World Party’s Karl Wallinger – HuffPost 5.30.14
Mike Ragogna: 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?
Karl Wallinger: 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.