SMALL WOUNDS IN CLOSE-UP: THE CINEMA VERITE OF THE APARTMENTS part 1
- Bernard Zuel
- 15 hours ago
- 7 min read
WITTY AND WELL READ, a connoisseur of film alongside literature and song, a man of carefully dapper fashion and yet another rebuttal to the reputation of Queenslanders, Peter Milton Walsh laughs often and laughs easily.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is not in most cases a noteworthy sentence. However, Walsh is perceived rather differently. Put it down to the slow, measured pace of most of his songs released as The Apartments, or his lugubrious vocals and set-as-solemn face, or subject matter that is often immersed in sadness, sometimes bone-deep sadness, or the way the French, who know and love tristesse in their music, love and have sustained The Apartments. Or really, all of the above, in varying degrees at different times.
But however you land, Walsh must surely be the male equivalent of, to borrow from Billy Bragg, a little black cloud in a skirt. Yet here he is opening a conversation poised to look at his new album, That’s What The Music Is For, already laughing, explaining that “I would have taken this on Zoom but I like to pace around when I am on the phone so I’m an unnatural candidate for the Zoom”. Been there before then sir?
“I used to always work in the dining room, so while I was working on No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal the kids were constantly coming out going, there’s nothing to eat. Opening the fridge, you know the routine,” he says, still chuckling. “So now I have a room down the back of the house where I don’t have to disturb anyone, just walk up and down with a riding crop like Billy Wilder.”
Setting aside the context of No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, his brilliant and utterly devastating 2015 album written around the grief of losing a child almost 20 years earlier, let’s focus for now on that Wilder line. Is this a throwaway mention of the great German-born film director, a man equally adept at noir as comedy, and not coincidentally, the director of the 1960 romantic farce, The Apartment? Yes, but no.
“It’s one of the things that [novelist and screenwriter Raymond] Chandler objected to when they worked together on Double Indemnity,” explains our in-house cineaste. “For a start he was shocked that Billy Wilder was just constantly lining up dates with women who were working at Paramount, but also that Billy Wilder, while he and Chandler were working on the script, would pace up and down with a riding crop.”
So is this how Walsh rehearses The Apartments in their Australian and French incarnations? Riding crop and maybe even jodhpurs?
“Yes, discipline!,” he guffaws. “Somebody recently asked me about Cherry Red, a publishing company that had the label run by a guy called Michael Alway, who had a label called EL Records. Mike was a very maverick, eccentric, energetic Englishman and the first time I met him, he was interested in doing something with The Apartments – we wouldn’t have fitted in at all on his label – he turned up to the meeting wearing jodhpurs, riding boots, he had a crop, looking like something out of a ‘40s movie. It was that wild English eccentricity. Or maybe he’d come off the set of The Avengers. It was that kind of vibe.”
Even if musically he wouldn’t have been right for that label, surely Walsh was tempted by that appearance.
“Oh yeah. With labels, the madder they are, often, the more interesting they are. So many others are run by accountants.”
How would he explain The Apartments to an accountant, the type who probably would miss the wry line tucked away on the new The Apartments album, “death would be my best career move”?
“Somebody I had a meeting with, it may been in the ‘90s, said something about Jeff Buckley and how he hadn’t done well, and somebody chimed in and said come on, he sold 60,000 albums in France. The one who was an accountant said, well, that’s a cult, that’s not a career,” Walsh chuckles. “So, yeah, I’m inexplicable to an accountant.”
Inexplicably, Walsh and The Apartments are a cult that has lasted beyond 40 years. Not financially spectacular years, not the kind of years to get you duets with Kate Ceberano and invitations from the dull folk at ARIA, or for that matter a bridge named after you in your hometown of Brisbane, as happened to his close friends and (briefly) former bandmates The Go-Betweens. But a body of work and a reputation among those who have noticed for being that almost cursed phrase, a songwriter’s songwriter.
Not that Walsh, who has for some time lived in Sydney, wants too much of that smoke blown up his Queensland arse. At least, not without some ego-levelling context.
“Last November when I was passing through London, I caught up with Geoff Travis who used to run Rough Trade, and I just wanted to see him and thank him for changing my life,” he says. “[In 1985] I had The Apartments, I had done a year with Ed [Kuepper, yet another Brisbane alumni] in Laughing Clowns, which was great, and I had a single, All You Wanted, and a bunch of demos. Geoff got in touch and said he wanted to put the single out on Rough Trade. I sent him the demos, he signed me, and I remember people asking me over the years, ‘when you did the demos did you send them off to all the record labels that you loved?’ [He laughs]. It was a miracle, the most benign miracle. I was alert to what a wild piece of luck it was.”
Being grateful for things is one of the through lines of That’s What The Music Is For, principally looking back at people who have had an impact on Walsh. It’s not just a man of a certain age reflecting on friends now gone, but some self-reflection on why they mattered. As he has said “I have a mind that inclines steeply towards hopelessness so I’ve always been drawn to people who are the opposite. I looked for the sun in others, with a different kind of energy, who were full of light and hope. The ones who think—If winter comes, can spring be far behind? I understood the gift I’d been given as people like this had moved in and out of my life.”
Saviours? Maybe. Foundational, certainly.
“One time I was out with [Everything But The Girl’s] Tracey Thorn – a long time ago but I haven’t forgotten it – and she said something along the lines of ‘I just feel like we only know two per cent of your story, and we are your friends’,” says Walsh, adding mischievously “admittedly vodka was involved.
“Friends have said to me you should write a memoir, but the subject of myself, that’s not of great interest or importance to me. But some of the people who have been part of my life, they are: I liked the fact that they wouldn’t leave me alone. I also really felt like I should write about them now while I can, before I’m gone too, or before I forget them.”
He insists he is “not fixated on the past”, but then again that’s because “I don’t really feel like the past is not part of the present”.
“I don’t think things run on a line. I don’t think there is beginning, middle, end: for me it’s a kaleidoscope and everything informs one another,” Walsh says. “It’s true that I was tossing a whole bunch of things out when this happened, with photographs and notebooks your past will raise up from these things in front of you and you are back in that world. But I don’t sit down and think I want to write about [something specific], I’m kind of discovering what it is that matters to me by writing. By doing it, by sitting down and doing it.”
Back to Tracey Thorn saying how little his friends know of him. Without suggesting this is what Walsh was doing, it is an easy cliché for an artist to say look on my words – all my works – and you will know me, you will understand me. But the problem with songwriters is they refuse to keep their songs simply to one point of inspiration, one character, one perspective. These bastards just don’t make life easy for listeners or critics.
But can we listen to That’s What The Music Is For and say to ourselves, I know Peter Milton Walsh better?
“Oh, oh,” he says, stumbling in. “I, well, I … I think so. What I care about is in there, so in that way I am an open book [he laughs]. But I also feel that some people find the thing that draws them into the song is the texture of lived experience that’s in the song, but in so many ways the life story that’s crucial to the song is the listener’s, rather than mine.
“[Ernst] Lubitsch, who was Billy Wilder’s idol – he had this ‘what would Lubitsch do?’ sign up in his office – used to say, let the audience add up two plus two and they will love you forever. The songs are like life itself, like ourselves: we are all mosaics, part of the present and the past and things appear, disappear, reappear in endless cycles.”
TOMORROW: In part two of this interview Peter Milton Walsh delves into music in isolation, loss as inspiration and Frank Sinatra’s desolation as we understand more about the forces behind the new album, That’s What The Music Is For. “I don’t get sad listening to music; I get sad by other things and other situations, but not listening to music. There is something else going on.”
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That’s What The Music Is For is released on October 17.
The Apartments will play
Low 302, in Sydney, on October 17
The Junk Bar, Brisbane, October 25
George Lane, Melbourne, November 15
and tour Europe in March/April 2026.