yeah, I’ll come quietly. We’re starting off on the 24th in Freehold, New Jersey and then we’re hopping around the place, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, down the West Coast, too.
MR: You have about 26 dates, right?
KW: Yeah, until July 24th and then I’m going into the desert for a few days and then I’m going to New York for a few days and then I’m coming home.
MR: Some of these places must be like second homes to you by now since because you’ve spent so much time here over the years.
KW: It’s like that…New York, LA, certainly those two. Chicago to a certain degree as well. I dig it.
MR: But you’re also an internationalist, because, after all, this is a World Party!
KW: Yeah. It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? Western atomic powers, basically, it’s like Britain and America–maybe you can include France in there. But it’s basically the Britain & America Party. Britain, America & Sometimes Australia Party.
MR: You’ll be releasing a live double CD soon, will that give us the update on Karl Wallinger creatively?
KW: I don’t think creatively in a way, but certainly performance-wise. I think it’s kind of funny, I think the songs work well stripped down. We’re doing a two-piece tour, I’m on stage with an acoustic guitar most of the time, I play on the keyboard and David Duffy is playing fiddle and mandolin occasionally and drums and electric guitar. It’s just so easy to get around, it’s like a few pieces and that’s it. Mixing it live doesn’t seem to be any different from a band. It’s strange, but it’s great fun, and we enjoy it. It’s a strange sort of potpourri of things, really.
MR: It will be interesting to see the reinterpretation. You play most of the instruments on your albums, don’t you?
KW: Yeah, it’s like I’m the band and I do the band thing on the acoustic and these two guys who play amazingly well are with me and they both sing backups and they both play. The fiddle’s often going through a distortion pedal, so it’s not just straight ahead acoustic stuff, it’s a kind of rendition of the songs in a compact way that you’ve never heard of really. We just really enjoy it. I’m heading toward another album and hopefully we’re producing that with a band and that will be a nice juxtaposition to this. I think it’s good to keep it interesting, just for yourself.
MR: Do you think we’ll get to hear a Waterboys tune or two?
KW: I don’t think a Waterboys tune will be played, no. I don’t tend to help the enemy.
MR: The years sometimes soften history, no?
KW: No.
MR & KW: [both laugh]
MR: Karl, you have so many classic songs that resonated on a poppy level, but at the same time you’re very known for your politics. Are you still working it all in together?
KW: I think it’s more complicated today. I think the things I’m singing about are still things we’ve yet to deal with, like the crazy attitude of humans towards their lives and towards the planet and towards existence. I don’t know, really what the hell I was singing about, but in another way that’s what I was singing about. I think it’s very complicated at the moment, what’s going on. Because we’ve got such access time has sort of stopped still and what we’ve got here in England is a party called UKIP who have come along proposing that we live in the fifties mentally and people are buying it. It’s a strange thing, they’re like pro-smoking, pro-freedom–it’s a bit like your Tea Party except it’s a very British version of that, so it involves smoking.
MR: It’s almost like when humans can find solutions yet they just can’t take “yes” for an answer.
KW: It’s very strange, isn’t it? The whole attitude towards wind farms over here is amazing, I wonder where these people were when they put up all the pylons, or radio aerials, didn’t anyone say, “Aren’t they a bit ugly” to those at the time? Wind farms, to me, aren’t ugly, they’re rather beautiful because it means that we’re not fucking everything up, and yet really hate them. But one of the best things I saw on wind farms is a Texan farmer was standing in his field and he said, “I get sixty or seventy dollars an acre for my crop and for the wind farm I get a hundred dollars for an acre of land.” I think that’s how we’ve got to make this work as a revolution of environmentalism, make it part of people’s lives who reject it now. Sell it to today’s people as a way of being that they can trust. All the time there are vested interests who are into the big oil and big fuel and motor industries raging against us and distracting everybody and not making them realize that this is probably the most important thing we’ve got to do right now. It’s a strange thing, people seem to be working against the sense of it all, yet there’s a vested interested that people need to do their every day job. We’ve got a world described in another age and that age is gone and we’ve got to describe a new age that hasn’t arrived yet. We’re in a strange intermission period.
MR: Exactly. And you would think that these billion dollar industries that are against wind power would see the buck and go there, yet they won’t.
KW: I think there is an element in the industrial world of people who are on top of the pile who just think, “It’s going anyway, so why not just cream it while it’s there?” I think there’s quite a few of them, from the vibes I get. The people are just like, “It’s what you can get now, buddy. No point in waiting.”
MR: Yeah, and that goes in hand with people over here who feel like these are the “end times,” and since these are the end times, what’s the difference? We’re all going to heaven or hell anyway.
KW: And that’s insane, that one! The mind boggles at some of the cul-de-sacs some of these people go down and inhabit, and they don’t want to come out! They don’t want to not believe. I hate it when people tell me I’m not Christian. Actually, the other day said that “we are a Christian country” and I differ from that. We’re a post-christian country. In most people’s minds, I don’t think they do believe in God, but they decide to think that someone won’t come and murder them. They do think that the ten commandments are pretty good, but they don’t have to necessarily say they were brought down a mountain by a guy who found them carved in stone by the lord. Surely we must be beyond this by now.
MR: And you also have those people who say, “Well, we’re the custodians of the planet, we can do anything we want.” You can apply that illogic as far out as you want to serve your own greed, ignorance or fear.
KW: I used to think that the progress of mankind toward a good and honest and livable, survivable world where people were decent to each other was a progress bar that was going forty-five degrees up the graph permanently when I was a young guy, and I realize now that that wasn’t quite right. It’s a little bit more a zig-zag, really, it goes up and it goes down, we shaft each other for a while and then we kind of go, “Oh, what were we doing? Sorry, even though you’re German I can embrace you, I don’t have to kill you,” and then we quickly mix it all up. We were just singing it the other day, “What we need is a great big melting pot big enough to take the world and what it’s got.” That’s kind of the essence of World Party, it’s trying to write songs that are catchy about things that move us all, that’s the idea.
MR: Personally, I think your “Ship Of Fools” carried a terrific message and was pretty spot on, Karl. Hey, what advice do you have for new artists?
KW: I think more and more it’s to do with the times that you’re in. We’ve got to make it better times for the artist to make their art in rather than to expect the artist in these times to come up with something that’s satisfying or connects with humanity. I think it’s very difficult. I think this is the time of Damien Hirst and a lot of spurious, well-marketed stuff that comes at us from every angle. I think it’s so intense and so much all the time that it’s very difficult for a good idea to get any legs. People say, “Well if it’s good it gets trajectory,” I don’t think so. If it’s good someone’s got to give it a chance. The Beatles had to be given a chance, and the chance had to be obtained by Brian Epstein. Just recently I realized how important it is to have a management situation that can translate the musician’s ideas into reality. Musicians are terribly impractical and haven’t really got a clue how to do anything other than play music, which is invisible. I don’t think they’re very good at saying, “We should start in New York and make our way across and hit the radio stations and do the whole thing,” you know what I mean? I think that today the people that are making those plans are making all kinds of spurious stuff that doesn’t have any resonance with me. It’s very rare that I’ll hear something and think “Oh, that’s very cool,” I do hear some things sometimes, but it’s been a very long time.
MR: As a result of all this, young or new artists have had to come up with their own machine, so to speak, where they’re reinventing the whole shebang.
KW: I think that’s just the way it’s got to go, it’s got to through periods, and that’s why there’s such a big gap between peaks in artistic endeavors. It’s only being fifty-seven that’s given me the idea of having a time line that I look back at and I think, “That was a good period, this is a good period, that was strange, nothing was happening there,” there’s normally something somewhere in each place that’s a good clue, something you can point at and say, “That was good,” but I think it’s very difficult for certain types of art to exist at certain times because the pressure’s too great in another direction. This isn’t the time for everybody, seemingly in Europe for instance, to be getting on. I think there are a lot of people in political parties who want to split the European experiment up, and it’s like that in music as well, there’s a lot of times when certain elements of music, certain types of music or sound or chords or the way people sing is in such a way that doesn’t connect with a lot of people. I think the reason we don’t have Top Of The Pops anymore is because there is no overriding sense that one particular band can be number one in the way it used to be number one. It used to be that love it or hate it, it was number one and sold bucketloads, but now nothing’s really selling bucketloads. Everyone’s in their own little world in computerland going wherever it is they go. There’s not really the consensus they had years ago with one media, radio and TV.
MR: Very smartly said. What’s going to be happening for Karl’s World Party in the near future?
KW: The album…that’s the main thing. I’m moving out of the studio that I’ve been in for twenty-five years and it’s so full of stuff that it’s a Herculean task just getting everything out of there. I just want to go somewhere else and do something different, recording-wise. I’d like to live in a house where the living room door was a studio door and behind the television was a load of mic inputs, have a studio within my house. I don’t see why there’s any reason to not do that now, I’ve been in a house and done a record and then I was in a studio that I made into a house-like place, and now I want to go back to a house and do records in a house again, live and work in the same place. That’s what I want to do. I want to make an album by the end of the year.
MR: Beautiful, but I imagine you’ll approach it the same way as the others, basically.
KW: Yeah, whatever thought process you had before, you’ve just got to go into it the way you do things. I just tend to get out of the way and let myself get on with it. I don’t think thinking about things is a great thing to do. I’ll make it in the same way as the last stuff, but I don’t think it will sound the same. I always think that.
MR: Karl, this has been awesome. Is there anything else we need to cover?
KW: Well, I think there should be world peace, everybody should get on with each other, and we should all wear our underpants on the outside so we can check if we changed them. That’s it, really.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne