The Greatness of Karl Wallinger

On the recent death of one of Wales's most accomplished and successful songwriters.

On the news of the death of Karl Wallinger, Richard Parfitt, novelist, musicologist, and ex-60ft Doll, tweeted that Wales had lost its greatest ever songwriter, and who am I to disagree?

I’d wanted to write something about Wallinger at the time (he died on March 10th 2024, at the age of just 66), but there was a lot going on, and Blue, Red and Grey didn’t exist at the time, but even though I intend this newsletter to be focussing on current moments with immediate (or semi-immediate) effect, Wallinger’s music has come back into my life with such a force since his death, it feels only right to bring him up here.

Indeed, Wallinger’s music (particularly through his band World Party) has come into my life in a way it never did when he was alive. His music is of a rare authenticity, and I think most likely the World Party album Goodbye Jumbo (1990) is a masterpiece of its type. Wallinger’s style, his voice, his song-building, could be roughly described as Warren Zevon channeling Mick Jagger, by way of George Harrison, a smidge of the other Beatles, and something of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. He gives us music that is complex and simple, that is reflective and melancholic and yet is also infused with the sheer joy of making music. In a difficult few months for me, I have found it life-affirming.

Listening to him has brought me to a new appreciation of the music he made with Mike Scott when he was keyboard player in The Waterboys, and now knowing that those defining instrumentations in the ether of “The Whole of the Moon” were Wallinger’s, I wonder how middling this great would have been otherwise. Wallinger was an accomplished musician, singer, and performer, but first and foremost, as this contribution proves, a composer.

He is forgiven for his role in giving the world a Robbie Williams hit single when Williams made a carbon copy of “She’s the One” in 1999 (Wallinger won an Ivor Novello award for it in 1997). Ex-World Party member and Robbie Williams oppo Guy Chambers lifted the song and brought it to Williams, only really supplanting Wallinger’s pained and grizzled vocal with his karaoke performance. Williams, for years, pretended he had written it. Wallinger, astutely, called the glorified cruise singer, “a cunt”. As biographies go, that’s a pretty astute one.

I was going to write a long piece, paying tribute to my favourite Wallinger songs, but instead here is a playlist that I think just about does him justice.

Wales’s greatest ever songwriter. Who I am to argue with that.

Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is available for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books.