Interview – Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments – Part 1
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse caught up with Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments about the release of the new album.

No More Workhorse: How have you been? How is everything?

Peter Milton Walsh: I’m in Oslo at the moment, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been to Scandinavia. I’ve been doing interviews along the way and went from Paris to Hamburg to Copenhagen to Oslo. It’s just been brilliant. The light here is incredible, and it’s perfect. I know it’s autumn now, but it’s perfect. It’s really exceptional, a magical time.  I really do love this season in Europe. I do love autumn. It’s fabulous.

The light is really important. When I lived in London, I found that as soon as the clocks changed at the end of October, I would start thinking, this is on now for six months. It was dark when you got up, and it was dark when you went home. It was just this thing always above you, a grey sky. Whereas New York winters, when I lived there, they can be hard. You feel like your eyelashes are going to drop off, and your ears and your nose. But there are still these really high, blue and white skies. There’s light, and it’s just different. I think if there’s some light around, it really does change things. Look, I’m the kind of guy that was made with about 2 cents worth of hope, so I’m not really meant for dark climates!

NMW: How have you been in the last five years or so?

PMW: I’ve been pretty much par for the course. The last record was released when COVID was still an epidemic. I couldn’t do any shows and couldn’t really promote it or anything like that. So it was a quiet time, but I just started writing songs, thinking, maybe one day another album might turn up. With the rain.  And eventually, it does happen. Look, I’m not a kid, so I don’t have a whole bunch of people saying to me, ‘you gotta get your TikTok followers up, we’ve got to do these territories, you’ve got to do 200 shows in the next 12 months! ’ So I’m very grateful and aware of the gift of being a ‘never-was’ kind of person because I get to just release stuff when I’m ready to release it and I’ve got good people that I work with at Talitres in France.  It’s a great label.

Peter MIlton Walsh (The Apartments) photographed in Finlays Avenue, Earlwood, NSW, on 16 April 2020 by Bleddyn Butcher

NMW: Did you approach this album differently from before?

PMW: No, it was like the last album in the sense that Tim Kevin, the guy with whom I work, has a studio and he’s 10 minutes away from where I live. He’s really busy because his studio is not an expensive studio. It’s really one room. But he’s got all this sort of old gear, 50s and 60s analogue gear, and he’s got an incredible ear for sound and detail and stuff like that. When I first met him, which was when I was preparing to do In and Out of the Light, I said to him, ‘the way I want to do this is, I’ll play you something, if you think there’s something there, then I’ll move on it. But I’m happy if you go, I’m not sure about that’. So this time we just did it the same way.

He’d turn up at my place, I’d sit at the piano or play the guitar, and I’d say, ’I do think this will be something’. And he’d go, ‘yeah, absolutely’. For A Handful of Tomorrow, I remember he came over that day and I started singing the opening line, “We made mistakes, who doesn’t, babe? I loved you while the music played”. And he goes, ‘Great start. ’ It’s just a good way of working for me because there’s no pressure. I’m not sure how I would ever handle pressure. There are lots of things I know that I’d never be able to handle. I couldn’t handle pressure, fame, all those things. None of them threatened me, by the way!

NMW: Do you think you write more from observation or experience?

PMW: I think they all speak to one another. Experiences that I’ve had, people that I’ve known, situations I’ve been in, and memory as well. I was thinking the album had to start with It’s A Casino Life.

Your head is crowded with people from the present and the past, and they swap places all the time. They’re with you. Even when they’re not with you, they’re with you. Once I’d written that song, I felt like there are people and situations that I want to hold onto and tell a story while I can, while I remember them. I was working with music and memory because every situation I’ve ever been in that counted, music was there; it was part of it. So many significant moments… a song can just summon up a world that’s gone, a place, a time, a person… so it was kind of like that.

I just thought I’ll see what happens, and I wasn’t that conscious of it. I only really recognised it when Tim said to me, ‘we’ve got eight songs now’, which to me is quite a magic number. Then I had to type out the lyrics because most of the time when I’m in the studio, I’m just writing stuff and throwing it down. It’s there in the moment that it’s happening. You might tell yourself you’re writing something, but something is actually writing you. I felt like that’s what was going on a lot of the time.

When I did No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, there was 20 years of not doing anything with a band. I used to work out songs and then show them to a band, rehearse with the band and then record and try and get it to sound like what I wanted to hear. But there have been times in the past, like Mr Somewhere on the Evening Visits, and the title track of No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal. I really had no idea where things were going, and it was just happening while I was doing it. Normally, you wouldn’t do that because studios are so expensive.

I watched bits of Get Back. I didn’t watch the whole thing because it’s eight hours. You see the band just working a song up from nothing, and the Beatles were in the studio while they were doing it. I think bands stopped doing that because studios became so expensive.

NMW: You’re happy with the album?

PMW: Yeah. When I was getting all the lyrics together and thinking of how to sequence the album, the dimensions of the songs… they aren’t revealed even to me immediately, but over time, they come to me.  As for how the songs get received and the place they find in people’s lives, that’s something over which I’ve never had any control. You put your record out in the world and you kiss it goodbye and you wish it well, but it could be completely ignored… It’s a casino life!

NMW: The song, The American Resistance seems like a bit of a departure for you.

PMW: It was a curveball for me also. I got invited to Mexico City to play two shows. I was going to do a show with a young Mexican jazz trombonist in his 20s, Kunt Vargas, an astonishing musician. I was going to do a set with him and then I was going to do a solo set. And I thought: the only way I can get to Mexico City is through the United States, so I might see if we can play there. Can I do a show in San Francisco on the way? I’d played a place in San Francisco, and Kate (Peter’s wife) got in touch with them and said, ‘Would you be interested in him doing a show? ’ They said, ‘Oh, definitely. ’ So we set the show up on the way to Mexico City. Then Mark Eitzel from American Music Club said he would open for me. Which is pretty huge because Mark Eitzel’s about a million times bigger than I will ever be. It was so beautiful of him to do that.

Just before I left Australia, I’d been reading Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin. That’s about the German resistance. It’s very poignant at the beginning because all these parents are concerned about their sons who’ve been conscripted to go to war, and will their sons live, or will they die. But everyone is saying, ‘France has fallen, the war will be over soon’. So these people are thinking, ‘Okay, my son will be home soon’. And, of course, we know what happens. These people lost their son. They were determined to resist in that complete climate of fear, to resist Hitler. They would just go around various apartment buildings in Berlin and put these little notes saying something negative about Hitler and about the war effort, and your son will be next.  It was such an extraordinary story. I’d never heard of the German resistance. I’d only ever heard of the French Resistance. Since then, I went to the Danish Resistance Museum, and I went to the Norwegian Resistance Museum. It was happening in lots of places, but the only resistance movement I’d ever heard of was the French Resistance.

Anyway, while I was in San Francisco, it was the fourth or fifth week of Trump. There was a demonstration outside Tesla’s offices because Elon Musk has been part of the whole Trump thing. I spoke to six or seven people on the Saturday night at my show, and they said, “I’m not going to just sit on my ass and moan. I was at the demonstration last night. I’m participating, I’m doing this, I’m doing that.” I thought, , this is great. I’ll never hear about this. I never knew there were these constant acts of resistance happening all over America because they just don’t get attention.

The thing that soaks up attention is grandstanding and attention seeking by Trump. But there’s this whole resistance movement, and I thought, this is great. America had fallen, so it was as literal as that. I was also thinking I’ve never written an ‘external’ song, mainly because I don’t have any talent for it. Possibly you will agree now that you’ve heard The American Resistance! I felt like it was really worth celebrating this thing that was going on. I tried to celebrate this, that in the midst of this terrifying darkness, all these people are sticking their necks out.

NMW: Any other song you’re particularly happy with?

PMW: I have a strong feeling about It’s A Casino Life because it was the entry point for what became the album.

NMW: The artwork features a photo of Venice is that right?

PMW: That’s right. About 2019, I came across this photographer, and I saw that shot. I’d already started on the artwork for In and Out of the Light, which I wanted to be different from the artwork for No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal. I wanted it to be more like a graphic design kind of thing. But I thought if ever I do another black and white cover, I would love this image. I got in touch with the photographer (Angela Favaro) and I said, ‘Would you ever consider letting me do that?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, absolutely. ’ So I had the cover long before I had the album.

The back cover is actually me in Mexico City, because they got me there to do the two shows. There was a show with Kunt (Vargas) on the big stage. Then they said, ‘We’ve got this room which holds about 100 people, but it’s got a Steinway grand in it, and maybe you would like to play in there for your solo set’.

Then they said, ‘Oh, actually, the solo thing is going to be bigger than we thought. We’re going to put the Steinway grand piano out on the balcony, and we will have everyone sitting down there at the bottom of the stairs for you to play to.’  And someone (Mara Arteaga) took a bunch of photos that night.

The Interview continues in Part 2. 

That’s What The Music Is For is available from https://theapartments.bandcamp.com/album/thats-what-the-music-is-for