SAMPLE: "Who Are You?" (live, posted 2015) - watch Karl & Co kick ass even after his aneurysm
ROB SEZ: There I was, poking around in my archives. I was on the hunt for World Party studio rarities to share with you, and I kept finding fabulous live versions of WP songs. "OK," I eventually told myself, "these will become another comp." I used my usual criteria to keep or discard tracks: "Does this get me going?
"Does it raise my temperature or at least pique my interest? Is it a well-performed, but rarely-played, song?" If the answer to at least 2 of these was Yes, it was a keeper. (A few of these were released as B-sides, but they're now out of print and unavailable via official channels. About half of these come from lossy sources like webstreams.) Karl posted several of the tracks online and made others available to fans as authorized bootlegs back in the 1990s via his own website. After I settled on these 13 tracks, then came the fun part: sequencing. I ordered them strictly by intuition and how they flowed when I listened back. This is probably version 14 or so.
01 You're a Hurricane, I'm a Caravan (demo, undated) - just Karl at the piano
02 Ship of Fools (demo, partial 1984) - first time Karl ever recorded the song
03 Holy Water (vinyl-only B side) - inexplicably left off any album or comp
04 The Little Man Within (demo 1985) - "Gets him mixed up with Him"
05 All the Young Dudes (edit)+ - a soundtrack cut worth keeping
06 Penny Lane* - how does one guy DO all this?
07 Martha My Dear* - simply great
08 These Are the Days - this is a "leftover"?? (Dumbing Up DVD audio)
09 Little Bit of Perfection (outtake - Dumbing Up) - on the original LP, then cut
10 Nowhere Man* - early recording & rather simple, but it does the job
11 All You Need Is Love* - ditto my comment for Track 06
12 The Long & Winding Road* - if 1980s-era Prince covered the Fabs?
13 A World Without Love - written by 16 year-old Paul McCartney
14 Your Freedom - Rainy Days (demo 1990s) - worthy of a good listen; wow
15 Sunset - a studio jam, with guitars turned up to 11
All songs by Karl Wallinger, except: +David Bowie (by way of Mott the Hoople), *Lennon-McCartney
ROB SEZ: The sprawling 5-CD Arkeology is a great thing, and every self-respecting World Party fan needs to have it, at least digitally. That said, I was uncomfortably aware that it left out a lot of strong material. So I did what I typically do: I hauled out my archive and looked for Karl's gems that didn't make it to the box set or the streaming services of Apple Music, Spotify, etc. So what you have here is about a disc's worth of RARE FINDS — and not the throwaway kind. Half are sourced from my own CD singles and vinyl, and the others are lossless captures of lossy webstreams of one sort or another. I doubt that even the most fervent fan has heard ALL of these. Track 14, for instance, is something I found recently when I was on my treasure hunt. A quick sidetrack: did Karl have a serious Beatles fetish or what? Answer: obviously! Yet I challenge you to name another artist who consistently pulled off Lennon-McCartney cover versions of such high quality and right feel — even when he radically revamped the music, as he did on track 12. There's plenty more out there that didn't make it into Arkeology. But I am convinced this is the rarest and best of the lot.
