MOST WOULD ACKNOWLEDGE THAT AUSTRALIA HAS PRODUCED SOME EXTRAORDINARY SONGWRITERS AND POETS OVER RECENT DECADES - AND IN AUGUST, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC IS THRILLED TO HOST A UNIQUE COLLABORATION, TWO OF OUR FINEST WRITERS TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, AN EVENING YOU'D BE MAD TO MISS...

PETER MILTON WALSH with PETER BAKOWSKI
SATURDAY 26th August
COMMENCING AT 8 P.M. [doors at 7.30 p.m.]

PETER MILTON WALSH was in The Go-Betweens in 1979. He was in The Laughing Clowns in 1984. But most importantly, he is the near-myth behind The Apartments, the group he named after one of Billy Wilder’s greatest films. The band began in the time-honoured manner in Brisbane, Australia - high school friends, a dealer drummer who walked in off the street and a stranger, met on a train, on second guitar. Since the release of the band's debut album The Evening Visits … and Stays for Years [released by Rough Trade in 1985, recorded by Peter with contributions from members of Orange Juice, The Triffids and Everything But the Girl], Peter has slowly built a reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter. He wore impeccable suits and shades under a mop of blond hair in Brisbane’s sweltering heat. He had a taste for the arcane and the exotic. His music is of another time: post-punk, certainly, but also of Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel; Françoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg.  He is a star in France, yet all but unknown in Australia. He lives quietly in Sydney, rarely performs and until recently had released no albums at all for nearly 20 years. In 2015, No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal wa eleased by Paris label, Microcultur and was named #1 Album of the Year by France's leading music blog/magazine, agic.  The man himself is no mystery; he's just not one to make a noise about himself. He deadpans that he's been “hard at work developing my sitting still and keeping quiet talents, which to me are a little bit neglected in this world”.

PETER BAKOWSKI fell in love with the map of the world at the age of six. In 1983 he wrote his first poem while staying at a friend’s farmhouse in Waco, Texas, in response to receiving a “Dear John” letter from a Melbourne girl. As a result of that fateful letter, Peter ended up travelling for seven years, caught a freight train across Montana, lived in a cave on a Mexican island and ate gazelle cooked in stale blood with road builders in the Central African Republic. Peter has been writer-in-residence in Rome, Paris, Macau, Suzhou (China), Battery Point [Tas], Greenmount [W.A.] and at the Broken Hill Writers Festival. He has read at the Australian Consulate in New York, the Australian consul's residency in Shanghai and at the National Library in Canberra. His poems continue to appear in literary magazines worldwide and have been translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Bengali, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Polish. In February 2015, Editions Doucey of Paris published a bilingual edition of his Selected Poems entitled Le cœur à trois heures du matin. Peter’s aim as a poet is to write as clearly as possible and no matter how many books he writes in his lifetime, they’ll all be about what it’s like to be a human being. 
 

"Peter Milton Walsh and Peter Bakowski respect words, how through their sound, power and arrangement they move the listener, shake them down.
They bring to their words an unfinished book of extensive travel, inhabiting the streets of Paris, London, New York, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, among others.
Alternating song and poem, juxtaposing, complementing, reacting to each other's work, the house concert will showcase what drives them to honour words, how they make and present their choices, playful, precise, rhythmic and resonating long after the evening ends."

ALL PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC EVENTS ARE FREE
WITH GENEROUS DONATIONS INVITED AND ENCOURAGED
PLEASE RSVP TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS ASAP
FOR FULL DETAILS AND TO CONFIRM ATTENDANCE
EVENT IS BYO
and we now enjoy the generous support of Camperdown Cellars who are offering our patrons 20% off all wine.
ask for a voucher on arrival !

PLEASE INVITE FRIENDS OR ANYONE ELSE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED BUT...
DO NOT LIST ON WEBSITES OR SOCIAL MEDIA