FEATURE:
Second Spin
World Party – Goodbye Jumbo
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A terrific album…
IN THIS PHOTO: World Party’s Karl Wallinger in 1990/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre
that might not be that well known or played widely, I wanted to spend some time with World Party’s Goodbye Jumbo. The second studio by the group led by the extraordinary Karl Wallinger, the amazing and legendary artist recently turned sixty-five. One of those artists and songwriters who has written so many great tracks but many people may not know, Goodbye Jumbo is an album that you need to seek out. Having written wonderful songs like She’s the One (which was covered by Robbie Williams), his music with World Party is incredible. The fifth and final album from World Party, Dumbing Up, was released in 2000. Although it only got to thirty-six in the U.K. album chart, Goodbye Jumbo received positive reviews and is an album that stands up today. It is well worth some time and exploration. I am going to get to a couple of reviews for an amazing album. First, Back Seat Mafia discussed why Goodbye Jumbo should not be forgotten:
“A lot more people should really know who Karl Wallinger is. He left The Waterboys at exactly the right time and set up his own musical project under the catchy name World Party. He immersed himself in 60s influences a good five years before it became fashionable, releasing albums like 1990’s Goodbye Jumbo, but by the time retro pop was in vogue, he was nowhere to be found. He’d arrived at the party early, sat alone for a few years, popped out for a breath of air and by the time he had got back lesser talents had drunk the free bar dry. Damn.
Goodbye Jumbo is arguably World Party’s finest album and is so chocked full of great pop moments that it can get a little overwhelming, and it’s almost impossible to take it all in. Infact there’s so much good stuff here that here and there the songs can blur into each other, which is a real shame, because taken individually, each track has the potential to be a thing of wonder. As it is Goodbye Jumbo suffers from a running order which puts great material next to other great tunes which are just a little bit too similar. The songs that leap out are those with up-tempo melodies (“Put The Message In The Box”, “Show Me To The Top”), but the heartbreaking centrepiece of Goodbye Jumbo and the highpoint of World Party’s output is the emotionally fragile “And I Fell Back Alone”.
If you heard each of the songs on Goodbye Jumbo in isolation, each one could be considered a classic in their own right, but there’s something about the combination of these dozen songs, the sequence that they are presented in, and the fact that every now and then Wallinger could slip into a sort of nice, but not particularly creative, holding pattern, which means that Goodbye Jumbo will always fall short of its true potential for me.
Does this mean that Goodbye Jumbo should sit gathering dust, forgotten at the back of music collections? Not at all. For all its flaws, it still an album of intelligent, sophisticated guitar pop, and perhaps the best album-length distillation of what Wallinger’s World Party was all about, with its empathetic, informed world view and oblique references to eco concerns and all without getting preachy or talking down to its audience. Wallinger seemingly credited his audience with a certain level of intelligence, taste and self awareness, which is something that the behemoths of 90s guitar pop simply forgot to do. Looking back, the British music scene of the mid-90s missed Karl Wallinger and World Party far more than anyone realised at the time”.
Displaying such a range of moods and sounds, there is such a spectrum and prism that runs through Goodbye Jumbo. That is what makes it such an interesting listen. You can put it on once and be amazed by the Wallinger and his band. You will come back time and time again and find plenty of reward and pleasures that might have passed you by the first time. It is a shame that more has not been written about the magnificent Goodbye Jumbo. This is what Entertainment Weekly said about this gem released on 24th April, 1990:
“If I call Goodbye Jumbo inconsequential, I’d like to think that Karl Wallinger — the sole power behind this and the previous World Party album — would be pleased, even charmed. ”I was just writing songs,” he has said. He put the album together with ”no marketing ethic at all.”
So, despite an undertone of social concern — the album’s title refers to the threatened extinction of elephants — Wallinger’s music sounds like his hobby, not his compulsion or even his career. But that also could be why it’s so airy and delightful. You never know what to expect. A song like ”God on My Side” (a gentle attack on religious fundamentalists) reflects in nearly every note Wallinger’s obsession with the Beatles; it sounds as if he’d been listening to the White Album a lot, mixing it with occasional doses of John Lennon’s ”Imagine.”
Then the next song, ”Show Me to the Top,” introduces a wail midway between a train whistle and a convention of ethnic flutes, repeating peacefully over an easy beat. The glowing sound of ”Love Street” makes you feel that we’re all babies and that the world has become a giant cradle; ”And I Fell Back Alone” is an achingly private song about the end of a love affair.
There are albums that add up to more — or less — than the sum of their parts. Goodbye Jumbo adds up to precisely the sum of its parts, nothing more, but also nothing less. Considering how fine those parts are, that’s enough”.
I want to wrap things up by sourcing Rolling Stone’s 1990 review. They discuss how the music has this immediacy and urgency. Goodbye Jumbo is an album that demands to be heard and, although nothing quite like it existed in 1990, it was very much an album for the times. I heard it for the first time a few years ago, but it (an album) that I really love and have got so much from:
“The second World Party album from Karl Wallinger begins with the apocalyptic urgency of "Is It Too Late" and progresses through the guarded optimism of "Love Street," "Sweet Soul Dream" and "Thank You World." As it moves from fevered desperation to a romantic, almost dreamy utopianism, Goodbye Jumbo displays an ambition as broad as the emotional range of its music.
Formerly the Waterboys' keyboardist, Wallinger wears his influences on his sleeve. It's unavoidably easy to hear his borrowings from Dylan, Lennon, Prince, Sly, the Stones. To dismiss the album as pastiche, however, is to miss the conviction that makes Goodbye Jumbo so audaciously cohesive, so compelling.
With its one-two punch of "Is It Too Late" and "Way Down Now," the album opens with the most bracing anthems for the millennium this side of Midnight Oil. World Party can't sustain such intensity (what party could?), but Wallinger's multi-instrumental textures suggest the freshness of first-take inspiration, and his reedy vocals bristle with immediacy. While Private Revolution, World Party's 1986 debut, was pretty much a one-man show, this album features the support of a three-man band – including key contributions from guitarist Jeff Trott – and guest spots by Sinéad O'Connor and Waterboys violinist Steve Wickham.
Wallinger's missionary zeal occasionally belabors his messages, but the music throughout is sufficiently vital to overpower resistance. If the first World Party album represented a big step, the followup finds Wallinger making far greater strides. Confronting the challenge that has faced everyone from U2 and R.E.M. to Terence Trent D'Arby and Lenny Kravitz, Wallinger attempts to reclaim the glories to which rock once aspired, while avoiding mere imitation. For all of the timeless influences it incorporates, Goodbye Jumbo demands to be heard as an album for these times. (RS 579)”.
An album I would thoroughly recommend to anyone, World Party’s Goodbye Jumbo was praised by many in 1990. Some sources and sites consider it to be among the finest albums of the ‘90s. I am not sure how many people know about it today. A stunning album led by Karl Wallinger, World Party’s remarkable and hugely impressive second studio album is one that you need…
TO hear today.