Karl Wallinger, who has died aged 66, was a multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter who became successful in the 1980s and 90s on both sides of the Atlantic with World Party, a band that consisted of “me and whoever is playing with me at any given time”.
Often working alone in the studio, Wallinger recorded and produced the bulk of his albums by himself, playing an array of instruments that included keyboards, guitar and bass, while defying the musical fashions of the time with songs that matched thoughtful, contemporary and witty lyrics with unashamed musical references to the Beatles and a number of his other 60s and 70s heroes. A cover version of Wallinger’s song She’s the One was released by Robbie Williams in 1999 and became a No 1 hit single in the UK.
A classical musician as a child, Wallinger had switched direction after deciding “I don’t want to teach oboe, I don’t want to form my own wind quartet – I want to rock!” His first success came when he joined Mike Scott’s folk-rock band the Waterboys in 1983. Intrigued by hearing Scott talk about Patti Smith, Van Morrison and Lou Reed, he answered an advert in which Scott had said he was looking for a guitarist – and persuaded him that he needed a keyboard player instead.
Over the next two years Wallinger helped to shape the band’s rock-orientated “big music” phase, playing on their second and third albums, A Pagan Place (1984) and This Is the Sea (1985). The latter included the Waterboys’ best-known song, The Whole of the Moon, which was written by Scott. It reached No 26 in the UK singles chart in 1985 and then No 3 when it was re-released in 1991.
During the Waterboys’ rise to fame, Wallinger had also been writing his own songs, which he recorded in his London flat. Deciding to concentrate on his own music, he quit the band in 1985 and moved to Woburn in the Bedfordshire countryside to record in a home studio.
Now working as World Party, he released his first album, Private Revolution, in 1987. It included the angry, apocalyptic rocker Ship of Fools, which was a minor hit in Britain and became popular on American radio.
After moving to a 32-track London studio known as Seaview Cottage, he recorded his second World Party album, the Grammy-nominated Goodbye Jumbo (1990), which matched rousing rock ballads with environmental concerns. On the cover he was dressed in giant elephant ears and a gas mask, an image explained by Is It Too Late, in which he dreams of an elephant graveyard in an African plain “wondering why there was no more rain”.
There was a further mix of rousing rock melody and thoughtful lyrics (“the world says … give a little bit of your love to me”) on the 1990 single Put the Message in the Box. Again, Wallinger played almost all the instruments himself, though with other musicians adding occasional percussion or slide guitar and Sinéad O’Connor singing backing vocals on Sweet Soul Dream. Wallinger had played on her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, three years earlier.
For Bang! (1993) World Party became a three-person group, with Wallinger joined by David Catlin-Birch on guitar and Chris Sharrock on drums. This proved to be the band’s best-selling album in the UK, reaching No 2 in the album charts, while the single Is It Like Today? was a Top 40 hit in the US, where the band toured, supporting 10,000 Maniacs. The follow-up, Egyptology (1997), was less successful, despite including Wallinger’s original version of She’s the One, while a fifth album, Dumbing Up (2000) failed to reach the UK’s Top 50.
With World Party’s fortunes apparently on the wane, Wallinger was faced with a more serious setback. In 2001 he suffered from a brain aneurism, from which it took five years to recover. This could have presented serious financial problems for him and his family, but he was saved by Williams’ hit recording of She’s the One.
By 2006 Wallinger was ready to re-start his musical career, but it would be another six years before he gave his first major British concert, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. That gig coincided with the release of Arkeology, a five-CD compilation that included rarities and covers of Beatles songs.
Born in Prestatyn in north Wales, Wallinger was one of the six children of Julian, an architect, and his wife, Phyllis (nee Owens). Obsessed with music – especially the Beatles – from a young age, he tried to vocally recreate all the sounds he heard on the album Sergeant Pepper. He started piano lessons at the age of nine and the following year began studying the oboe.
His skill won him a music scholarship to Charterhouse school in Surrey, after which he worked in music publishing and then was briefly the musical director of the Rocky Horror Show. Later he played with a series of bands before joining the Waterboys after meeting Scott, who described him as “one of the finest musicians I have ever known”.
He is survived by his wife, Suzie Zamit, their son, Louis, daughter, Nancy, and two grandchildren.
• Karl Edmund De Vere Wallinger, musician and songwriter, born 19 October 1957; died 10 March 2024
