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Few things in my musical history have generated more excitement than the return of World Party. Karl Wallinger was, and still is, World Party. Twenty years ago it was rumored that he was a young genius who lived in the studio. He sang every part, played every instrument, wrote and recorded all of the soulful pop songs with melodies so easy to embrace you’d swear they were plucked from the well of our collective unconscious. So where has he been for so many years? Cloaked in self-exile in a dark tower someplace, looking very much like Brandon Lee’s The Crow, as he did on the cover of his last album, Egyptology? Nothing so exotic as that.

A series of life shattering events kept Wallinger out of the spotlight for the past five years. He left EMI on troubled terms in 1999, his manager, Steve Fargnoli died, and he had an aneurism in 2001 that left him speechless and unable to walk for a time. But now he is back and World Party has been touring the U.S., including performances at SXSW and Bonnaroo. Since March, the three-piece acoustic band has hit the road in support of the re-release of their first four albums and the U.S. debut of Dumbing Up. The remainder of the tour that just got underway this week though will be with a full band and there are even plans for a new album in May of 2007.

Wallinger spoke to Glide’s Lauree Guyer from his studio in London on the hottest July day since record keeping began. They discussed the band’s triumphant return, technology, and influences that are shaping the music industry today.

Several times over the past few years I google’d your name and never came up with anything that indicated you had any health problems.

I didn’t exactly make a news broadcast out of it. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but it went on for a long time. It’s been a bit of a shock. I’m still not quite all the way back, but whatever’s wrong with me now won’t change. I’ve just got an eyesight thing going on. I’ve got left hand stereo vision and center vision, but no right hand vision in either eye. You can’t do an impersonation of it if you haven’t got it. People put their hand over one eye and I say, “no, no I’ve got half an eye in both eyes.”

It’s been a bit strange learning to play everything again, [but] I’m pretty much back to speed. I’ve been playing the piano again for a few minutes every day, just gradually getting back to speed. It means while I’m playing guitar I can’t actually see the machine heads so I don’t know how far my hand is up the neck of the guitar. So I’ve had some interesting chords come out in the middle of songs. I’m definitely coming through that period now. It’s really good to be back.

When I saw your show in Minneapolis, it was obvious your voice hasn’t suffered. I always liked your voice, but it ironically seems to have improved.

Matured, [chuckles] like a fine wine. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I don’t give a shit really about what I’m doing, so I don’t actually get nervous. I go and just do it and enjoy it. I think that helps. But also, the way we’re doing it with a three-piece and no drums is a lot easier to sing because it’s more centered on the singing. With the band there’s not quite so much focus on just the vocal. This way of doing it was really great for that. I’m trying to take that and extrapolate into the live thing with the full band.

We’ve been coming back really, much more consistently than we’ve ever done. We normally just used to appear for two weeks, do a quick tour, and then bugger off for three years. Not a very good plan if you’re planning on getting near the charts or world domination. It’s been great. It’s been really great to play and great to be out there doing it. I’ve had a real good time.

I think of you as an artist who writes songs that take the larger view, the planet rather than the neighborhood, the human race over one man. And you include other important subjects like spirituality and human sexuality that rarely make an appearance in pop music. It almost seems like there is a taboo against certain subjects that very few other artists break.

Anything that makes any sense seems to be taboo at the moment. People just don’t sing about reality. Music, I always thought, was meant to be something that enabled you to have thoughts and ideas. Music can ring true and point out something in an emotional way and an intelligent way -and it can do that. It’s just that’s not what’s selling at the moment and it’s a shame.

The thing is, there was a politician over here six months ago. He was a mild, right-wing politician called Michael Portillo, who I’m not a fan of at all in any way. He said something really interesting on a talk show that was just in passing and I thought it really defined what’s going on. It was just a lucky fluke as far as he’s concerned because he’s not exactly a visionary. But he said that the government’s basically trying to decide whether to make it easier for people to get a new car or whether to concentrate on solving the problems of the planet. I thought that was pretty much a sort of summing up.

I think what’s happening in the broader sense is that the music that we find around us at the moment is in the new car camp. That no one’s concentrating that much on the other side of things because it’s just not the way ahead. So having superficiality is a good thing as long as you have the right look. It’s a very superficial time. And it’s just quite incredible.

I just think what they want to give at the moment is struggling against the tide. We should be trying to concentrate on how we can source our energy requirements from other places rather than nuclear, oil or coal. Or trying to make planes fly on non-emitting fuels. It’s just an unbelievable time.

And I’m sitting here on the hottest day since records began and my osteopath doesn’t think it’s got anything to do with global warming. And I’m like “well, what are the facts? I don’t know, but its just fucking hot!” There’s got to be something going on that’s wrong, surely. We’re not thinking right about the world. And it’s all in the name of freedom and economy and democracy, but it’s bullshit.

Do you think that the music industry is changing, in that it’s fragmenting?

Oh yeah, its been fragmenting since the technology came along enabling people to just do their thing in their bedroom and put it on their myspace site and disseminate it that way.

"Top of the Pops," the chart show over here, is stopped now. We don’t have a chart show on BBC anymore, there’s no cohesive chart thing going on now.

I don’t think of it as a bad thing, although I do see that there is a chasm between people now and the music they might enjoy.

I think of it as a bad thing. I think it’s specialized marketing brought about by these people with marketing degrees who could be selling anything from coat hangers to fried eggs. It doesn’t matter to them. They’ve got these theories about how to get a product exposure and profile in the marketplace and they follow that. That’s what they’ve been taught at university.

And music’s nothing like that. It’s just not a thing that should be treated like that. And there should be people in the music business who are into music and that’s why we’re getting the bullshit that we’ve got at the moment that’s meant to be music. I’m not a big fan of many things.

No one’s there like a lone maverick saying this record is good to go and it comes through and we all love it. It’s like a consensual way of marketing, arranging for bands to be made popular these days. And woe be tied to you if you don’t hit within one or two records, you’re out the window.

If you’re nobody and you put something on the internet, you’re not going to get anywhere with it. You’re going to need some more promotional tools. You’re going to need to get on the radio and get in people’s faces live. There’s still part of the old school there. There is a new world, but I don’t know how it suits the powers that be because it means that everyone can get their rocks off and get their music out and who really cares if they’ve sold a million or not? Whereas, I prefer a world that’s got more of a varied mass culture rather than specialized, individual cultures where people are sort of in there to become as free to do whatever they want. But, then I don’t find that there is any freedom there. There’s just the opportunity to be ignored, [laughs] in your own way. [laughs]

There's been some kind of success which was meant to have been on the internet only. We had a number one single over here that was only downloads. I think that was the Gnarls Barkley one actually. And the Arctic Monkeys initial impulse was, “hey there's this band who have this download success. People have their own audience that's been able to support them at number one in the singles chart.” So there've been some good things that have been happening with it.

It’s like the technology thing. It’s meant to help but it actually puts you in chains. My hard drive on my power book went down the other day and my life stopped. My life, the way I live it now, just stopped. I didn’t communicate with anyone, I didn’t know what anyone was saying to me by email. “Wow, I can’t believe how dependent I am on this stupid silver box.” That was a bit of an eye opener.

It’s happened a couple of times. I mean, I did all my albums here on analog stuff up until Bang I suppose, and Egyptology was part analog and part digital. Turning off the computer one time because it had crashed or was being upgraded, I went back to analog and there was no screen. I was listening to tape through the speakers and I was actually feeling very strange, I kept thinking, “what am I looking at? Where’s the visual interface?” And I didn’t need one. People had been making records for years with just listening to sound. Now it’s so important to see the screen and see the timeline moving along. All these other things have been brought in. They sold it as a thing that will save you time, but I’ve never spent so much time dickin’ around with boxes as I have since I got the computers. It’s a real bunch of bullshit.

They took something that didn’t need any upgrading technologically - the analog tape machine for instance - and all it can’t do is replicate within a single track. If you’ve got a 24-track tape it was quite difficult to replicate that line or that bit of drums or whatever over and over again. Whereas with the computer you can just copy and paste it. That ability alone is one of the things that’s overridden the analog tape machine and the way people work today. And also, if you’re using the tape machine you have to be a musician to really play the stuff onto the tape and there’s a lot of people making music who just don’t have a clue about music. They just have a clue about sound and about how they can arrange the sounds using the technology.

That’s why some records sound strange to me, but they’re still hits, because no one else knows about music. They just hear the record and the vibe and stuff and they like it. It’s really changing music completely. The technology has changed music completely. It’s changed everything. It’s changed traffic lights systems. What are we talking about? [laughs]

Technology. I was disappointed with satellite radio because I thought I could actually get stations around the world. But, it’s not like that at all. There are marketing people coming up with these playlists.

So the playlists are just there and you’ve got this kind of music, and I hate that. I love variation. I’d love a station that plays Nat King Cole next to Led Zeppelin, next to George Formby, next to Frank Sinatra, next to Run DMC. That would be great. The trouble with genre stations is you listen to one or two good tracks in that genre and then you listen to twenty-three complete piles of crap. I haven’t got time to listen to all that garbage. I just want one station that plays the best of everything. I’d listen to that non-stop.

It’s interesting. It’s just this strange thing we’re being sold. Everything’s an innovation, but so far it’s been a little bit of crap, hasn’t it? I mean you can play some amazing game on a computer but that’s just a way of wasting time.

Really, I was probably being more productive using analog than I’ve ever been using digital. Actual music, you see there’s more music that you do when you’re using analog and no computers. And when you’re using computers, you do more computing than you do music. You have to set things up, do the thing, make sure you got the thing, and upgrade the thing. Whereas with analog you’ve just got a guitar, press record, and start playing. It’s a different thing altogether. Anyway, there you go, no one’s using analog these days.

So while Wallinger is quick to point out the caveats associated with technology, he does make smart use of it in promoting World Party with a fully-belled and whistled website, myspace site, and an exclusive site that offers access to B-sides and alternate versions through a link on the re-released CDs. And although it may seem at odds with being a serious musician, he has made a foray into comedy through a forum he created called Seaview TV. Seaview spoofs are making their appearance on the DVD and the panels of the booklet that come with Dumbing Up, as well as on a dedicated website.

When I asked him about his interest in comedy, Wallinger said it was attractive, subversive, and a way to tell the truth--another way to communicate with people in a way that will make them listen. And that statement seems right in line with the carrying on of Wallinger’s vision of a World Party.