Apartments - The Melody of a Farewell

Walsh Is the Night

(Grant McLennan)

We Are the Day

(Robert Forster)

In 1979, the Go-Betweens took on a new member: Peter Walsh, whose band, the Apartments, had just released their first single on the Go-Betweens' own Able Records. It didn't work out, but had it not been for that, we might never have gotten the Apartments at all (or maybe the Go-Betweens would have made one more masterpiece – who knows). Walsh was already a legend on the Brisbane scene, his reputation built partly on his impeccable look, back when he was still drifting through the post-punk movement. After a stint in New York, it wasn't until 1984 that he returned to Australia to reform the Apartments, going on to record The Evening Visits… And Stays For Years in London the following year. Even the title gives a vivid impression of the crepuscular imprint that would always define the Apartments' music.

Essential listening for any Go-Betweens fan, the record opens with the supremely elegant "Sunset Hotel", an ethereal elegy of choral voices and acoustic guitar recalling Shelleyan Orphan, before plunging into the turbulent waters of a "rainy ocean" on "All The Birthdays" – with a defenseless, desperate edge that McCulloch's songs never had. Naturally, there are plenty of tracks here that hold their own effortlessly against the best of the Go-Betweens' catalogue, sometimes with a singer-songwriter slant that makes "The Evening Visits" less pop than "16 Lovers Lane" ("Mr. Somewhere").

You have to wait for the singles added to the 2015 reissue ("Help", "Nobody Like You", "Refugee", etc.) to catch the more purely indie-pop side of Walsh, who in the second half of the album instead turns to moodier numbers, vaguely Morrissey-esque and tinged with blues, which perhaps fall a little short in execution ("Speechless With Tuesday", "Lazarus, Lazarus", the evocative, Cave-like "The Black Road Shines (On Rainy Nights)").

All told, this debut sits most comfortably in the "collector's gem" category, and it's no surprise that Captured Tracks saw fit to reissue it. The album's ornate tone, which sets the stage for the dark chamber-pop of Walsh's career – a sort of shadowy twin to Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel – was never going to sit well with the underground tastes of the era, especially in the English-speaking world – which is why, to this day, the Apartments have remained a popular band only in France.

Perfectly in keeping with his elusive personality, Walsh responds to the solid critical success of The Evening Visits by vanishing into the shadows for seven years. In the wake of the UK tour supporting the debut album, opening for pop's new mainstream rising stars Everything But The Girl, the Apartments' discography grows by just a single release – but what a release: "The Shyest Time" (1987), destined for the soundtrack of Howard Deutch's "Some Kind Of Wonderful" (released in Italy, alas, as "Un meraviglioso batticuore"). A masterful Go-Betweens-esque blend (how could it be otherwise) of vivid, colourful surges and stinging languor, the song would be the only sign of life in a period spanning the late '80s and early '90s otherwise made up of shadowy live appearances – including a handful of dates alongside Amanda Brown of the Go-Betweens – and third-party reinterpretations of the catalogue (namely, This Mortal Coil's cover of "Mr. Somewhere").

There was nothing to do but wait until 1992 to find the band tackling a full length album again, but fortunately the wait proved anything but futile. Drift reveals itself as a vibrant turn in the Apartments' sound, now almost entirely shedding the singer-songwriter nakedness that warmed so many moments on The Evening Visits in favour of a brit-rock sound packed with biting layers of guitar. Of course, Walsh is not exactly one to sneak in through the back door, and what in other hands might sound like a mere nod to fashionable trends, in his case reads as added value, a way of recasting his own poetics in an unfamiliar colour. Far from losing sight of his inner world of impossible loves, with their transient quality of a hotel room or a railway station, the songwriter here harnesses the aggression of the arrangements to project his demons outward. There's no other explanation for these songs, built on grooving rhythmic frameworks that never stop bleeding insatiable tension – take the breathless four-four pulse of "Nothing Stops It", or the street-wise anthem for broken hearts "Over", like a noir tale narrated by Paul Westerberg.

Each song feels like a different shading of the same state of mind, one that can also take unexpected forms, like the baroque strings that open "Places Where The Night Is Long", a title that stands as a manifesto for an aesthetic in which place becomes a reverberation of consciousness. The streets Walsh walks rarely allow for rays of light, but when they do, the results open up beautifully to pop's gentle seductions – try resisting the bewitching beat-pop flourishes of "On Every Corner" or the tearful violins running through the bittersweet "All His Stupid Friends".

It goes without saying, however, that the landscape in which our man moves most naturally is that of an endless dark night of the soul, the one enveloping "What's Left Of Your Nerve", setting it adrift in a state of perpetual displacement, while Walsh floods it with a torrent of words that can only graze the tragedy of a goodbye. It is in this respect for the inexplicable that the authenticity of the songwriter's lyricism lies, one that still proves more than a credible saving grace in the few moments where the melodies betray signs of strain ("Mad Cow") or where the performance tends to overreach ("Could I Hire A Little While").

There isn't a single passage on Drift that hides the narrator's fragility in the face of the enormity of what's being told, and it's this ruthlessly human quality that gives the album its inexhaustible depth – perfectly exemplified by the volcanic opener "The Goodbye Train", which, fittingly, would later undergo a terrifying process of subtraction, re-emerging three years later transfigured into the masterpiece "She Sings To Forget You".

Everything Is Meant to Be Taken Away

"My feelings? About ten years ago, I hid them somewhere and haven't been able to find them", said Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur's noir masterpiece "Out Of The Past", a film that Peter Milton-Walsh, a keen cinephile, recently named in an interview as one of the essential reference points of his imagination. As icy as it is illusory, Mitchum's line was really just a device for exposing the impossibility of ever truly leaving one's inner turmoil buried in the furthest recesses of the past, since a person's demons cannot be tamed by the passage of time, and it takes very little for them to carve out space again deep within the soul. This conflict between apparent detachment and the heart's inescapable fragility is precisely the focal point of Walsh's vision, one that in 1995 he turns into the driving force behind a tormented collection of memories bearing the programmatic title A Life Full Of Farewells.

With the band now officially established as a trio (alongside Walsh, Eliot Fish of Big Heavy Stuff on bass and Mark Dawson on drums) and fleshed out with a string and horn section, the Australian songwriter here chooses to give voice to the bitter contemplation that (perhaps) precedes a crucial turning point, dressing his confessions in a chamber-pop steeped in melancholy, yet never suffocated by heartache.

The dance is opened by the trumpet melodies of “Things You’ll Keep”, which, in homage to Burt Bacharach, sketch a light, catchy pattern, vaguely perfumed with jazz, lending an air of serenity that is soon dispelled by a flood of memories as murky as a winter sky. With unsettling control, Walsh reviews touching slides of defeat, as in “The Failure Of Love Is A Brick Wall”, whose acoustic arpeggios seem to sharpen like knives against vitriolic lines (“Failure came and took your hand, you always meant to miss it”), or “You Became My Big Excuse”, a pedal-steel ballad for open spaces glimpsed through a window, which gracefully unfolds the horrific side of intimacy (“The poison that I drink when I sink my teeth in you”).

With its emotional tension held in check yet always palpable, the album marks its shifts in pace through counterpoints now of a violin, now of a cello, or else a muted trumpet, so that every element takes on a precise aesthetic purpose, whether it's depicting memories that are distant yet inescapable (the horns of “Not Every Clown Can Be In The Circus”), or hinting at escape routes whose real viability remains uncertain (the measured layerings of “End Of Some Fear” and the unstoppable “All The Time In The World”).

Every moment of A Life Full Of Farewells, thanks to the crystalline purity of its melodies and its sensitivity in the dialogue between lyrics and arrangements, is memorable in its own way; though if we're honest, it would be hard not to reserve a special place in the heart for two moving reflections like “Thank You For Making Me Beg” and, above all, the indescribable elegy for voice and piano, “She Sings To Forget You”. This is perhaps the ultimate expression of a confessional tone that constantly throbs beneath the cultured, detached veneer of Walsh's art; an art whose zenith is represented by this miniature "Blood On The Tracks", a cult work to be jealously guarded and potentially enshrined as a hidden milestone of that chamber-pop which contemporary indie has brought back into the spotlight.

That this was an immaculate period for the Apartments is also proven by the following Fête Foraine (1996), a compilation of tracks drawn from the three albums, played live in the studio and reimagined in a minimalist, spectral key. Stripped of its rhythmic scaffolding and dragged along on a bed of acoustic guitar, while a piano and distant backing vocals timidly peek through, Walsh's imagery seems to close in on itself in a desolation with no way back, with the lyrics shifting their focus onto the claustrophobia of rooms and onto night as the abyss of existence from which there seems to be no re-emerging.

The whole album takes on an expressive power animated by a sense of looming threat, starting with “What’s The Morning For”, once a fresh burst of indie-pop and now a narcotic, Velvet-esque lied pierced by organ drones. But the real difference lies in Walsh's performances: his voice, reduced to a faint breath, takes possession of the songs and injects them with a constant tension between damnation and the desire for redemption, as in a “Sunset Hotel” shifted down to the lower octave and doomed to become the symbol of this disorienting journey through the graveyard zones of the Apartments universe.

A period of happy and steady artistic productivity that reflects the solidifying of Walsh's life: a professional with a family (wife, a son, Riley) in Australia, a successful musician in Europe (in France, in particular). A double life that suits him well, giving him the great freedom that allows him to change course entirely on the following Apart, with a new band (a new drummer, in particular), compared to the classic, conciliatory pop tones of A Life Full Of Farewells.

The songs on Apart rest on a stripped-down modernist scaffolding, a dry percussive groove, the odd flourish of bass, the sudden eruption of horns, like a cruiser's sirens in a deserted bay. Amid it all, Walsh's voice holds forth in a confidential tone, bordering on a worn, decadent spoken word – on a record also sinisterly charged with dark omens (“No Hurry”, “Welcome To Walsh World”). Indeed, after the dreamy, “Sunset Boulevard”-like elegance of “Breakdown In Vera Cruz”, the anthemic build of “To Live For”, the George Michael-turned-dandy of “Friday Rich/Saturday Poor”, the endless measured whispered crooning of “World Of Liars”, the elusive jazz-pop of “Cheerleader”, comes “Everything Is Given To Be Taken Away”. The album's peak, in which Walsh gazes unflinchingly into an abyss of melancholy that fills, out of what was once blackness, with flickering colors reproducing the words:

So tell me

what comes after

the big sleep

in a grotesque waltz with death, which also knows moments of resigned, childlike euphoria, like the soothing “ba-ba-ba-baa” that little Riley was used to humming. On the last day of mixing the record, however, a phone call comes into the studio from his wife: Walsh must get their son to the hospital as soon as possible.

A bitterly ironic twist of fate: Walsh himself, the balladeer of impossible relationships and the sense of loss, finds himself, right after finishing the mix of Apart, having to face the worst tragedy of all. Indeed, just before setting off on the tour dates to support the album, the singer receives the news that his three-year-old son, Riley, is in danger of dying from a rare autoimmune disease that causes severe white blood cell deficiency. The father promptly erases the Apartments from his life and devotes himself day and night to caring for the child, but, despite his efforts, the inevitable happens in September 1999.

The Weight Of Songs

For eight years the band remains a distant memory, buried beneath a wound impossible to heal. Only in 2007, spurred on by his friend John Willsteed, bassist on the album Drift, does Walsh find the strength to bring the Apartments' repertoire back onto the stage, even amid the difficulty of reclaiming songs that now carry an even greater depth.

Perhaps because music is the only way Walsh knows to vent his pain, after a series of sporadic appearances in his native Australia and in the country that adopted him artistically and otherwise, France, the band's activity resumes on a regular basis in 2012, with the official announcement of a French tour. The synergy between music and cinema, always at the heart of Walsh's interests, now emerges explicitly, in images of Jean Seberg taken from the set of “À Bout De Souffle” by Jean-Luc Godard, which play behind the band during their performances.

The tour's huge success, whose title "It's Not Our World Anymore" marks a turning point in Walsh's life, stands as the ultimate proof of the bond between the Australian singer and the country of that Nouvelle Vague which so deeply inspired his elegant, fragmented storytelling style. Sealing the band's rebirth, 2013 saw the release in France of Seven Songs, a live recording of an excellent performance for the Label Pop programme on Radio France.

Built on delicate electro-acoustic colourings, enriched by horns and piano, the album brings back the little pop orchestra that the Apartments were on The Evening Visits and A Life Full Of Farewells; while it certainly adds nothing surprising to the catalogue, it works more than well as a concise primer on Walsh's songwriting, which in these heartfelt revisitations shines with a certain immunity to the wear of time.

The fact that I had written a song like that ["Everything Is Given To Be Taken Away", from Apart], and that I had written it before things came to an end – before we lost Riley – that stopped me, and I thought it would put an end to songs, forever. I didn't know if I'd be able to find the way back to who I was before he died, but, in fact, I didn't even think I had to, in the end.

(Peter Milton Walsh)

Thirty years since The Evening Visits… And Stays For Years; eighteen since the last work, Apart: that alone gives the measure of how much weight this new release carries in Peter Walsh's career, and in his artistic rebirth, which often clashes between the desire to honour his son's death with silence and the urge to bring him back to life in new songs, which keep flowing from his pen regardless. An understandable despair, one that nonetheless cannot conceal the negative pull of self-destruction, well expressed by the bleak, devastating passage from Adam Zagajewski's poem "Old Marx", which Walsh quotes in an interview with The Guardian: “He still had faith in his fantastic vision/ But in moments of doubt/ He worried that he’d given the world only/ A new vision of despair.”

Luckily, little by little the torment eases, and so the songs of No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal start to appear: first in 2011, with the release of the single "Black Ribbons", a duet with French singer Natasha Penot. With its open melody, a duet of chords mirrored in the vocal duet as in a Belle And Sebastian song, the track perfectly symbolises Walsh's return to life, as he crafts a mature, "adult" chamber-pop album, if you will, even as it brims with his twilight personality. And with some over-the-top performances, like the one in "The Good Son" style on the opening title track.

The loss of Riley is nonetheless the thread running through this new chapter for the Apartments, so it's no surprise to find the icy, petrifying setting of the heartbreaking masterpiece "Twenty One", written and poured out from regret over everything Walsh will never get to experience with his son. A true boulder of emotion awaits the listener halfway through the record, trying to tear away every mask with its desperate candour, which turns into a scream of pain in the finale: "There will be no twenty-ones/ There will be no parties". Riley's other direct appearance comes in the closing track, "Swap Places", where Peter recalls the final days in hospital, wishing he could die in his son's place, as any parent would wish in such moments.

The contrast between the lyrics—so direct, unafraid to voice clichés that are nonetheless true (the rhetorical question "Where's the God in all of this?", the memory offered with brutal, searing honesty: “Walking round the hospital, Friday afternoon/ Other children going home/ Wondering if the day will come when that might be you, if you’ll ever come home”)—and the elegance of the writing and arrangements conveys the sense of transfiguration of Walsh's personal story, which he chose not to embellish or fictionalise except through music, the true bearer of hope on No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal.

There's also room for a pop run like "The House That We Once Lived In", "September Skies" and "Please Don't Say Remember", a genuine burst of sunshine made of major chords and even proudly optimistic tones (the Pearlfishers of "September Skies"), while McLennan's romantic, feignedly naive style returns on "Please Don't Say Remember".

In short, No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal is one of those artistic gifts that Walsh surely wanted to give, quite rightly, to his son, but which in some way becomes a gift to humanity as well: within it lies that sense of compassion, of shared transcendence over the absurdities of being mortal, achieved through art.

What happened after the crowdfunding campaign for No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal is a small miracle. After eighteen years of absence, the band rose again like a phoenix from the ashes.

That's What The Music Is For (2025) is a project just as intense and refined as its predecessors, if not even sturdier. The Apartments' cultured chamber-pop unfolds as an endless series of snapshots depicting lonely, cold nights spent searching for a shoulder to lean on, a fleeting comfort before being swallowed up by the oblivion of indifference and glasses of alcohol drunk without really needing them. Walsh digs into the depths of the soul with lyrical and musical strokes as intense as Blue Nile (the gorgeous, aching "It's A Casino Life") and draws a smile with a light guitar shimmer and a rhythmic crescendo that pulses like a heart waking from a dream ("A Handful Of Tomorrow").

At times a breath of horns and brass keeps alive the vitality of slightly more mournful, languid ballads ("Another Sun Gone Down"), but the real surprise of "That's What The Music Is For" is the solid eight-piece line-up: the blend of voices and instruments on the title track is pure sonic and emotional perfection, a slow crescendo that aims not for emphasis but for detail, and for that poetic vulnerability in which everyone can recognise themselves. These are songs unafraid of the wear of time: past ("The American Resistance") and present ("Afternoons") are told with equal harshness and candour, entrusting a handful of emotions not always easy to master to just a few notes of piano or guitar.

The Apartments' songs aren't suited to fleeting, distracted listening; they are tales of pain and rebirth (Walsh disbanded the group in 1997 following his son's death), framed with a craftsmanship reminiscent of Blue Nile's "Hats": "Death Would Be My Best Career Move" opens with the same incipit as the Scottish band's "Over The Hillside".

That's What The Music Is For is a nocturnal, autumnal record, yet one suited to every season of the heart. With every listen, the eight tracks take on new shades of colour, and some are even allowed to rise above the grey clouds dominating the cover art. That's exactly what happens on the closing track, "You Know We're Not Supposed To Feel This Way", a bittersweet song with faintly epic tones that the band frames with a performance full of pathos, where every instrumental element fits together like a mosaic, a succession of ripples and waves settling over soundscapes steeped in melancholy, before letting hope resurface.

Lorenzo Righetto: “The Evening Visits… And Stays For Years”, “Apart”, “No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal”

Andrea D’Addato: “Drift”, “A Life Full Of Farewells”, “Fete Foraine”, “Seven Songs”

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro (“That’s What The Music Is For”

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