Interview – Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments – Part 2
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse caught up with Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments about the release of the new album. You can read Part 1 of the Interview here. 

NMW: Are you planning to tour to promote the album?

PMW: Yeah, probably spring of 2026, I think.

NMW: How do you find performing these days?

PMW: I’m at ease with it. I’m a bit further along the road now, and the people that turn up… I don’t really have any sort of half-hearted fans! So the people that turn up are interested in the music. I did this show maybe 40 plus years ago, 82/ 83, when I was with The Laughing Clowns, Ed Kuepper’s quartet. We played with Sonic Youth in a loft in Berlin. I remember Thurston Moore saying, You’ve got beer countries and you’ve got wine countries. Sonic Youth tends to do well in the beer countries, Germany, the UK, and America. And he used the phrase wine countries. And I was thinking, what the fuck are wine countries? I didn’t know, and it’s Spain, France, Italy.  I remember thinking, I’d like to do something in a wine country because I came from a beer country.

The funny thing is that when I moved to New York, the New York I had in my head was the New York of 76/ 77 – Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, that kind of New York. New wave New York. But the New York in 1982 was absolutely in thrall to noise bands and was more like Hank Rollins and Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and Swans. It had completely changed. And for somebody like me who works on a level of intensity that’s not tied to volume and noise, it wasn’t going to work out for me to stay and try to do a softer sort of thing. I don’t think in 82/ 83 in New York, Sufjan Stevens or Bon Iver would have done anything either. There’s a time when certain things are very dominant and prevailing, and it’s hard to ride your way around it.

What I’m saying is that in Europe and the places I play, they tend to be more of a concert situation. You’re much more like Nina Simone than you are The Birthday Party. I would go to shows in London, and it didn’t matter how enormous the band was. There were always 400 people up the back at the bar, just chatting to one another while the band was playing. Now that doesn’t really happen so much in the places that I play in Europe. They’re kind of set up for listening. People are there because the songs have something that works and speaks to them.

NMW: You have reissued a few of the older albums in the last few years. How do you feel about them now?

PMW: I think most of them you can get now on vinyl. When I throw together a set, I have to include the past because I think Mick Jagger said, the 10 rules of rock and roll, and number 10 was, nobody’s interested in new material. Just play the hits! I get a chance to play the new material when I go out on tour, tied to the release of the album. Which was why it was a shame when In and Out of the Light was released, that I wasn’t able to tour it because it’s good to get it when it’s fresh for you, and it’s fresh for the audience as well.

But, yeah, I’ll end up doing something. I recognise that in some ways I may be making music for a world that no longer exists. For all I know, it could be for an audience that no longer exists, but I’d better not tell the record label that! Starting the album with It’s A Casino Life, I felt was a good thing to do. When I hear an album, the first thing you hear of a Bill Evans record or a Billie Holiday record or go and see a Jane Campion movie, you know the signature and you’ve entered a particular world. That’s why I put It’s A Casino Life at the front of the album, because there it is, there’s the signature. If you don’t like this, go away!

NMW: Have you any interest in collaborating with other artists?

PMW: I would, it just hasn’t ever really come up because there’s no person… career or whatever, that’s a comparison to mine. Most of my friends and people of my generation, like Robert Forster, Tracy Thorn, Ben Watt, Nick Cave, they essentially did the work when the work was around, and the people that come to see them now are cemented to them from 40 years ago. I wasn’t really paying that much attention 40 years ago, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention even in the 90s when I was releasing a few more albums in a row. Then, after my son died, I wasn’t paying any attention at all. I really felt like that whole thing of career is trivial by comparison.

Sometimes I think, do I remember even ever having a dream of wanting this to be anything better than it is? For all I know, I might have had a dream once, but after Riley died, it was a dream that never came back. So that’s… death. Death Would Be My Best Career Move! That’s obviously a joke, but part of it that’s true. I am a man with no illusions. I know I’m gonna die like Gaudí, I’ll probably get hit by a streetcar, and then nobody’s ever going to recognise me. It doesn’t matter, I’ve done what I wanted to do. I’ve not been this sort of public figure like my friends and contemporaries. One of them actually said to me one time, “We know about 2% of your story and we’re your friends! The public doesn’t know anything about you”. I have to agree.  The reason that I seem like a man of few words is that I have been a man of few words.

I’d love to come to Ireland. I’ll talk to Robert Forster. You know Lindy Morrison, that used to be the drummer in the Go Betweens? She’s great and she’s very funny and she will often say to me, “Peter, Peter, Peter, you never did your homework. The rest of us were slaving away, working, playing all the time, and doing 200 shows a year. You never did your homework”. I agree with her! Robert can go to Ireland because Robert did his homework, and I didn’t. If I go to Ireland, you’d better turn up because nobody else will!

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