Something to Believe In by Andrew Stafford

Author:Andrew Stafford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2019-07-01T23:34:18+00:00

Apart

(The Apartments)

Another album that kept me company while I was in hospital was Apart, by the Apartments. The group name, taken from a Billy Wilder film, is a vehicle for singer-songwriter Peter Milton Walsh. I didn’t realise until a little later that he was originally from Brisbane, a contemporary (and very briefly a member) of the Go-Betweens, and later on the Laughing Clowns, but those parts of his résumé are purely incidental. He is a songwriter on par with any of his peers – Forster and McLennan, Ed Kuepper, Dave Graney, Nick Cave – but his songs speak of a different set of influences: Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel; Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy.

It’s a more European sensibility. The Apartments’ second album, Drift, released in 1993, reputedly sold 25,000 copies in France and less than 200 in Walsh’s home country, and while his audience has grown in the intervening years, the ratio hasn’t moved much. One critic later wrote that it amounted to ‘one of the greatest crimes of neglect in Australian music’, but the situation was reinforced by Walsh’s tendency to court local anonymity. More than twenty years later, his return to music after a long absence would be hailed with an epic 14,000-word feature in the French edition of Slate.

Apart, though, appeared when Walsh was on a creative roll in 1997, his fourth album in five years, before the silence. It’s a difficult album to write about. Listening to it makes me sombre and reflective, because it puts me back in those hospital halls and gardens. While I can talk and write about that time without too much trouble, listening to Apart reconnects me to the experience more intimately. Artists like Bowie and Robyn Hitchcock were inhabiting characters I engaged with from a distance, whereas the first line on Apart is ‘If you’ve made a mess of your past’ – which, as young as I was, I felt I had.

We impose our own lives, fantasies and delusions upon stories that have nothing to do with us, particularly songs. The backstory of Apart is wrenching – not because of what came before but what happened in its aftermath. The world it described was a far more adult and experienced one than the planet I inhabited in my own head. It spoke obliquely of a decadent past, but To Live For was about marriage and fatherhood, and a thin grasp on a more hopeful and settled present.

So why did I connect to it? Any insight I had was distorted through my own callow experience. Part of the answer lies in the music, which is lush and supremely melancholic. Much of it is semi-orchestral, with horns, strings and piano instead of guitars, but while it’s chamber music, it’s not quite chamber pop. Walsh’s voice is small, but the music is big. Like clouds, the songs hang rather than float in the air. Some, like No Hurry, drift past, evoking the lazy torpor of a Brisbane summer. Others, like Friday Rich/Saturday Poor, scud by in the breeze.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.