Martin Newell Interview

I was asked by my friends at the LA Record to conduct a phone interview with one of my favorite all-time recording stars, Martin Newell of The Cleaners from Venus. The resulting sprawl of an interview was published (in edited-down form) in the Summer issue of the LA Record. After numerous requests (from the same one person, Matt Fishbeck) and now that the issue has come and gone, I thought I’d post the whole thing up on the Wombleton site. The opening lyric to one of the Cleaners’ best-known songs, Julie Profumo, is “I’m Going to England. I’m leaving today…”, so it somehow seems appropriate. Also, during our first record shopping visit to the UK in June, we had the opportunity to visit with Mr. Newell on his home turf. He actually sold us quite a few of his leftover LPs, many which some of you have already bought. There’s still a few more in the bins, so get them while they last. Anyhow, let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the epic, full interview w/ my unpublished intro:

MARTIN NEWELL INTERVIEW (UNABRIDGED) BY IAN MARSHALL 04-19-2010

Beginning in the early 1980s, Martin Newell (with Lawrence “Lol” Elliott) released a number of cassettes as The Cleaners from Venus. These tapes were home-recorded, self-manufactured and distributed by band themselves from their home-base in a small riverside village near Colchester in Essex. The DIY / Cassette-culture thing was already somewhat of an established ethos in post-punk England, but The Cleaners were special. The music is a heady mix of catchy radio-friendly melodies with strong out-in-front vocal delivery, layered “kitchen-sink” psychedelic excursions, jangly chorused guitars with cheap drum machines and synthesizers in all the right places. The tapes themselves are mini-concept albums comprised of ten-or-so three-minute pop songs, each one bursting with energy and ideas without sounding overwrought. The Cleaners music from their classic cassette period (1981-86) is perfection (with a bit of tape hiss). There are moments reminiscent of the early, pre-gloom Cure, Soft Boys, Swell Maps, TV Personalities, XTC and even Haircut 100… but there is undoubtedly a demented quality to this music which is unaffected and restrained; it’s a feeling akin to trying to hold a polite conversation with one’s grandparents whilst flying on Owsley; like this music is trying to be normal 80s pop music, but it just can’t! The Cleaners original cassette music has never been easy to track down and similarly elusive is chief Cleaner Martin Newell, a Dickensian cult-hero and recovering anarchist who has been known to periodically drop off the pop scene to attend to his gardening round and successful sideline as a poet and newspaper columnist. He’s continued to do great work since the initial dissolution of The Cleaners from Venus back around 1988. In the ensuing years he has created an impressive catalogue of music (more in the singer-songwriter vein) released under his own name. He’s been known to revive the old Cleaners handle from time to time… and that time has come again- as Martin has just put out a brand new 2010 Cleaners album (more on that later).

Back in June, my traveling companion and I found ourselves meeting Martin Newell in person, at his two-storey flat in Wivenhoe, Essex. We sipped homemade Sloe Gin and listened to his brand new recordings for the then-soon-to-be-released Cleaners from Venus LP ( now entitled “English Electric”) and, if you’re wondering, yes, Martin Newell still “has it”. He also showed us some of the old cassette masters. I held in my hand the original of The Stray Trolleys’ “Secret Dreams of A Kitchen Porter” which was recorded in the pre-Portastudio era; pre-Cleaners! He even sang us “Julie Profumo” and “Victoria Grey”, sold me some of his old stock and went on a hilarious rant about Joan Baez. I wish I could have brought you our conversation from that late night… but this interview is probably more on point, albeit less uproarious. It was culled from a lengthy phone conversation we had back in May. My focus was the early Cleaners from Venus period, on the occasion of the re-release of three of the best cassettes by Burger Records. True to form, these titles are only available on Cassette in very limited quantities, so grease up your Nakamichis, kids; wet your Q-tips and start your compressors, here’s…

THE INTERVIEW:

(ring… ring..)

Hello Martin?

Oh hi, you’ll be Ian then.

That’s me. Hello. I hope you don’t mind that I’m recording this. In the end I’ve got to get it all down on paper. OK?

Yes. So, as long as you’ve got a clear line and I will try to use my best BBC voice so you will have no trouble transcribing it.

So, let’s just start by finding out what you’ve been doing lately.

I’ve actually been really busy. Since last autumn, the local council for kind of the big region where I live, and the rail authorities, which is a national thing, asked me if I could decorate a rundown station. It’s an old industrial station. It used to be what used to be known as the engine-room of Colchester. It’s called the Hythe, which is an old word for harbour. They knocked the old buildings down which had been vandalized and they asked me to decorate it with poetry. And they asked me to work with an artist. But it wasn’t just as simple as writing stuff and making it all sound pretty. I had to go into the psycho-geography of the area, are you familiar with that phrase?

Yes.

So I had to do a lot of research and talk to the residents and do the history of it and write tracts of stuff about it and it’s all up on the station house. It looks very pretty. There’s a link to it on my website.

So anyone, if they’re touring in the area…

Well, it means that commuters stopping at the station now, which is being developed with new accommodation, can stand in a station full of my poetry and Dale Devrereux Barker’s artwork. It’s really, I think, the first of its kind in England. So I was immensely proud to be asked to do that and I worked on all through the autumn and a large chunk of the winter and they finally unveiled it. Straight after that I won a prize for my column, (laughs) which is one-thousand-words-a-week I write for a regional newspaper: The East Anglian Daily Times. The music got kind of neglected for a while there, but I just put a new download EP up on the site called “Mule”. Actually it’s a bit of a return to form. Yeah, it sounds Cleaners from Venus. It really does and I don’t know why this has come about! It must be some kind of kismet because I know the guys at Burger have released the old Cleaners from Venus stuff from about 25 or 30 years ago.

Yes and that’s one reason why the L.A. Record asked me to do this interview, to tie-in with those releases. I guess I’m known as a local Cleaners fanatic, for lack of a better expression.

Oh right. I’m amazed anyone knows anything at all about us. We were fairly minor, but then when we got signed and we started making vinyl records, we made a bit of a splash then. But certainly in America the biggest thing was “The Greatest Living Englishman” if you’ve ever come across that.

Yes, I’ve got a CD of that one. That was done in 1993, correct? My entrée into it was through the Cleaners “Going to England” LP. But I bought it much later; a few copies made it to these shores, evidently.

Well, “The Greatest Living Englishman” was my first solo album and it was produced by Andy Partridge. My whole -I hesitate to call it a- career, was just a series of jobs that seemed to link up (laughs) and comprise a lack of income. But, you know, I never toured America, but I did go to some other fairly eccentric countries in my time.

How do you feel about discussing the old Cleaners days?

I never mind. I never mind talking about it. I mean, its not like I’m jaded. It was terrifically exciting. When it ceased to be exciting I stopped doing it for a while and did something else.

So, let’s go back a bit. I’ve read the first volume of your autobiography “This Little Ziggy” and I understand you’re posting chapters of volume two on your website now…

Yes I am. That’s an ongoing thing. I’ve also got a new book out as well. You know, it’s all come full circle, but when I started the Cleaners from Venus it was almost out of despair, really. I tried doing things the orthodox way with regard to the music industry. You know, ever since I first saw The Beatles I thought “Well, that’s the job for me”. And it seemed like the business didn’t really want to know me, no matter how hard I tried, so I just thought “Well, I’ll do it for myself, then”. And that was a sort-of Zen thing, that when you stop trying for something, you find it. And so, we began doing this Cleaners From Venus thing; we had so little money and we made things ourselves. We had pitiful recording equipment! But it was such fun and then, of course, it became good and obviously the music was good underneath all the racket. We became a little bit successful anyway.

The story of your first band (The Mighty) Plod is well documented in “This Little Ziggy”. You also joined Gypp and played in other groups prior to the Cleaners. But you’ve acknowledged in other interviews that you were somewhat out-of-step with punk, new wave or DIY-type music with these earlier groups. You were interested in it, but it wasn’t really something you were doing musically, even in 1979.

No, in 1977 it wasn’t; by 1979 it was. Because it suddenly struck me! I mean, before that I stayed with Gypp, who were really a kind of heavy prog rock band; they were from a sort-of country area. You have to really understand that when punk was going on – and it was a very necessary revolution; it was pop refreshing itself, if you like; that only half-describes it, but the end results weren’t always good. Sometimes it was a real noise! It wasn’t very attractive! The top echelon was good, The Damned and The Sex Pistols and The Clash… But there were a lot of bands who were just redundant old rockers who just cut their hair and got guitars and thought “you just make a racket”. In that period where everyone was so confused all kinds of charlatans got through. And I thought, “Well, I’m not joining in with that” because I was with a bunch of nice country boys from Suffolk and we were making quite good music and we had a following. So I stayed with them. But towards 1979 I thought “you know, I know about three-minute pop songs. This is why I came in! Why aren’t I doing three-minute pop songs?”. So, I started to do it.

It is largely three-minute pop songs that make up, say, “Blow Away Your Troubles”, but there’s also a level of sophistication there. And some of the tracks on that record are very odd. They’re not simply pop songs… they’re a little bit askew; kind-of deranged!

Yes they are, yes. You can put that down to musical ineptitude, I think. We weren’t very good (laughing). I wasn’t very musically confident at that time but I was having a lot of fun. I’d been a lead singer for nearly five years and there was always a guitarist in the band and the guitarist was always really good whomever I was playing with. It was Bachelor Johnny with Plod and it was Ian Peppercorn in Gypp and they were good guitarists… or good guitarists under the technical definition of the term. I was always a kind of, um, I don’t know, a bit of an impressionist really. That’s were I did fit into the punk ethos. I could play “a bit”. But, I knew jangly stuff. I was good at jangly, twangy guitar. My heroes were people like Hank Marvin… and Ray Davies, I suppose. Twangy guitarists.

On the early Cleaners stuff, what strikes me about your guitar playing isn’t so much twangy solos in the Shadows vein, but repetitive, rhythmic licks and riffs that stick in your head.

That was all I could do! Like I said on the Cherry Red TV interview… when I first learned to play guitar, once I’d got three chords, I didn’t think “let’s learn a fourth”, I thought “let’s write a song!”

I feel I should rewind a bit by mentioning that after Gypp broke-up you were on your own for a bit. You even signed to EMI for a one-off pop-punk flavored single called “Young Jobless”. Around that time you also joined up with Lawrence “Lol” Elliot. Together you started making tapes as The Stray Trolleys- these weren’t released at the time they were recorded but a couple of years later. Eventually Lol came up with the moniker Cleaners from Venus and you put out “Blow Away Your Troubles”, which I would nominate as one of the best and certainly strangest Cleaners From Venus tapes, which incidentally hasn’t been re-released in America yet…

That was our first one. It’s incredibly bad sound quality! I’m amazed anyone’s gotten anything out of it at all.

Well, it’s just that there’s these beautiful ‘nuggets’ buried beneath the hiss. There’s something special happening there in songs like “Wivenhoe Bells”…

Oh, “Wivenhoe Bells”, yeah. The first one, the first ever one, you mean. I did a later one on… on…

On “Midnight Cleaners”.

Yeah, I think it was “Midnight Cleaners”. Yeah, “Midnight Cleaners”. On that one I had a little four-track Portastudio by then, so I really did the kitchen sink on it, you know. By that I mean… well, it’s a joke we make about women who pack to go on holiday and they put everything in apart from the kitchen sink.

Yes, I love the re-recorded version, too. With the sound effects… actual church bells, children laughing, sound effects. It’s more psychedelic. But in the original version, what amazes me is how it’s such a tight, perfect little production. It’s so economical in how it portrays a certain mood and meaning, which seems to be loaded into every aspect of the recording. The descending piano part is cunningly reminiscent of church bells. The percussion sounds like a ticking clock, as in “the march of time”. And the lyric tells us of people from all walks of life hearing the same church bells at the same time, throughout the village; whoever they are, they all take a moment away from themselves. It’s full of heart and feeling. This isn’t the shambolic naiveté of the Swell Maps and it’s not the angry venom of The Sham 69. Neither is it the cold, existential chamber music of Joy Division. This song is full of melody, maturity and warmth… and this is Martin Newell in 1981! Martin Newell the anarchist, kitchen porter and DIY tape-maker. Can you tell us where “Wivenhoe Bells” came from?

“Wivenhoe Bells”? I remember working very hard on the song at the time. Lol wasn’t on that one…not on drums anyway. I think he helped me with some of the effects and the mixing later…He was away in the west of England seeing his girlfriend the week when I did most of the work on it. Due to coming from a military family, I spent some crucial parts of my childhood out of England, in Singapore, Malaya and Cyprus. This enhanced my ideas of an England in my head. I was writing about the small things all around me, which I’d missed so much when I was a kid. I was away for a great chunk of the swinging 60s… part of 1964, all of 1965 and quite a lot of 1966 too. The pop soundtrack of those years only made my idealization of my country more extreme.

A quality that shows through in a lot of your work, especially in your more recent solo albums, is a certain nostalgia for an England which maybe does or doesn’t still exist. You seem to propagandize the existence of a sort of quaint, charming, pastoral England that someone like Ray Davies, whom you’re often compared to, was claiming to have disappeared 40-or-so years ago with “Village Green”.

Well, I think The Small Faces and the Who were a bigger influence on me than the Kinks, and they were every bit as provincially English. I didn’t really get into Ray Davies’ more esoteric stuff till the early 1990s as it happens. I only really knew the singles. But there is a lot of truth in what he says in some of those “Village Green” lyrics about wanting to go around frantically taking Polaroids of things that you know before they disappear, because as you get older you become more aware that these things are disappearing.

But my question is… Does this England still exist, or are you perpetuating a myth? I fear that England today is all Starbucks and Iphones and rave music.

That quaint charming England as you call it, still exists to an extent, but you have to go and look for it harder these days. I don’t harbor any illusions about it, however. That doesn’t mean I won’t write about it. It was still very much there when I was a kid though.

This is an essay subject really. I’ve written book chapters on it. I have no illusions about England. It’s willingness to change was always part of its style. I could however, take you on a bike ride or a walk near where I live, and show you that underneath the vulgarity and hastily embraced modernity, there is still a quieter more permanent place. The fact that many people have forgotten it doesn’t mean it’s not still there.

Speaking of book chapters, you’ve written a very observant and rather hilarious piece about modern-day British youth culture. Do you mind if I excerpt a bit of it for our readership?

Not at all. Cherry pick what you want out of it.

In a chapter titled “Da Yoof”, you write:

“Today’s young people can at times be bloody infuriating. They sit around in bracingly expensive, astoundingly ugly sports clothes, swear constantly and spend much of their time bawling a strange language at each other. Some of this I have learned to understand. For instance: “Shalaytorsdazza-yeah?” roughly translated, means: “Ah Darren. Perhaps we may possibly rendezvous on some future occasion? Goodbye then.” Nearly everything that young people say these days, is a question? Such questions often have the word, “like” arbitrarily inserted within them? And the music that they – like– listen to? Yeah? It often sounds rather like two mental patients arguing with each other, whilst putting up a shed? Go into certain pubs where young people congregate on Friday nights, as they bellow into their mobile phones, the conversations are rich with expletives and belches. They also chug back strong lagers and strange cerise-colored vodka-based drinks, as if to indicate that their lives depended upon it. Many of the lads are hulking and, sometimes, rather flabby. The girls, with their straightened peroxide hair, blank eyes and WAG clothing styles, will usually match the boys, drink for drink, expletive for expletive.”

You must feel a bit out of place in the world today.

If there’s anyone I’m like it’s probably Doc Brown in “Back to the Future” now. I even have a coat a bit like his that I wear sometimes. Some real (laughs) bad looking dude came into the pub a couple of years ago and I thought to myself “this guy’s dangerous” and he just said “Erraugh! I like you, you remind me of that old guy in “Back to the Future”.” Ha ha ha ha!

In Giles Smith’s book “Lost in Music” he talks about your allusions to the mysterious “cassette underground”.

Yeah!

How involved, back then, in a hands-on manner, were you in the distribution of your music? What was the procedure once you finished recording one of your tapes?

Oh, well Giles wasn’t really involved in that. Giles joined right at the end of all that.

Yes, but in the book he says he knew you for a few years before he joined the Cleaners and that back then you and Lol were always dropping-off these tapes in the post and talking about this secret network of tape distributors which would soon be the undoing of the record industry.

Yeah, well that’s right. That’s what we did knowing that that was my world now and I wasn’t making proper records. I made lots and lots of cassettes and we’d duplicate maybe twenty at a time or get someone to do it for us. And then we’d sell them. And we’d sometimes send them abroad to people like Joachim in Germany. And we’d send him a Photostat-able cover so he could make his own. Then, if he sold a few, he’d send us a bit of money. And we used to sit around drinking home made beer and coloring in the covers ourselves. The early ones all have hand-colored covers. And we’d do maybe, over the lifetime of a cassette, sometimes as many as four hundred. And it seemed like an achievement to us at the time since we were completely cut adrift from the mainstream music industry. We had our own little thing. It was a kind-of cottage industry at a time when the music industry was very strong. It was very hands-on. We made the recordings. We often duplicated the tapes ourselves, we colored the covers in and we posted them ourselves!

What hope does a fan these days have of ever finding one of the original cassettes… there are people on Ebay, from time to time, from, say, Greece and Belgium selling cassettes; maybe they’re photocopies, maybe they’re the real McCoy. How does one know if they’ve found an original… or does it matter?

Psssh. I don’t think it really matters, but I do worry about the quality, because the quality of the stuff that went out wasn’t that good in the first place… so they must be listening to some really furry tapes by now! I was amazed to find that those guys at Burger have done a really great job on remastering.

Yeah, I just got the Burger reissues a week or two ago and they do sound really good.

It’s a funny thing- I’ve found some of the original artwork now. I didn’t find it when Burger first approached me. I’ve been cleaning out my house and I found some of the original artwork… and not only that… I think I may have found a couple of original cassette masters of some of the tapes. The tapes went up to number thirteen, though I don’t think there were thirteen tapes released, all told. There’s more stuff there. I listen to it sometimes now and I can hear all the faults with it… but, you know, some of it’s still quite exciting to listen to.

What other artifacts exist from The Cleaners from Venus era. Do you have any of those T-shirts left?

Oh, there is one T-shirt and there’s a very famous picture of Captain Sensible and Joey Ramone and Dave Vanian of The Damned all standing together with Captain wearing the Cleaners From Venus T-shirt, one of the originals. And I have one left which my daughter was using as a night shirt but I recently managed to retrieve it at the laundrette and its still just about intact.

Sell it… to me (laughs)!

Well a friend of mine says we should sell T-shirts.

You should! And that original one’s a great design, nothing fancy but to the point. It looks like the same lettering from the “Ilya Kurayakin” picture sleeve.

It just says “Cleaners From Venus” and on the back it says “A Victory for Common Sense”.

In one of the major interviews on your website, the interview asks “when are you going to re-record some of the classic early Cleaners-period songs and give them the proper treatment and sound fidelity they deserve?”. Personally, I have reservations about this approach because I find the original recordings to be extremely charming and effective the way they are. It seems it would be impossible to capture the spark and feel of the early tape versions… and you’d need a time machine, like Doc Brown, to capture the peculiar spirit of the times.

Well exactly. But sometimes I will actually play the songs on a guitar because, well… one sort-of orthodox part of my musical upbringing was that I learned from an A&R man when I was seventeen that if a song is any good it will stand up on one instrument with one voice. And some of those songs will. I could probably sit down with a guitar or a piano and say “well, this is what it is”. So, you know when I do my Golden Afternoon every year… do you know about that?

Is there a clip of that up on the internet, with you playing “Julie Profumo” live?

Yeah there is. I do one concert every year and have done since 2003 in England in the local arts centre, which is a lovely old church, and I play a selection of my old songs. It’s usually just me playing on a guitar or a piano sometimes accompanied by another musician or maybe two musicians. There’s never a drum kit and we just do the songs as basically as we can. We’re just trying to get some of the feeling out of them.

I remember watching the Beatles Anthology; the part when George Harrison was talking about “If I Needed Someone” or some track of his off of “Revolver”…

Uh… that was “Rubber Soul”…

Oh no, now I’ve done it myself! Well anyway, in the program George asks the interviewer to tell him which of those two albums the song was from… I mean, it’s funny that billions of Beatle fans know every little factoid, but not George. He says he can never tell the two albums apart, but nevertheless he feels it was the golden period for them…

Yeah, it’s a great period that. It’s my favorite Beatles period.

So, for you, Martin, is there a phase of The Cleaners from Venus that you would consider your heyday. A Saturnian age, perhaps?

Ummmm… that is quite a hard question, actually…. Yeah! There is the period where we went to record, where we did an album called “Going to England”. Round about that period. Round about 1985/86. I think we really hit our stride then. There were some good songs going on then; some really good songs.

Songs like “Follow The Plough”. That was probably the first song I ever really got into by you guys. And it’s maybe one of the more “rock” type songs in your whole catalogue. It almost has the feel of “New Years Day” by U2 or something like that. But, the consensus among the particular set of Cleaners aficionados I’m in touch with would probably be the period of a few years earlier, more around the time of “Midnight Cleaners”…

“Midnight Cleaners” was pretty good. That was great fun, yeah, yeah! And the other bit was, I suppose, “On Any Normal Monday”.

Yes, from the period when you were collaborating with Lol Elliot around 82-83 there are so many catchy little masterpieces. From “On Any Normal Monday” and “Midnight Cleaners” on through “In The Golden Autumn” there is very little filler.

Yeah, but they’re very crude. I listen to them now and I think “aw, bloody hell that could’ve been shorter…” I think one thing I’ve really learned from Andy Partridge when I worked with him, was self-editing skills. You know, he taught me when to end a song, I think.

But that’s something that makes your work from that period so unique. If certain songs were shorter, and didn’t have spoken word ramblings and noodling saxophones and clanging xylophones, they wouldn’t be so endearing, so odd… and attractive to people who like their music to be a bit obtuse. And those weird moments fit nicely in between the proper pop songs to help create the overall mood, making the cassettes each their own little secret journey or something. So, when Burger Records approached you to do these re-issues of your early tapes, what did they initially propose?

I kept hearing these rumors that, you know “a lot of people like The Cleaners From Venus on the West Coast here in San Francisco and Los Angeles” and I just thought… Really? Why? You know, it seemed like years ago to me. But I’m not a burned-out musician; I’m still as enthusiastic as I ever was. And because (laughs) I kept walking out of record companies, I’ve never really been crushed by them. So, I lived to fight again. I’m kind of like a- I don’t know, I hesitate to use the expression really- but it’s like I’m a terrorist organization, because I don’t have a particular state, a particular country… I’ll never be the ruler of any thing but I’ll always live to fight another day.

And a lot of what you supposedly did “wrong” back in those days, which might be viewed as mistakes by some, like “you should have signed with that major label or gone on that tour that time”, has served you in that it’s created an enormous amount of mystique about you. You’ve almost become like a living Nick Drake or a not-crazy-Syd Barrett-who-hasn’t-quite-disappeared or something like that.

Yes, it has created a mystique. It probably has. But what it hasn’t done is made me a lot of money (laughs).

Yes, but at the same time you’re not ruined by over-exposure. You could go out there and re-launch yourself, whereas others from your “generation” who’ve gone out time and time again – and I don’t want to name names- but say, Dave Wakeling or someone… and his New Fun Boy Special Beat Cannibals… he’s sort-of on his ninth showbiz life and is basically spent. There’s always a new album and a new tour and the critical world seems to say “Oh gawd, not him again!”.

Oh, everyone does it! Everyone does it. No, I haven’t done it because… I don’t know, I just haven’t done it! I’m reasonably happy doing what I’m doing. I don’t think I’d really like having a big audience.

You have a small audience, but it’s an uncommonly dedicated following. Take a garden-variety band from the same period like China Crisis. They have a much larger number of people who are mildly interested in them; that think they have a few good tunes and are generally fond of them- but you, with The Cleaners From Venus, get a comparatively modest population of people who think you’re absolutely “it”. So there’s a balance… and maybe it adds up to the same overall quantity of love in the end.

Well, and another reason I don’t get out there so much is I don’t really like getting on planes very much. It’s very difficult to do it now anyway (chuckles).

Well, what you’ve heard about a flurry of people in Los Angeles getting into The Cleaners from Venus lately in California is true, so it might be worth you hopping on a flight to LA to see for yourself. Even before the reissues came out, hipster kids on the East side were passing the Cleaners music around, going like, “Hey have you heard of these guys yet”, almost as if you were a new band or something.

Oh right! Well, that’s very, very sort-of flattering, but you know, I’m quite old now… ha ha ha!

Well, it’s an interesting thing, because the audience-in-question seems to be in their early or mid-twenties. In their lifetime cassette decks haven’t been widely in use, except for when they were babies!

I don’t know who’s selling the stuff, either! Because I’m probably not getting any money from it.

Oh, I’m sure you’re not. It’s all on Ebay and places like that. People are hunting down the old LPs and cassettes; downloading the cassette music for free from blogs or circulating home made copies of the “Cassettes on CD” series you did some time back.

Well, that was the pretext that we started on, we did say let’s just kind-of give it away, You know, “no rights reserved”, so I’ve asked for that one really. It’d be nice to get a bit of rent money out of it here and there, though.

Yeah, but no one’s really selling a lot right now, so you’re not alone. Culture Club isn’t benefiting from that sort of Ebay trade either! But still, over the years you’ve created a little underground sensation by this method of making it a secret, free thing that people can pass to each other and say, “Wow, listen to this! You can’t find this anywhere.”

Yeah, that is good. I quite like that. Yeah and also it’s annoying for the record industry, ‘cause we’re the one thing that they can’t have (laughs).

How do you feel about the record industry now that they seem to be doomed? Does it make you happy or do you feel pangs of sympathy?

Um… It doesn’t make me as happy as I thought it would. You know, when we started DIY I had this saying based on the John Lennon thing, “What if they started a war and nobody came?” I said “What if they started a record company and nobody signed?” That’s actually happened now. You know, but I don’t feel particularly jubilant in victory, I just thought it would probably happen if they got too greedy. They slit the goose open that laid the golden egg and, yeah, they had another golden egg, but they had no more goose (laughs).

So as far as you’re concerned, it’s more an ‘I told you so”-type scenario. But for someone like yourself, for whom, I imagine, going to the record shop back in the salad days of pop and rifling through the great hit singles of the day was a way of life, it’s a bit depressing.

Yeah, it is. But as I’ve also said, as long as young men and women want to make music and hurl themselves willingly into the sausage machine, businessmen will find ways of getting money out of it and taking the money. That’s one thing they can’t do with us. Well, they probably could but I wouldn’t care, they could probably only take me for a certain amount.

I want to a make a point of asking you about the three tapes in particular that Burger Records has on release. I have them right here and they are “Midnight Cleaners” (1982), “In The Golden Autumn” (1983) and “Under Wartime Conditions” (1984); three consecutive albums that were originally put out as cassette-only releases… And now they’re back and available in very limited quantities from Burger. So I thought, to make things flow better, I would stagger it and ask about each tape in separate little bursts here and there throughout the interview, to avoid this turning into a trivia quiz.

All right, go ahead.

So, tell me a bit about the first of the three, “Midnight Cleaners”…

I remember it was a Winter album. I think the actual title track was quite avant-garde. I had a friend called Mick Brannan play sax on it. A lot of people said “I like that, you should do more of that”. But my favorite song on it was “Wretched Street” probably.

And there’s also a dance-y song on it: “Corridor of Dreams”. It almost has a Haircut 100 feel about it.

Yeah, it did sound like that. You know, I never really got that right and then I had a big row with my girlfriend at the time about that. You know, she was upset because I changed a line in it that was referring to her. We had a row and I said “Okay, I’ll take you out of it”. When I took it out and she heard the final thing she went “You’ve taken me out of it!” and I said “You said you didn’t like it so I took you out” and I don’t know, there’s no explaining women really, is there?

And “Only a Shadow”? Is that a song about seeing a ghost?

Yeah, that really was a true story about the first unexplainable thing that happened to me there; there was something out there behind me once and I just said to it “Is that you?” and they said, no, there was no one there. And I said, “You were standing behind me” and it said “No”. It’s a long story, but that was about a ghost, yeah.

A good friend of mine who is a real Cleaners booster in these parts- the guy who is probably responsible for a lot of the current hubbub if you trace it back – his name is Jimi Hey, mentioned that he thought you might have some interesting theories/opinions about UFOs or aliens? He wanted me to ask if you’d like to share your views on the subject, past or present. And with Stephen Hawking bringing the subject up and scaring everyone in the news recently, I guess it’s topical.

I always found the subject of aliens to be good comedy stuff, as did Lol, who once wrote a song called “UFO Over Urmston”, a district in the north of England. I was actually much more interested in ghosts, time travel and the supernatural.

Who were the earliest fans of The Cleaners from Venus? Who responded to this music back then?

Well, there were some people in Germany and there were people all over England really; a small group of them. They’d write and say “I must have the new Cleaners cassette.” We gathered that they were probably quite young; they were younger than us then and we were still in our twenties. We think they probably liked psychedelic music. We think they probably smoked some dope. We think they were free thinkers. That’s the only evidence we have (laughs). From the way they wrote their letters and the kinds of things they said. They were fans of a kind of “lost freedom” really, as we were ourselves.

Speaking of “lost freedom”… As a young person in England back around 1982, did you feel that certain freedoms had been revoked? It seems that you, Lol and some of your like-minded peers were on some sort of quest; looking back on the psychedelic era (and earlier) with fondness and developing a sort-of “social surrealist” outlook as opposed to some of the harsher punk-type stuff that was still sort-of lingering on the scene. Can you comment on the social climate in England around the time of the early Cassette period?

Cultural decades rarely turn on their own chronological axis.The 50s for instance weren’t really over (in England, at least) until 1963, after the Profumo scandal and the Beatles. Similarly, the 80s didn’t really begin –and the last vestiges of the 60s weren’t really over — until about 1982, when Mrs Margaret Thatcher had PM for almost three years. We’d had the Falklands conflict, she’d begun to smash the unions, and the monetarist ethos had finally filtered down to what you in the USA call the blue collar sector. Her administration had actually tinkered with the very social fabric of a previously laid-back and not particularly acquisitive English people. The hippie / bohemian ideal was finally over. It wasn’t even good enough not to be rich anymore. You had, if you were poor, to want to be seen to want to be rich…a notion previously thought vulgar by the liberal bien-pensant of my nation. Essentially, I suppose, those of us among the ragged artistic types of people, and I was one, suddenly felt that the party was over. There was, as I say in one of those early songs of mine: ” Less room for you to dream.” Suddenly, everyone was a car owner, a home owner or had some spurious aspiration It was, of course, no less of an illusion than the the hippie bubble had been. The young, many of them, were unemployed. There were no provisions for those who weren’t employed, other than to attend stupid courses to prepare them for jobs in the services industry. There was however, at the same time a defiant counterblast of energy in pop music, satire and the arts. This was born of people, who, like prisoners with nothing to do, decided to paint the walls, dance and sing, rather than do nothing. Those few people who liked Cleaners music, were of that type, I suppose. Many people, however, were not. The echoes of the 1980s still reverberate down the two following decades. A cheery and doughty optimism has somehow been lost in the process.

So, when Burger proposed these re-releases, did they originally want to do vinyl or CDs?

They wanted to do cassettes! They wanted to put the cassettes out as they were. Which I was so mystified by, I didn’t know that many people still had cassette machines.

Well, here in L.A. it’s a little different than elsewhere. Everyone has to spend so much time in their cars. And the younger, hipper, “free thinkers” are more likely to have older, crummier cars, with built-in out-of-date cassette players as their only source of recorded music for the road. So it’s actually a viable market with the bohemian music kids here.

Of course, of course! So we’re finally benefiting from car culture!

And some of these kids are scrambling to find interesting music on cassette…

Ha ha ha ha! Oh right, oh wow, that solves it then! Yeah, but I think Burger maybe, I don’t know, but they mentioned it, eventually may put some of this stuff to CD.

I was hoping for LP records! I’m a DJ and I’ve tracked down a copy of that limited edition box set of EPs. I personally think that CDs are becoming something that people take for granted. You can leave them out in the sun, scratch them up, throw them around… and simply burn another copy if need be. Whereas, people take great care with their vinyl. They store and handle it with respect. It’s the collector’s format.

Vinyl is actually a much better way of storing sound. They did some tests a couple of years ago and they found that vinyl archives last for over a hundred years and that’s as far as they know. It’s a very, very good way of preserving sound.

Well, I have CD-Rs that are maybe two or three years old that sound digitally corrupted. There’s a clicking noise underneath the recording. Like the sound is being chewed-up. And if you drop a CD on the floor and get a nick on them, they’re history! On the other hand I’ve got sixty-or-so year old records, caked in dust, which sound loud and great, relatively speaking. I must admit that I was a little disappointed, because I’d originally heard that Burger was trying to re-release the Cleaners tapes on vinyl. When the cassettes came out, I thought to myself… “yeah, but I’ve already got them on cassette.” I actually spent a good deal of time searching-out the original issues of the cassettes on ebay. Of course, as a completist, I still had to get the reissue cassettes. But, I really wanted something I could throw on the turntable… and not to have to listen to only in Jimi Hey’s Volvo!

Well, maybe they will put out stuff on vinyl. If they have the capacity to do it, if the market’s I guess there they will. But I haven’t really spoken to them in great detail, in fact, we haven’t really arranged anything! They all seemed very enthusiastic young chaps so I just said, well go ahead, what have we got to lose?

Yeah, I think they’ve done a good job and they certainly put together a nice little event here on the East side of Los Angeles in honor of the cassettes being released. But it seems a bit limited in terms of its potential. I mean, one can’t realistically expect a cassette-only release to make thousands of dollars in profits these days, or even hundreds for that matter.

No, but it could go to CD and vinyl eventually, couldn’t it?

I think vinyl is the way to go; that way you’re not ‘giving it away’ again, being that records are more of a pain to copy for someone. Not only would it be a desirable collectible but DJs could play it out and more or less advertise the music. I know you’re not necessarily “Mr. Marketing” (Martin laughs), but that is an organic way for the music to spread and become more well known… and don’t you like the idea of people hearing your music during a night out, or even dancing to it?

Well, that would be interesting seeing people dance to Cleaners songs. I must put more tempo changes in in the future. Ha ha ha.

“Songs for a Fallow Land” is a perfect tape in my opinion. One of the best you ever did. And that’s the first full-length tape credited to you under your own name, as Martin Newell.** (**“Two for Winter” was an earlier EP done as Martin Newell)

Yeah, because Lol had moved by this time. I think there was somebody else who helped me out a bit, but I think I mostly did that one by myself.

It says on the tape insert “I played everything”. That’s pretty impressive, because you work in a variety of styles and it pretty much displays the whole range of the Cleaners sound in one concise set. I’d probably recommend someone listen to that tape first if they wanted to know what you guys were about… except for the fact that it’s not technically the Cleaners.

“Julie Profumo” was on that. It was the gateway to the next album, the next phase really.

To “Living with Victoria Grey” and your alliance with Giles Smith.

Yeah and that in itself lead to us doing our first vinyl album, “Going to England”, which did actually sell quite well despite what Giles wrote about it. We did about ten thousand in Germany on that, you know. And that’s quite a lot to do cold; before we’d even toured there.

A different direction for The Cleaners arrives in the Giles period. It even gets kind of soul-pop, like Prefab Sprout or Style Council. On the other hand, there’s the “Oranges and Lemons” era XTC, Robyn Hitchcock-type thing coming to full fruition then as well.

Giles was sort of like Robert Palmer in a way. I think he would rather have been black and, as I sometimes joked, a black woman at that… Aretha Franklin possibly. For a preppy middle class kid, he was very up on soul and black music generally. That brought a really different dimension to the Cleaners.

Oh… how do you like the poem that John Cooper Clarke wrote about you, “Martin Newell”?

I was very flattered by it.

He riffs on the gardening thing pretty heavily.

Yeah he does because when I met him I’d just started doing poetry and I stopped doing music. Gardening was rather a large source of income to me. You know, when you have a little English gardening round and you’ve promised, say Mrs. Barnard, that you’ll come and do the lawn before it gets too long, nature won’t wait! So I would go and do a gig and then come back from that gig –and I might have covered myself in glory; I might have even been through a tour- but I would come back and do that garden and sort it out as I’d promised.

Did you plan out the early cassettes as sort-of little concept albums when you set out to do them? Something like “In the Golden Autumn” seems that way, at least in how it portrays a certain mood throughout; how the lyrical themes tend to pop up repeatedly in various songs. Or, are the tapes merely a collection of tracks and what you had ready, you put out?

No. I had an idea. Right, you know when the Beatles had to work so fast because they were on tour the whole time and they were expected to come out with six singles and two albums a year, which is an unprecedented amount of work compared to today, and I thought in doing that they were very much writing as they went along. So they would probably write an album in the course of a month or something like that and have it out four weeks later and that captured a mood and a zeitgeist. I thought that if we worked that fast we might capture some of the atmosphere of the time and everything would sound a lot fresher and I still believe that. I still believe in doing things quickly.

I would say that when the Cleaners started they sound quite a bit more avant-garde and all-over-the-place; genre hopping with synth drums and saxophones… and by the time things fizzled out for the Cleaners when Giles was in the group around ‘87, you had kind of formalized the sound, which was by then leaning in a sixties direction. Not sixties in the “experimentation” sense, but in the revivalist sense- like you wanted the records to reference and sound like sixties records. It was retro in comparison to the early stuff, which was more in step with a contemporary post-punk thing.

Yeah, it was. Well I think that just happened; that I got rather better at what I was doing. I did want to try and make what I call a garden shed “Sgt. Pepper” if you like, or a garden shed “Revolver”. I knew I couldn’t make the real thing cause we just didn’t have the technology. But I thought that maybe if I really tried very hard I could make a kind of post-punk version of a “Rubber Soul”. That was my ambition and it probably still is in a way.

Now, speaking in regard to the music on your earliest tapes, were you informed at all by the current music of the day?

Oh yeah, that definitely leaked into us. You know, the Sex Pistols and all that stuff. And Lol brought a lot of that to it as well. Lol was very modern. He was very much a creature of his age. He was about five years younger than me, so he brought a lot of that “let’s do it right now and who cares about the racket” towards it.

Around the time of those early cassettes, 1981, 82, 83, there were lots of bands in England mining similar territory, I think. Maybe The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and The Bunnymen… even though they were on bigger labels and recording in glossy studios, relatively speaking, they were making comparable psychedelic pop music.

Yes they were. And especially The Cure; I think the early Cure stuff was really good. I think they had very much the same spirit as us, especially if you listen to something like “A Forest”. That was something that I heard at the time and I thought “That’s pretty good!” ‘Cause they’d used drum machine and said it’s drum machine and presented it like “it’s only a drum machine” and it sounded pretty good! It was a good case for a drum machine.

People who categorize the Cleaners as something obscure and exclusive – like, “it’s only on cassette, it’s muddy and weird” – don’t give it credit for being so accessible. It’s really just creative and fun pop music, albeit slightly unhinged… quite like a lot of things that were on the UK charts from the same period.

Yeah, I think that’s the thing about English pop music generally. The Americans, and particularly I’ve noticed that with Americans, they’re often much better musicians technically. But I think that English people maybe -to use a terrible cliché- think out of the box more. They just think “we’ll do this” and if something go wrong and it sounds a bit odd, they won’t say “Oh that’s technically wrong”, they’ll go “Oh, that sounds quite interesting, we’ll keep that!” That’s not to say that Americans sometimes don’t do it as well. If you listen to, say, The Flaming Lips, they’re a favorite of mine, they do some interesting stuff. And they’ve got a kind of “back to analogue” attitude.

Kamagra online available: The online availability of this drug has also cures pulmonary hypertension. pharma-bi.com generico cialis on line This way visit this storefront now viagra low price you can avoid having to go out to a crowded pharmacy. According to scientific research studies based on vitro test subjects, this peptide buying viagra from canada helps to boost bone growth, and muscle repair. In on line cialis addition, heavy consumption of drinks can also lead to erection issues in males. Yeah, I guess there were a few bands in America around that time; maybe they showed up a little later, like the Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets and Husker Du… they were all dabbling in strange, personal, somewhat psychedelic sounds for a limited, yet die-hard fan base…

And the Eels; I think they were quite good but I never got into them as much. But Flaming Lips… I went out and bought one of their records I liked them that much and that’s saying a lot coming from me. Just every so often I heard American stuff and I thought “Bloody hell, they’re really good at this”. I mean, I was a big Beach Boys fan for a start.

Referring back to Giles’ book again, and how he paints you as somewhat of a neurotic character in it; you don’t like air travel, etc. Is there some sort of fear involved which explains your history of not actively seeking fame and fortune? Giles might say you’ve sabotaged your career several times over in that regard.

I have known people much more famous than me and I do not know one of them who hasn’t been, in some way, damaged by it or scarred. And all of my scars are my own. They’re not things that have happened to me as a result of being traumatized by the ghastliness of the music industry. But I actually really am a homebody; I think one central thing is that all throughout my life I’ve always just wanted to kind-of stay where I was, but my destiny seemed to have been to travel right from a very early age. My dad was in the army and then I joined a band. I’ve done an awful lot of traveling. I’ve been to some very strange places. I’ve been to the Falklands- the Falkland Islands and I’ve been to Iceland and I’ve lived in Singapore and on Cyprus and I’ve been to Japan twice, so it’s not like I’m scared of travel. I actually just like being where I am. And as I get older, the more that becomes the case. But it doesn’t preclude me traveling. I’ve never ruled out going to America but I think I’d have to go on a boat or something. ‘Cause I’m not putting up with all that stuff where, you know, you’re standing at four o’clock in the morning with your belt and your shoes off having your aftershave analyzed.

Yeah, Martin Newell’s voyage to America by steamer ship; that would be a great documentary project for you as well.

Well, that’s the romantic idea for me, like Oscar Wilde or something stepping ashore in a cape with a cocked hat saying “I’ve got nothing to declare but my genius” (laughs)

I love the opening scenes of Stephen Fry’s Oscar Wilde movie, where he seems so out of place visiting some horribly depressing coalmine in Virginia or somewhere.

He was really amazing, Oscar Wilde, he was an incredible bloke. He was one of my heroes. Him and there’s a couple of American writers I really like. One of them is PJ O’Rourke.

From National Lampoon?!?!

Yeah, but also I’ve got loads of his books. He’s just such a great writer. You know he used to write for hippie underground magazines. Then he crossed the floor as we say; he went from left to right. And I think he did it with a certain amount of irony but he also did it with an enormous amount of good sense.

In his early days at the Lampoon, PJ was apparently one of the most radical leftists on the staff, known for chastising the other writers for being complacent, elitist dilettantes; he would always be railing on about “the straights” and things like that.

Yes, but like all people- and I myself was like that- you kind of get over it. Ha! I’m not saying I espouse right wing values necessarily, but you get wisdom and you realize that there are certain old gentlemen on the right who have seen nearly every situation you could envisage. And it’s not like they’re all villains, many of them know what their ideal is, but see that the world is not like that. In other words, what I’m saying to you is that a cynic is only a rusted-up romantic. I think if you dug deep into the core of PJ O’Rourke, you’d probably find, you know, a romantic under there somewhere. Or else he wouldn’t be able to write like that.

In my opinion, I think the seed of change got planted in him around the time of his infamous “Foreigners around the World” article for National Lampoon. It was an unrelenting parody in encyclopedia form that broke down every different race and culture using every possible cliché and slur to explain about them. I think he got so much angry mail from the humorless, left-wing PC types after that that he realized it was much more fun to piss them off than stay with the cause.

I can see how that would happen, that ostensible switch from left to right. A very similar awareness of the humorless hypocrisy of the left happened to me too, in the 1990s. I remain broadly anarchist /humanitarian/socialist however.

Phew! That’s a relief. I was worried for a second there.

Another American author I like is Mark Twain. The centenary of his death is coming up. Have you read any Mark Twain?

Oh definitely. We’re force-fed “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” in our schools here. Some of us went on to “A Connecticut Yankee…” in college, but other than those, I’d be interested to know what you’re into.

“The Prince and The Pauper” is really pretty good, I read Huck and Tom when I was a kid. “A Connecticut Yankee” is a great story. I think I would like to have met Mark Twain. A very witty sort of man, I think. I like Washington Irving too.

Wow, I’m sure PJ O’Rourke would be flattered to hear his self being sandwiched between the likes of Mark Twain and Washington Irving. It’s funny; it would have never dawned on me that we might end up talking about PJ O’Rourke in this interview. It’s the last thing on earth I would have thought of, actually. How did you encounter his writing?

He was Rolling Stone’s foreign correspondent for a while. I think he got the job by default. He’s just such a tremendous writer and he’s so funny. And I think a lot of people, especially on the left, don’t realize that.
Can you recommend a book to start with by PJ O’Rourke?

My own favourite PJ O’Rouke book is Age and Guile beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut. Incredible series of essays, It’s a good introduction to him and his work.

Okay, let’s go on to the next one in the series Burger releases, 1983’s “In the Golden Autumn”. Following the Winter record that was “Midnight Cleaners”, this was obviously an Autumn album, wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, it really was, that really was. I used to do albums by the season and that one was Autumn and I wanted to make a nice Autumn record.

You reference autumn a lot in your work, even now. It must be your favorite season.

Yeah, it was, but spring’s beginning to catch up now. It seems that now as my bones ache I’m beginning to enjoy spring a bit more. We just had a really hard winter here.

So let’s talk about some of the individual songs. What’s a “Holloway Person”?

Oh, that was actually based on a real woman that I knew when I was eighteen who was in and out of prison. Holloway is a women’s prison. She was a friend, not even a girlfriend, but she was someone who I liked, but you know… She stole things; she sold drugs… She was rather an exotic woman to me. She was very sort-of hard. She always went out with my friends, not with me. I don’t think I was quite, um, villainous enough for her, ha ha. She liked villains.

“Ghosts in Doorways”… Now, Giles Smith, in his book “Lost in Music”, tells the story of first night he moved into the big, scary, old house you were managing back in the mid-eighties. You apparently told him stories of a ghost lady who was often found lurking outside his bedroom door. And you spooked him!

No I didn’t spook him. It was really haunted. England is full of old houses and that house was the only house I’ve lived in that some very strange things did occur. It’s the only house I’ve been in where, you know, things got mysteriously hurled around and people saw stuff and heard things that weren’t there… all the time!

So what is the legend of that house?

It was an old doctor’s house. I think it had been maybe a children’s sanitarium at some point as well. It was just an old house. It seemed to be imbued with, I don’t know, just some kind of hauntedness. There was a period where lots of strange things happened there and Giles, like all good Atheists, was more scared of ghosts than people who maybe have religion or actually subscribe to any kind of spirituality (chuckles).

So, let me ask you, then. Was “Ghosts in Doorways” inspired by the goings-on at that old house?

No it was not. That’s a much earlier song.

So, you include ghosts in your theory of existence.

Yeah, I do, yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, I do. I don’t go around looking for them or anything, but if someone says to me they believe in ghosts or something like that, I usually say “Well that’s fair enough”. Yeah, because I have actually encountered such things. But, you know, I don’t belong to any mystical religion or anything.

There’s a pair of songs on “In The Golden Autumn” – and actually they begin each side of the tape – “Renee (Who’s Driving Your Car?)” and “Krugerrand Gladiators”. Both are driving, exuberant, crazed performances, representing the more punk-type component of the Cleaners’ sound. “Krugerrand” is a kind of angry rant against consumer culture.

Yes it is, yeah.

I’d maybe point the people who are coming in from the Damned direction to check out those two songs for their initiation into the Cleaners klub. And I’d probably play some of the more whimsical, pastoral pop fare from the later tapes, like “Golden Lane” or “Clara Bow”, for the XTC folk. So what’s “Renee (Who’s Driving Your Car?)” all about anyway?

I don’t remember much about it. I heard it for the first time in twenty years when Burger remastered it. I remember thinking “Oh, this is a big driving song and it’s good and cheerful”, but I don’t remember much about writing it or what it was about. Oh yeah- I think it was obviously looking back to a more exciting time, that’s all. Of young people having fun and, you know, “what’s happening now”; “who’s making that sort of excitement now”. I think it was as simple as that. I probably threw the lyrics away, rather. I probably had a good tune and a good melody and just thought “Oh this needs some lyrics” and probably wrote them like that ‘cause I would do that sometimes.

Do you have any special favorite songs from the Cleaners’ cassette period that you still hold dear or that you’re most proud of?

Yeah, er… “Julie Profumo”. “Julie Profumo” is a good song and, um…. hmm… what else do I like… well, there’s quite a few things. “Ilya Kurayakin”. That’s a good song.

One of my favorites is “Marilyn on a Train”.

We lost the master of that, you know. We did an original version of it on “Blow Away Your Troubles”, I think, and it was a better version but it’s very lo-fi. And then we did it later on on “In The Golden Autumn”. And that’s the one thing I don’t have the original four-track master of. I don’t know what happened to it!

Is there any unreleased music from the early Cleaners days that never made it onto one of the cassettes?

Yeah, Lol has some of it. There was a really, really good one from the “Blow Away Your Troubles” period. Uh…arrgh, what was I called? I could sing it to you, but I can’t remember the title. Ha! I’m sorry, that’s really useless of me. I’ll probably remember what it is later and I’ll email you the title of it. Oh, that’s right… it was called “The Meltdown Wahtusi”. That song was pretty good.

Why would that have not made the tape?

What we used to do is, once we’d got a load of songs down, Lol would be sitting there with the two tape machines, just digging individual song masters out of the drawer and banging them onto the tape in whatever order. So when you bought the Cleaners tape, depending on what kind of mood Lol was in or what he’d smoked or what he’d drunk or something like that, you got a completely different version of it to what other people got (laughs). I mean, the “Blow Away Your Troubles” that you know is standardized, but the first ones… we had forty songs and the tape would take something like twenty-four of them or something, so you got the twenty-four songs that came up first, not necessarily in that order!

How long did these little opuses take to create? The multi-tracking seems pretty well thought out.

Well “Blow Away Your Troubles” wasn’t even done on a four track; it was done on a sound-on-sound machine. It was done on a Sony TC-630 by bouncing and they were all in mono. You recorded on the left, listened to it and recorded on the right. Then you went back. So, you couldn’t have stereo. You know, getting a Portastudio was a major breakthrough. But we didn’t get one till 1981, I think. That Autumn.

Would you lay down basic tracks and think about them, sit on them a while and then add on various layers and vocals over time or…

No, we did it all in a day. What we would do was we had a WEM Copycat with four inputs, it was the only thing with four inputs we had, so Lol’d sit on the drums and I’d have the bass and we’d play the bass and drums. And sometimes we’d just freeform it in verse-chorus-verse-chorus shape till we’d got something we liked. And then I’d go and put some guitar on it and then we’d put some vocals on it and we’d often do two over the course of the day. And that’s how things like “Swinging London” happened.

Who is Lawrence “Lol” Elliott, anyhow? There’s not a tremendous amount of information available about him out there. And how did you meet up with him?

Well, Lol moved to Wivenhoe, which is my village, when he was about nineteen or twenty and I guess I was about twenty-five or twenty-six. He was a Northerner and he came up to me in a pub where I was drinking and said “Have you got any drugs?” (laughs) and I said “No, I didn’t, furthermore I was very unlikely to have any”. Then I got talking to him about music and we just kind of got on, you know. He was young lad; he was quite fond of smoking dope and taking magic mushrooms and things.

Was he touting himself as a musician or did he just fall into that with you?

He was actually a very creative guy. Earlier on in his teenage years he’d written a couple of plays. He’d left school early when he was fifteen and joined a hippie traveling commune or something like that. You know, he traveled around on a bus and he was just one of these free-form musicians. He had an old, cheap drum kit and he just set up and played it with whoever would have him. He moved to a house in Wivenhoe with two of his friends and I just got to know him cause he was round the pubs. I liked his attitude, he was a very cheerful northern lad. He was a great guy, he became my best friend really. Very good chap; very positive, very lateral thinking… you know, just a bit ‘out there’ really.

Are you still in touch with him?

Yeah I am. I went to do a gig in Bath. He lives way over the other side of the country now in Bath, which is quite a long way west from here, it’s two hundred odd miles which is a long way in England, especially if nobody drives. He lives in a really nice place there. He had a bit of an accident, well not an accident, he was attacked by some guys, round about the time we made “The Greatest Living Englishman” in 1993, and he got a terrible kick in the head and it damaged his hearing… and it damaged him for a while, he was very, very depressed for years and I was out of touch with him. But he gradually got better, he’s found some equilibrium. But if you go round to his house now, which is in a beautiful square in that lovely Georgian city, and he’s still got really old gear everywhere; he picks it up from jumble sales, you know what a jumble sale is? A Bric-a-brac sale. A car boot sale or something like that. What do you call those in America?

Like a yard sale or a garage sale?

Yeah, it’s something like that but it’s where lots of people sell the stuff from their garages all in one place.

Oh, that’s called a swap meet or flea market here.

Yeah, something like that. But Lol goes round and he gets ancient old instruments and things like that and old tape recorders and he does them up and fiddles with them and he still records on that. When you go round there (laughs) things may work or they may not. He’s still working on the same principle as we always used to. You know, “this might work or it might not” and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t (laughs). He’s still very much like that. He’s like a wild creature; it’s as if you took a liking to a fox or particular kind of a raven or a blackbird or something like that. They’re very beautiful to watch and they’re lovely to interact with, but you can’t kind of tame them and make them do circus tricks. When the Cleaners got a record contract, Lol had moved to Bath then. And I invited him back to play drums on the “Going to England” sessions, which Giles wasn’t keen on, cause Giles was very much an apollonian, city-type college kid. He was a very smart guy as well, you know; a really intelligent guy, a dazzling urbanite really. And Lol was a free-form hippie and the two of them got on all right, they didn’t argue really or anything. But they didn’t really understand each other. But I said “No, we’ve gotta have Lol back, we’ve got a record contract now! We need Lol in the studio!” So I got some money out of the record company and we paid for him to come up from Bath and play drums… but he only lasted about three tracks, that sort-of-thing. But I still think those three tracks on the album are the best ones.

Would you ever think of inviting him to your Golden Afternoon concert?

Yeah, whether he’d come or not I don’t know and whether he’d play is something completely else.

But do you envisage working with him again at some point?

He’s a lifelong friend of mine; you know- he’s a force for good. But he’s very much out there. He’s still doing tapes every so often. They’re very much soundscape type of things. They’re very psychedelic.

He doesn’t sing on any of the Cleaners stuff, does he?

Singing? Lol used to sing on the early things. He did used to sing on them. In fact, if you listen to “On Any Normal Monday”, he sings on quite a lot of them.

Yeah, I recently had a debate with someone because I thought that it was him singing on the verses of “Living on Nerve Ends”.

Yeah, he does. He sings them. And not only that he sings “Spirit of Youth in Flames” as well, that’s all him.

Wow, that’s interesting. He’s largely thought of as just your drummer/sidekick. Like a Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst of The Cure to your Robert Smith- there’s the Cure parallel again. The “other guy” in all duo bands should be named Lol, I think. Lol Garfunkel. Lol Oates.

No, “Spirit of Youth” is Lol’s song. I don’t think I did much on that apart from master it up a bit, you know. He brought that along and I thought “Yeah that’s interesting, I’ll have that”. He sang on all sorts of things.

So, if Lol, as a collaborator, brought out the off-the-wall facet of your musical personality, what did his more-or-less replacement, Giles Smith, bring out in you?

Giles brought a kind of coherency, logic and organisation to the table. He’s also an extremely clever and witty bloke, who happened to be a very good musician. A good person to have on the team.

And his book “Lost in Music”, despite what you yourself might take issue with, is excellent; it’s genius! It is a must-read for anyone who has wasted as much time as I have bothering about pop music. I urge every record freak out there to down track a copy. But compared to Giles’ book, which I found to be very funny and a light read, your book, “This Little Ziggy” was gripping, and kind of heavy and depressing at times. There’s a sad story in there. You were in a dark place at one point in your teens. You were upset about a recent breakup and you were frazzled with drink and drugs; at one point after a week-long acid-eating contest you broke down in tears. Sometime after that you spent a lot of time, as an escape from the dreariness, immersing yourself in a picture book depicting the afterlife as per Norse mythology. You decided you wanted out of your life, that you wanted to see Valhalla for yourself and you attempted suicide with an overdose of pills.

I think I needed to get out of the tumult of youth and all its attendant perils, before my head cleared. I don’t blame my dad, but it’s salient that during my teen years, there was no older, guiding male presence to advise me. I was out of my depth for a while.

Did you end up channeling some of the restlessness, confusion and anger of your youth into a more productive process than drinking and taking drugs by doing music… how did you make the transformation, from borderline hooligan to creative musician-type?

As soon as I locked into creativity, due initially to joining a rock group, I began to really like my life, again.

There are also several funny moments in “This Little Ziggy”; I recall one story about you waking up in the middle of the night at the place you’d crashed at after some post-gig partying. You’re stumbling around in the dark looking for somewhere to urinate. You’re feeling around and are knocking things over when you come across an open window. You proceed to have an epic piss during which, you said something to the effect that, ideas for entire concept albums came to you, et cetera. The next morning you looked out the window and saw no evidence of the event, however… mysteriously under a window about two rooms down… was a huge puddle.

Ahh, the mystery of the Special Brew, yeah.

That’s my question: what is Special Brew? I frequently see it mentioned in books, mostly books about punk from England. It’s always, you know, “after Terry and the Idiots played we went to Steve’s place and had some Special Brew” and it’s sort of taken for granted that everyone knows what it is. What’s so “special” about it?

Carlsberg Special Brew is a beer that –and not too many people know this in England- was brewed to commemorate the visit of Winston Churchill with the Danish Government in the years after the Second World War. So the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark brewed an especially strong beer. Special Brew is about nine percent, which makes it nearly wine strength, but you drink it in amounts that you would drink beer. And here you will see men who live in cardboard boxes and don’t shave and, periodically, they think they’ve had a good night out if they’ve shat themselves in the gutter basically (laughs). So, that’s the kind of captive market of Carlsberg Special Brew. That and punk rock musicians. I don’t drink it anymore. I have an agreement with everyone who knows and loves me never to drink it.

But you still enjoy a beer every now and again?

I mostly drink wine now, but I do actually like beer inside, yeah. I brew my own beer still.

Great, so will you be exporting any of that for Burger Records to print up here and sell on your behalf?

No, you need special licenses to export beer! Oh and I haven’t got any left; I gave my last bottle to a musician who’d been helping me record!

So that’s how you paid the guy who engineered the new download EP? You are an enterprising fellow! I do want to ask you about the new songs at the end of this thing- not only as a plug but because they are really, really good.

It would be nice if people bought it in fact, because it does sound like the Cleaners, mind you; you can agree on that! So if the readers want to get it you could maybe put that at the bottom of the article.

Sure, yes, we certainly will.

It’s very Cleaners. There’s four really first rate songs on there, really written in the spirit of The Cleaners. I think you’ll agree when you hear ‘em. They were just done in a shed last week. Three days in a shed and I’ve got four tracks!

Wow! So it’s back to your roots.

Really.

But before we get into that, let’s go on to the third and final tape in this dazzling Burger Records triptych… “Under Wartime Conditions” from 1984. For me, and I’ll be honest here, it’s not my favorite tape and is mostly notable for it’s step-up in sound quality.

Yeah, I’d learned to use the four track a lot better then, but we mastered it onto a Revox run by I guy I knew who had a recording studio and we took a lot more care mastering that.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still fabulous and there are some great tracks on it. Here’s an interesting one: “Summer in a Small Town”. Would you say it’s your one foray into “rap” music?

Yes, rap was still quite young here, then and I wanted to see if I could do it.

For our readers who may not be so well-versed in their Pink Floyd-lore, can you explain about “Song for Syd Barrett”. What’s this “chariot race in Roger’s dream” and “icicle cage” stuff all about?

Those lines were just me throwing the sort of random images about that Syd himself might have done. They didn’t mean anything. Although Roger was Syd’s real first name… Roger Keith Barrett.

“Drowning Butterflies” is another big highlight for me and, of course, “Blue Wave”. That’s a re-do from “Blow Away Your Troubles” and I think I like the original a bit better. You have a history of revisiting your songs later on, like with “Winter Palace”. You did it again on the very next tape “Songs for Fallow Land”. The first version from “Under Wartime Conditions” is all chimes and bells, which is kind of unique. It’s not a rock song, really.

Yeah, that’s right. For the later version I just built on the same actual track. Originally I did it with only four glockenschpiels, cause I really like the sound of the glockenschpiel, and then I decided to make it into a full band, rock instrumental track. But I think I prefer the one with just the four glockesnchpiels on it.

I was wondering about that, because you seem to be enchanted by the glockenschpiel. You use it all over that early Cleaners stuff. And yeah, the original “Under Wartime Conditions” version of “Winter Palace” is a really haunting, shimmering thing.

Yeah!

Can I make an observation?

Er… How long is this article going to be?

I think they want five-thousand words.

Fuck me, that’s really long! Sorry, excuse my language, but that’s a big article. I know what five-thousand words is. I’ve had to write five-thousand words… it’s not an article, it’s a dissertation, Ian.

Yeah, it’s going to be huge. It’s for a great paper here called the L.A. Record. It’s a free music paper that everyone in L.A. reads now because the music writing in the dominant paper here, the L.A. Weekly, is garbage. Well, it’s good if you like reading about 90s grunge rockers and the swing dancing revival, I guess. And the Record is kind of filling the void left by Arthur magazine, which has gone under I think.

Well, you must get me a copy of it, then. Okay, go ahead with your observation.

For someone who had a bit of a reputation for being anti-commercial or even slightly reclusive, being that The Cleaners never performed live during the first several years, you really hammed it up on some of those early recordings, like on “I Fell in Love with a Cleaner” and things like that. It sounds like you were just bursting to perform… to reach people. Like you had a tremendous “fourth wall” approach as part of your bedroom recording set-up that was like an audience of thousands. Can you comment on that?

I think that underneath all the angry young man schtick, I was really just a showbiz creature waiting to be shown the way to the stage. I mean, I couldn’t fight, and I was no good at sport, what else could I do but sing and tap dance? I call it the “Mummy, you’re not watching me” syndrome.

Is it not at all frustrating for you, because it is for me even thinking about your career, that you did all of this great work, really smart stuff full of good ideas… and the critics seemed to love it… that your music isn’t more widely known? You’ve won practically everyone over who’s ever heard your stuff, but that number of people is very limited. The fact that you’ve worked with Andy Partridge or Captain Sensible is supposedly impressive. But I think it’s more impressive for them to say that they’ve worked with you, if that makes sense. You’re the genius. It’s just not fair!

Very kind of you to say so, but both Andy and Captain are much better at crystallizing their ideas and putting them into good quality commercial form.

So, let’s quickly try and get ourselves back up to the present day. We’ve pretty much covered the Cleaners by now. Oh! I would definitely recommend that our readers to check out “Brotherhood of Lizards” which was your subsequent project that immediately followed the Cleaners’ “Giles period”. Can you tell the people what that group was and how it came about? You basically left The Cleaners from Venus, right?

I went on strike, because of a disagreement in direction. Nel, left with me and we became Colchester’s first licensed street musicians for a while. The Lizards came out of our more acoustic sound. Then we got signed.

And how would you describe your more recent solo work, from the mid-90s onward. How does it differ from the Cleaners sound?

It was partly informed by Andy Partridge’s and Louis Philippe’s (and later, Nel’s) respective production methods and partly by me, really, learning to be me. There was however, with all three guys, a tendency to take time and get things right. With the Cleaners methods, which I’ve returned to, it’s more of a “Right here, right now, bang it down on tape, to hell with a few mistakes and move onto the next thing.” Instant pop. That’s what I’m rediscovering. Complete with all its faults. I really believe that most of the listeners prefer me like that. Pop’s meant to be spontaneous.

For me, my theory is, whenever you have more control in the studio, and play more of the instruments yourself… well, those are my favorite recordings by you. Whether it’s a Martin Newell thing or The Cleaners from Venus or Brotherhood of Lizards or whatever.

Yeah, me too. When I’ve not got somebody telling me what to do.

Which, as you’ve said, is basically the approach you took for these new recordings known as “Mule”; that’s the name of your new EP. It’s currently available as a download-only and it costs three pounds (see details at the bottom of the page). I’ve been listening to it in the car for the past week and I’m really excited about it. The opening track “Wake Up and Dream” is, as you noted, right in the Cleaners bag. It’s up-tempo, it’s got the classic chorused guitar, great moody chords and has the feel of Graham Gouldman’s great sixties songs. What can you tell us about the song?

Well, I’ve had the idea round the workshop for some time and went into a little shed studio with my good friend Ta Chi Dave, where the methods and circumstances of recording immediately informed how the thing would sound. I think it’s a kind of kismet, really. Because Cleaners-related matters, thanks to you Americans have surged up and reminded me what it was that I used to be best at. I’m currently on a roll. I’m flattered that you think that it’s like a Graham Gouldman song because he is one of my all time songwriting heroes. You should also know, that so pleased are we with the four songs, that Dave and I are now building a new Cleaners album, the first for many many years and that in all likelihood, Burger will release it. We’re on a rolling programme of recording until at least end of June, with new songs being written all the time.
The next track “The Queen and Me” is a sort of fantasy about you, Martin Newell, being awarded an MBE and not worrying that it’s gone to your head… and then going so far as to end up spending afternoons with the Queen on a somewhat intimate, one-on-one basis, as friends- like a “Mrs. Brown” type thing, strolling around through the town arm-in-arm. It seems tongue-in-cheek on the surface, but there’s an underlying tenderness to the song and it suggests that a certain fondness may exist in your heart for the for the royals, which is rather at odds with your earlier, anarchist persona of the 80s. Is this a real secret fantasy of yours you’re letting us on to or were you merely having a laugh? And how do you feel about the Queen, anyhow?

I’m just having a laugh. I mean sure, I think the Queen is a bit of an anachronism, but I don’t hate her or anything. I just think she’s a rather ordinary old lady. I wish she wasn’t spending so much of our money. If she gave some of it up (maybe to me) and got on a bicycle I’d probably forgive her everything. The main joke however, is about me getting a knighthood and it being in the wrong name “Arise Sir Nartin Mule.!” The guys in the Indian restaurant down the road once called me Mr Mule, because they misheard me on the phone one night. It’s become an in-joke, with Dave calling me Sir Nartin, everytime I ring up.
I totally missed that one. That explains “Mule”, of course! Now, next is St Overdose On Sea which has a great descending chord pattern- a bluesy “Sunny Goodge Street” type sound. And there’s a blistering harmonica solo on it and that’s unusual for you. Is that you playing it? And did you steer clear of the harmonica over the years because of your well-publicized dislike for Bob Dylan?

Not many people know that I can actually play a harmonica a bit, I used to play harmonica in the 70s when I was a lead singer. It was part of a singer’s job, I suppose. I’m glad you like it anyway. Oh and lately, I’m beginning to really like and respect Bob Dylan thanks to playing bass in Hurricane, with Dave and Alec.

Probably my favorite thing on the new EP is the last song “Little Ships”. It really shows off the fact that your singing is better than ever. You harmonize with yourself and it rings out beautifully like the elusive “lost chord”; it’s fantastic! But it’s the one lyric from the set which I had trouble decoding. Can you explain what you were writing about in that song?

Many of the locations there are quite arcane and come from the British shipping forecast. North Utzera, Dogger, Fisher and German Bight are all sea areas. Thames, Tyne, Tees, and Humber are all rivers and the Zuider Zee (zoyder zay) is a sea area off Holland. The song’s a sort of melancholy lost-love song with maritime references; that’s all.

Well, I’m going to tell everyone they need to visit your site and download these songs because they really show you off at your best. And I can’t tell you how great it is to hear there is a new Cleaners album in the works.

You Yanks and your enthusiasm can take most of the credit for this. Thank you.

Did you know that at the Burger Cassette Release party there was a one-off Cleaners from Venus tribute band. Actually I was the singer. We were called “The Wieners from Penis”?

Were you singing Julie Profumo? That was a pretty good impression. The guitar sounds were good too.

So, to wrap it all up I’m going to ask something that the guys at the L.A. Record would consider one of those standard, boring questions that is asked time and again, but here goes anyway. When all is said and done, how do you want Martin Newell and The Cleaners from Venus to be remembered?

(Laughs)

Well you know, just as sort-of fun really! As someone who completely defied the industry. That it was home made, but it was good home made. That there were good songs.

And as a songwriter, you don’t have aspirations to go down in history as one of the greats, for eternity?

No, well I don’t know. I’ve got no idea. It’s not for me to confer immortality; it’s for time itself to confer immortality on bits of work.

Well, I’ll let you go now Martin, I know I’ve worn you out by now. Now I’ll try and fashion this into a succinct, readable something or other.

You’re lucky I have such a good memory actually.

Yes, well going back to my mention of “The Beatles Anthology” program; with McCartney saying things like “Did I write that one?”

Well, you can’t blame them for that really, can you?

And you staying put with more of a routine probably helped you retain a certain sharpness of mind.

And I also probably didn’t take the drugs and drink as much because we didn’t have the money. But that’s not the only reason; there was a moral impediment as well. I had to put that in.

Well, thank you so much for your time Martin.

Oh right. So, you’ll probably want some pictures, won’t you.

Yeah, do you have anything?

I’ve got all sorts of pictures on file. I can send you some if I make a note to myself.

I’ll remind you. And also, keep it in your mind that there’s something brewing here in America, there’s a swelling interest in your work with The Cleaners… and it’s a new audience of young-ish people, not only in California, but places like Brooklyn and the various college towns around the country.

Brooklyn?

In New York City.

Yeah, I know where it is or I’ve got a rough idea anyway.

So I do hope you’ll get on that boat and come and visit our shores before too long.

Well it might happen. We’ll see.

It was great talking to you.

So, what I’ve got to do is send some pics to you. Okay, well just send me an email prompt if I don’t do that. And ask me what eras, I might be able to find some early ones for you.

I will. Thanks again!

All right Ian, goodbye!

Well, if you made it all the way through that, I hope you found it enjoyable and interesting. Please stop by this coming Thursday… and check the Wombleton site in the coming week or two for more updates and folderol in regard to this England business.

Lastly, please support Martin Newell (a really good guy) and his absolutely stunning new music. “English Electric” (pictured below) is available for download through Martin’s website at: www.martinnewell.co.uk