World Party were a British musical group, which was essentially the solo project of its sole member, Karl Wallinger. He started the band in 1986 in London after leaving the Waterboys. Career After a stint as musical director of a West End performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Karl Wallinger joined a funk band called "The Out", before joining Mike Scott's Waterboys in 1984 to record the album A Pagan Place. After their third album in 1985, This Is the Sea, Wallinger departed to form World Party. Recorded at Wallinger's home in 1986, his debut album Private Revolution yielded two minor hits in the UK, "Private Revolution" and "Ship of Fools". "Ship of Fools", however, did much better outside the UK – it reached No. 4 in Australia, No. 21 in New Zealand, and No. 27 in the US, in the process becoming the act's only major international hit. Between World Party's first and second albums, Wallinger aided Sinéad O'Connor in recording her 1988 debut, The Lion and the Cobra. O'Connor, then an unknown, had appeared as a guest on World Party's first album. She would go on to appear as a guest on the second LP as well. Goodbye Jumbo, World Party's second album, contained the minor UK hit singles "Way Down Now" and "Put the Message in the Box". Wallinger collaborated with fellow songwriter Guy Chambers on some of the tracks. Goodbye Jumbo was voted "album of the year" by Q magazine and was nominated for a Grammy Award for "best alternative music performance" in the US. After the 1991 EP Thank You World, Wallinger recruited guitarist David Catlin-Birch and ex-Icicle Works drummer Chris Sharrock as fully-fledged members for 1993's album Bang!. It reached No. 2 on the UK Albums Chart, with the track, "Is It Like Today?" (No. 19 on the UK Singles Chart) also becoming a moderately successful single in Europe. Following the success of Bang!, World Party appeared at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994, at which they had previously played in 1987 and 1990. In 1994, World Party recorded "When You Come Back to Me" for the Reality Bites soundtrack, influenced by David Bowie's 1975 song "Young Americans". Catlin-Birch left shortly afterwards. Their fourth album, Egyptology (1997), written following the death of Wallinger's mother, was commercially unsuccessful, although "She's the One" won an Ivor Novello Award and was subsequently recorded by Robbie Williams. Sharrock