A Touch of Cynicism Crashes Wallinger’s Party

In an age in which it seems that every pop star has a cause and a plan for changing the world with a benefit project, World Party’s singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger wonders if more good would be done with an anti-benefit.

“I’d like to do a benefit for the ivory traders because they’re going to need some money soon,” he said dryly, dragging on a cigarette in the restaurant of a Beverly Hills hotel recently. “I’d like to actually do the gig and send them a check for $500, which is a pathetic amount. ‘Here’s our check because we’re really worried about you. . . . ‘ “

The half-joking concept is tied in to the title of World Party’s latest album, “Goodbye Jumbo,” but Wallinger, a personable, 33-year-old Welshman, was trying to make the point that pop stars take themselves too seriously, and that a mocking effort for a politically incorrect cause might make an effective antidote.

“I’d rather do things like that than the big guilty awareness things people are getting into, this heavy guilt that completely pole-axes people and makes them unable to function,” he said. “I can be cynical and no one can tell me not to and I don’t feel guilty. Guilt’s crap.”

In some ways, this cynicism may trouble some of Wallinger’s most loyal fans. As a former member of the Waterboys, where he helped Mike Scott on his idealistic spiritual quest, and in his own two albums, where he has examined the role of the well-meaning individual in a messed-up world, Wallinger has built a reputation as a deep thinker, the kind some fans assume has answers to the Big Questions of life.

“You mean the nutters?” he said when asked about those fans. “When they get concentrated they come across as nutters. I’ve been pulled aside at gigs and told this, that and the other. And I say, ‘Hold on, I’m just trying to have a drink.’ There are people who feel you’re expressing something they’ve been thinking. But I don’t feel I’ve got any particular answers to anything. I’m just on a journey like everybody else.”

And Wallinger also knows that when the journey includes stops at such heavy show-biz functions as the recent MTV Awards, where World Party performed a song, some of those same idealistic fans are again troubled.

“People ask, ‘Why are you there?’ ” he said, noting that such heroes of his as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and even Bob Dylan made their share of television appearances.

“We’re there to reach a lot of people, which is a great thing. I don’t feel cynical and guilty about things like that. I’d feel guilty if it was like, ‘We’re gonna save the rain forest tonight with this one and blah blah blah.’ But we’ll live or die on whether we’re a good pop pop group or not, and not on what we think and that we’re caring people.”