We couldn’t be happier to reissue The Apartments The Evening Visits…and Stays for Years. Our 2xLP release is an expanded look at the classic indie Australian acts’ 80s catalog, featuring the complete The Evening Visits LP (previously released by Rough Trade in 1985), the criminally rare first singles as well as unreleased demos; all lovingly remastered. Packed with liner notes from contemporaries like Go Betweens’ Robert Forster, The Chills’ Steven Schayer and recollections from Peter Milton Walsh himself, this set is an essential document for anyone interested in the the post-punk movement.

To get to know Walsh even better, he’s made us a digital mixtape of sorts, a list of Songs, Books & Movies that have stayed with him over the years. Enjoy!

Out of the Past. I think Tourneur must have been, or this at least this movie must have been a big influence on Jean-Pierre Melville—the characters in Bob le Flambeur and Le Samourai deal in the same doom, though all their troubles are set in Paris. “My feelings? About ten years ago, I hid them somewhere and haven’t been able to find them.” Always liked this scene, with a voice-over that felt like it could have been lifted from a letter you’d written yourself. You can sense that a trapdoor’s about to open for this guy. “Near the plaza was a little cafe, called La Mar Azul next to a movie house. I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half-asleep with the beer and the darkness. Only that music from the movie next door kept jarring me awake.” Someone walks through a door and suddenly he’s thinking this could be his luck or it could be his doom—but he’ll take whatever’s heading his way. This catastrophe he does not want to miss.

Spanish guitar. This is from La Question by Françoise Hardy, an album which many people think of as the French Forever Changes. Like so many of these things, this is a retrospective judgment. At the time, La Question was, like Third by Big Star, like Melody Nelson by Serge—both one of her greatest LPs and her worst selling.

Like Nelson Algren – The Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, Somebody in Boots, Man with the Golden Arm — John Fahey had all these kill-for titles: The Portland Cement Factory At Monolith California, Old Girlfriends and Other Horrible Memories, The Return of the Repressed. He called his autobiography How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. But, the title I loved the most seemed the most un-Fahey-like …The Evening Mysteries of Ferry Street. The only Fahey track on the cassette mixtape I first encountered him on was When the Springtime Comes Again — all that hope. It has remained my favourite John Fahey.

Being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do.The Last Picture Show opens with Hank William’s “Cold, Cold Heart.” A dusty desolate wind seems to blow through every scene. Sam the Lion owns the pool hall, the café and the picture show too and all of them, one by one, are going to disappear. Like the town itself, Sam is dying. One of those nothing doing, nothing going on small-town hells like the Brisbane I grew up in. Sam was looking back to a better time.

He once had something to live for.

A breakfast song, a late Saturday morning song, with flutes and tambourines to lift up anyone who needs it. Those at least were the circumstances in which I first heard it, waking in the fog following a night of Parisian sidecars. Sidecars always lead to trouble, the longest nights, mornings that come as afternoon and days just drenched with regret. I highly recommend them. But Barbara Lewis’s Anyway (she was very big with Dusty Springfield which was good enough for me) is always perfect, under any conditions.

“Requiem: 820 Latham”, written by Jimmy Webb, king of the breakup song, with Hal Blaine tearing the roof off as he slams into a snare. Jimmy says he wrote this song and “Hymns from the Grand Terrace” at 16. It would take more more years and experience before he could write “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — by then he was 18.

Early Morning Rain. I know this is set in an airport — “out on runway number 9, big 707 set to go” tends to give it away — but whenever I hear it, I remember riding through the rain on a bus coming into the Port Authority on 42nd Street. Which is funny, because I’ve never ridden through the rain on a bus coming into the Port Authority, but these are the deceptions of memory. I blame Midnight Cowboy.

Gladys Knight and the Pips. Saw them in 1976, a Brisbane venue called Festival Hall. Had 3,000 seats and was once the only room in town. Roxy Music, Bee Gees, Dylan, I first saw all of them there. Lou Reed also played Festival Hall on his Rock’n’Roll Animal tour. I skipped it. Thought Lou had lost it by then. Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner were with him and they ladled on staggering amounts of cream. Gladys had a 16 piece band, strings and brass. The Pips—her cousins, she said—were stunning harmony singers and their moves and wardrobes were simply astonishing. In that era, Jim Weatherly had come up with a string of hits for Gladys. Midnight Train to Georgia….“LA proved too much for the man, he couldn’t make it…so he burned all his hopes and even sold his old car.”

I had a Tony Joe White album, Home Made Ice Cream, with a song called “Taking the Midnight Train” and Tony had also written “Rainy Night in Georgia” — is it any wonder this song rang a thousand bells of recognition? Plus, a train song and a story of someone whose luck ran out trumps just about anything. At least this guy still held in his head the idea of “home”, which so often gets lost along the way. He could still go back. Weatherly says it was originally called “Midnight Plane to Houston” — doesn’t really do it for me either — but since Cissy Houston wanted to sing it, well, they couldn’t really use Houston in the title, could they?

‘DAY OF THE DEAD’ BY DIEGO RIVERA

Towards sunset on the Day of The Dead in November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of the Casino drinking anis….Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta’s coffee beans, you used to say they were Maria’s, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food…”

You do not know how to love these things any longer…from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, a story like a spell, of hallucinogenic longing, of one man’s breakdown that had been on its way all his life. Finally it turns up and takes place over the course of one day—the Day of the Dead.

Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye, give every one a penny that cries… Lee Hazlewood, getting older. Why this would mean so much to me at 22 is beyond me, possibly just because I liked how slow it is and my Autumn’s done come is such a strong line.

I do declare there were times I would rather have listened to “La Cucaracha” on a car horn than “The Boxer”, but this was another track that sent me on a Travis-picking bender. Love those notes cascading over themselves at the start. Love that you only hear them once. For sheer drama, I love the way Hal Blaine makes his entrance — gunshots down a deserted alley at 3am, a salute, a funeral at dawn. Once Hal’s on the track, everything shifts up a notch. Then again this is “Be My Baby” Hal Blaine, whose accidental boom-ba-boom-PAH! riff was born to be stolen. Take the Mary Chain, add Hal Blaine’s BMB signature and you only get the most brilliant songs they ever wrote. But this is Pet Sounds Hal Blaine, too. The Byrds & the Supremes Hal Blaine. The Fifth Dimension, the Mamas & the Papas Hal Blaine. Nancy Sinatra, Frank—Hal Blaine. MacArthur Park, Forever Changes, all of these—Hal Blaine. What a signature. That cannon shot in the chorus is one royal snare.

What debut ever had as much drama in it as this? “Under starlight shining white, I want to scream alone tonight.” “I Want to Scream”, what a song. The Laughing Clowns EP dropped with the impact of an earthquake in 1980. The Go-Betweens even wrote a song in the wake of it called “The Clowns are in Town”. Insular, intense, pure noir, expressionism, a double hit of Bernstein scores — Elmer and Leonard — the late night endless rain of Chandler, it was Stravinsky’s Spring and jazz and dark glamour, and I remember thinking at the time I’d encountered something I thought I’d never see, a singer among my contemporaries like Sinatra, this beautiful expressive croon that tried so hard to say “I’m feeling nothing, nothing at all” but from that detachment rose a tension that spelled out only the opposite — I’m all undone. Deadpan as Keaton, Ed Kuepper sang this awesome book of songs where betrayal and loss were so often repeated they were taken for granted. On stage, Laughing Clowns worked in deep contrast. In suits since ‘79, slick-haired drummer Jeffrey Wegener burning up an epic storm and Bob Farrell howling and crying through his tenor sax and these showy maniacs and their maelstrom fronted by Ed — like his lookalike Bryan Ferry, his appearance giving you not one clue to the nightmares you have to ride out to get here, a very private and cold isolation. Like at lot of records I love, it was a one-off, it wasn’t meant to last. But the class, the nerve, the drama in this: they should have owned the world.

I first came to movies as a teenager through TV. Nothing had subtitles. The schedule was strictly American and British. For a long time, late night TV — the time I liked best — was dominated by noir (American), crime, TV series and kitchen sink dramas (British) and a whole lot of intense stuff from both territories like Now, Voyager or Butterfield 8, The Big Sleep, The Angry Silence, The Maltese Falcon, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Hunter, Days of Wine and Roses, etc. I saw The Apartment for the first time this way too, and out of that developed an acute, disproportionate love for Billy Wilder. Love not lost. With The Apartment there are too many scenes to choose from — Wilder has a habit of making heartache just a stop on the way to happy — but this would have to be the most desolate. “The mirror… it’s broken.” Baxter says, and he’s broken here too as he discovers that Fran, the girl he loves, is his boss’s mistress. “Yes. I know,” she says, having had her own big disappointment minutes earlier. “I like it that way. It makes me look the way I feel.”

Beautifully desperate song by Tim Hardin, caught between regret and a promise. But take this song, add flute and Johnny Rivers, it’s a hat trick. “…always the rain around my eyes. It’ll never happen again.”

Serge Gainsbourg, “Je Suis Venu te Dire Que Je M’en Vais.” I swear, given that arpeggio guitar figure in the background, Serge had been listening to “I Want You”. When Jane Birkin had left Serge and was pregnant to her new husband, she was working on a movie in Morocco. Serge flew there, stayed in the same hotel in Marrakesh, but in the Royal Suite (for the King of Morocco), a room at the end of the same corridor as Jane’s room. He never once came to see her, but kept having glasses of champagne sent to her. On the little mat beneath each glass he would write “C’est pour les vitamins”.

“Sinnerman” by Nina Simone. This and “Soulin’” were the first two songs I could play on guitar when I was 12. Pretty sure I learned “Sinnerman” from The Seekers rather than Nina.

Salter Book Stack

On the cover of the Rough Trade release of “All You Wanted” is a painting that was generously done for me by my Hackney flatmate, Charlie Higson (painter, writer, musician, comic, The Fast Show, Renaissance man). A few books lean between the kitten and the cowboy boots — The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, Nobody’s Angel by Thomas McGuane and Light Years by James Salter, with a Bonnard painting on its cover are among them.

Salter is a devoted Francophile. Loss looms large in so many of his stories, as does the recognition that the sensual life, as led by so many of his characters, cannot lessen that loss but is the only way to live. The timing in coming across this book round then seemed perfect — the prevailing spirit within indie rock in England then seemed puritanical by contrast.

But Light Years is also strong on disappearances, about what will come and go in our lives. How the most powerful emotion can just fade, then vanish. Nothing’s for keeps. It made clear that any transitoriness I was feeling had nothing to do with the restlessness or impermanence of the way I lived and everything to do with living itself. There were few forever afters. You can’t even remember feelings. As with many stories and novels I read, parts of this one stayed with me and would often turn up with fresh meaning in different towns, in different situations. I ended up getting a whole bunch of Salters published by North Point while visiting the States at the end of the late 80s. This is a part of Light Years I kept: “Where does it go, she thought, where has it gone? She was struck by the distances of life, by all that was lost in them. She could not even remember—she kept no journal—what she had said to Jivan the day of their first lunch together. She remembered only the sunlight that made her amorous, the certainty she felt, the emptiness of the restaurant as they talked. All the rest had eroded, it existed no more. Things she had known imperishably—images, smells, the way in which he put on his clothes, the profane acts which had staggered her—all of them were fading now, becoming false. She seldom wrote letters, she kept almost none. ‘You think it’s there, but it isn’t. You can’t even remember feelings…I always just assumed the important things would stay somehow,’ Nedra said. ‘But they don’t.’”

I first heard Edwyn Collins from Orange Juice in Brisbane, in 1980. Spring Hill, Grant McLennan’s place. A line in this song — that’s usually all it takes for me — leapt out. “I’m not saying we should build a city of tears”. What a fucking line. Melody floats a sea of major 7ths. I first saw Edwyn Collins 34 years later, January 2014 and the room and the night both seem carried not on the strong currents of nostalgia but gratitude — Edwyn’s for being alive and back doing this, and everyone in the audience for seeing someone they might have thought they never see again and seeing him play so well. But…this wasn’t The Sound of Young Scotland anymore. It was the sound of a guy whose wife Grace had been told, after Edwyn had a massive brain hemorrhage, that he was lost, that whatever idea of she held about who he was should be left behind. That maybe Edwyn too should be left behind and she should “move on”. She never gave up on him. The famous line from The Inferno, “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood” applied to them both. But that line continues, and what follows is less well known but more important: “And so we came forth—and once again beheld the stars.” Edwyn and Grace got to once again behold the stars, Falling and Laughing. This is not the Postcard single take, but it’s still grand.

Jimmy van Heusen was a brilliant piano player, songwriter. He was not a lyric writer, but did his best work with one of the best, Sammy Cahn (“All the Way”, a track my other band, Out of Nowhere, unsuccessfully attempted a few times, High Hopes, The Tender Trap etc. for Sinatra). He and Sinatra ran together (this was not exercise), drank together and Jimmy was a night owl, which suited Frank, who found the nights sometimes long, sometimes lonely. Jimmy was also a pilot and often he and Frank would take off from Vegas over the desert sands at around 7am after being up all night. Sonny Burke’s disillusion drenched opening line here is hard to beat “Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams…” For me, songs have always, no matter how bleak they seemed, been like a match that flares in a dark alley, something you could lean when the lights of hope had gone out. Heads you win, heads you lose, just hearing a song that said I’m in the same night as you gave you reasons to live. Here’s That Rainy Day.

I think it was first hearing this original version of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (Brel was fond of recording songs from his repertoire over and over again) … that got me in the right space to write “All the Birthdays”. It’s the 1959 take, and I think it’s the only one featuring the haunting sound of the ondes- martenot in an intro that seems to move at a drugged pace and end with a second’s silence before Brel’s voice makes… an entrance. For years I thought — someone must have told me this — the ghostly sound in the intro was a glass harmonica, which gives you the same spooky noise as you slowly run the wet tip of your finger round the edge of a set of glasses. Wine glasses, not shot glasses. It reminds me too that on first listening to many of the songs that mattered to me then, I was often sitting on the floor, slumped against a couch or just lying there soaking up the sound, sinking more deeply into the spell of the song straight from the speakers.

A Canadian guy I went to high school in Brisbane and who played a beautiful Fender 12-string, moved back to Canada and ‘left’ me a couple of LPs, fantastic folk and finger-picking pieces—Ramblin’ Jack Eliot’s “Young Brigham” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel”. This take of “If I Were a Carpenterin” dropped D became the one I first tried to get my finger-picking together with, which is basically where it’s stayed. Another Tim Hardin song — I hope I’m not giving too much away here.

No matter where you live, New York City is already flickering in your head thanks to scenes from On the Town, Prince of the City, West Side Story, Taxi Driver, On the Waterfront, Manhattan — take your pick. Any of them will make the siren call of New York a little louder. Shadows by Cassavetes, whose people didn’t seem any more certain about themselves or different to the people you moved among, wherever you were, set out how fast life might get inside the blaring neon and jazz and the huge, majestic promise of those New York nights. “I’ve always been able to work with anybody that doesn’t want success. Jazz musicians don’t want success…They have these little tin weapons—they don’t shoot. They don’t go anywhere. The jazz musician doesn’t deal with the structured life—he just wants that night, like a kid.” Cassavetes poured that kind of night into Shadows.

I owe “Cannot Tell the Days Apart” to Brigitte Bardot — and a track called “Un Jour Comme un Autre” from her 1964 LP, B.B, that I picked up secondhand, of course, in high school. There were not too many Brigitte Bardot fans at my high school, or not too many fans of her songs at least. “Un Jour Comme un Autre” is one brief piece of sumptuous melancholy. There were not too many fans of sumptuous melancholy at school either. “Un Jour Comme un Autre” — a Spanish guitar, brushes, ribbons of bleak trumpet and Brigitte’s voice floating through it, all wrapped up in C# minor — was written by 24 year old Jean-Max Rivière. On the basis of this song alone, the guy’s one of the best songwriters around. I later found out he also wrote songs for Françoise Hardy. Either job sounded like nice work. “Un Jour…” seemed to me her way of saying “with you not here, one day is just like another”. My French being what it is, appalling, to this day I’m still not sure if I was right about that, but it began playing in my head years later at a time when, within my own life, I had begun to feel I genuinely could not tell the days apart.

Wally Stott was an arranger for Dusty Springfield and Scott Walker, who said having Wally write for you was like having Delius writing for you. Scott kept him busy, turning out Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3 and Scott 4 in just two years—extraordinary. Johnny Franz, who played piano for Scott, said that when Wally was 48, he went off to Amsterdam, had reassignment surgery and came back to England as Angela Morley. Johnny didn’t blink. Harry Secombe, however, said “I’ve heard of leaving your heart in San Francisco, but this is ridiculous.” In the Scott Walker documentary, they play Montague Terrace in Blue to Angela—possibly one of the most beautiful horn and string arrangements I have ever heard. She listens and says, her voice full of surprise, “Are you sure I did that one?” I have spent a lifetime searching for my own Angela Morley—I think possibly Nico Muhly might measure up—but have otherwise never really found a contemporary equivalent. The Bridge by Scott Walker.