Finally, a Reliable English Electric: A Conversation with Martin Newell

Story by Bill Kopp

I recently enjoyed the rare treat of a lively and wide-ranging conversation with Martin Newell. He’s largely unknown to American pop audiences, and that’s quite a shame. His music is pop in the best sense of the word: infectious melodies, straightforward instrumentation, witty (but never precious, arty or overly self-conscious) lyrics with clever turns of phrase, Newell’s music is in many ways the logical progression from the best music of the 1960s.

Newell’s approach has earned him heaps of critical praise, and a reputation as a pioneer in the DIY movement. Back in the 1980s he began recording his sturdy pop songs using fairly primitive home equipment, and releasing the results on cassettes via mail order. In that sense he’s something of a UK counterpart of America’s own underground DIY king R. Stevie Moore, but Newell’s work – under his own name and as the Cleaners of Venus – bears a more conventional, melodic approach than the often bent, avant garde stylings of Moore. His latest pair of albums resurrect the Cleaners From Venus moniker (for reasons he’ll explain presently) and bear the musical hallmarks that have turned many who’ve heard him into hardcore fans.

My original plan was to speak with Martin and then craft a feature around the best quotes. I should have known better: Newell is eminently quotable, and whatever the topic – his work as a music journalist, his thoughts on the aesthetics of recording, his humorous recollections – it was too good to edit down to a stack of quotes. So here’s most of our conversation, with the occasional comment from your humble host (in blue).

Newell disarmingly kicked off our conversation by telling me, “I just had a listen to some of my old records to remind myself exactly what it is that I do.”

Bill Kopp: What makes English Electric and The Stopping Train a pair of Cleaners From Venus records rather than the latest offerings from Martin Newell? Or, Brotherhood of Lizards, for that matter.

Martin Newell: The Brotherhood of Lizards is really different, because Nelson was involved. We were fifty-fifty partners in that. Even though I was the main songwriter, nothing got done without Nelson. I suppose he was sort of like the House of Lords: The House of Commons can do something, but the House of Lords can soon stop it.

But these are Cleaners From Venus albums because they were made with the very same sort of facilities, and in a very similar way. I write the songs the day before I go into the studio, pretty much. And it’s the same with production and creation values. The whole thing about Cleaners From Venus is that it was an anti-reaction to the music industry. I was really shocked when I got into the music industry and learned that people took months doing things. I thought, “Shouldn’t we write the song today, record it tomorrow and release it the day after that?” Because that’s what the Beatles and the Hollies and all my heroes used to do. Mainly because they were forced to do it.

The thing is, it makes for good – I hate to use the word — zeitgeist, really. You’re capturing the spirit of the age. If you’re living the life, and then you write the song at the same time, and then you record it at the same time, and then you release it all within a few weeks, you’re going to resonate — at least –with the people living in the same age.

BK: There’s a precedent for that approach; when The Beatles started Apple, they had an imprint called Zapple that was designed to release albums that were sort of spontaneous; the idea was that they’d retail for less. George Harrison’s Electronic Sounds and some of the John and Yoko stuff came out on Zapple.

Tell me about the recording of these new albums.

Martin: We made these new Cleaners From Venus albums in Dave Allen’s shed less than a year ago. I just said to him, “‘Let’s do some recording.” And it’s literally a garden shed with a little eight-track machine in it. Two hundred quid’s worth of equipment. It’s the sort of thing someone still in high school could buy, if they wanted. But they don’t know how to use those things!”

We had one Shure SM-58, my Rickenbacker, my two-hundred-quid guitar, and some drum sounds; I might have collected a tambourine somewhere. The thing is, it worked right from when we started. It was just like I used to do, so I thought, “Why don’t we just do this?” What it is, is fun. The Cleaners From Venus was fun. And it stopped being fun sometime after we started getting in big studios.

I’ve got nothing to lose now, and nothing to gain. I haven’t even registered the English Electric songs yet with any sort of publisher; I haven’t even filled in the forms. I don’t care. I didn’t even send review copies out. I told people about it on the web site, I released it for download, and we made a few copies. That’s how Cleaners From Venus used to work. That band was a log raft with me as captain. And a pair of raggedy underpants for a flag. And I thought it was fun then, so I thought, “Do I need the money? Do I need the fame? No, I don’t. What I do need to do is make music. So I’m going to do that.” Let’s see how we go from there. Then maybe we’ll try and sell something.

BK: Home recording technology has come a long way since the days of the Tascam Portastudio. Yet the ambience on these new records is a lot closer to the sound you got on the earlier cassettes than to anything approaching digital. Why?

Martin: The way I record, when I’ve got a producer — well, not a producer, but someone there – they’ll ask, “‘Are you sure about this, Martin?” And I’ll say, “Leave the bum notes in.” Because that’s what I did with the Cleaners. Leave the mistakes in! Mostly people don’t notice. You know how some artists say, “I’m an absolute perfectionist. And nothing gets past the gate ‘till I’ve okayed it.” Well, I’m exactly the opposite. Let’s bang it out and then we’ll go out and I’ll buy you a drink.

Within reason, of course. I don’t want to put out something that sounds like shit. But most of the time it doesn’t, because I’ve been doing this thing for a very long time now. And if I’ve not got it right by this time…if it feels good, leave it! If the guitar part is distorted, or there’s a pop on the mic, if it’s not too bad, I just leave it.

The amount of time I have made a record, having made the demos, and then we started recording it painstakingly, I come out at the end of it thinking, “Why didn’t we just release the demos?”

BK: And that’s what you did with the second new disc, Stopping Train.

Martin: Well, we really did. Many of those tracks – the first four, at least — were really demos. One we did at Fiona’s, the next door neighbor. She’s just got an old four-track tape machine. She knows a little bit about recording, but not much. So I just went over with my guitar. She has this four-track machine, but she doesn’t know how to overdub, though. No ping-ponging. So we only had four tracks: I could do three vocals and one guitar. I just said, “Fair enough, we’ll do that then.” And then a friend of hers called Nick mastered it onto a digital machine, but I wasn’t there or anything: “‘Oh, no. You do that. I’m sure you’ll do a reasonable job.”

I think musicians make far too much fuss about things. I’m really fed up with it, which is why I won’t work with them any more.

BK: Are there any real drums on English Electric?

Martin: Bits and pieces, yes. You know, I never spilled the beans about what happened on The Greatest Living Englishman. I’ve never told anybody: there were some real drums on it, but mostly there weren’t. Andy Partridge produced it, and he knew how to sort of blur the edges of things. You’d be surprised at what was real drums on there and what wasn’t. There were some real drums on there, but very little.

When we had the original Cleaners From Venus — the tape-era Cleaners – sometimes we had real drums. MGMT just covered one of my tracks, “Only a Shadow”; [the original version of] that one had real drums on it. I wrote the tune around the drums.

Lol, the drummer, had sort of fallen in love with this girl in Bath. He moved down to Bath, and he came back for a weekend to collect some books or something. Or maybe to change his shirt. So I sort of pinned him down and said, “Can I have a day with you in the kitchen?”’ So we set up a drum kit with three mics, and I recorded him doing five beats. And then I wrote myself around them. So Lol really should get a writing credit on that.

BK: When you go out to the shed, do you have the song’s whole arrangement in your head, or does it unfold as you record?

Martin: I have not a clue what’s going to happen, usually. I come from an old-fashioned approach. An orthodox thing about me is that I believe a song should sound like a song, even when it has only one voice and one instrument. Whether it be a piano or guitar or mandolin, you should be able to take that tune to a pub and play it. You should be able to play it to three people or whatever, and have them say, “Yeah, that’s good.” If you can honestly take the songs out that way, then you can record it.

The one area where I am a bit fussy is in how I write the song. And I like the idea where we’re finishing it, and we don’t get the fade quite right, and I can’t be bothered to do the mix again. So I just say, “Aw, fuck it. Just leave it like that.”

BK: With a few exceptions, you’ve operated totally outside what people call the music industry for most of your entire career.

Martin: Yes, I have. And it’s made me very poor. I think it was Groucho Marx who said, “I’ve worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

BK: Yet these new records are available on Kool Kat. So, what changed: the industry or you?

Martin: Ray Gianchetti’s a really good guy. But I’ve dealt with record companies a lot. It’s just that now, my instincts tell me who to deal with. I still deal with mavericks. Some guys in Brooklyn called Fixed Identity have released five hundred copies of one of my old records on vinyl. And then Burger Records over in Los Angeles have just released things of mine on cassette. They’re reproduced two hundred fifty copies each of three seminal Cleaners From Venus tapes. In their original covers. They just remastered them slightly and put them out on cassette. Because all the kids are driving secondhand cars.

Of those three labels that I’m dealing with in America, Kool Kat are the most efficient. I gather that Ray is closer to my age. It’s a proper record company, but with no music industry bullshit. He must have been ‘round the block a couple of times. Like me. I’m from Essex, which is near London. People in London don’t quite think of us as hicks, but they think “Don’t fuck with them.” So when I found out Ray was from New Jersey, I thought, “Well, I can probably work with him!”

BK: You seem to possess a bottomless well of melody. In a perfect world “Call the Wrecking Crew” would be a huge hit. What would you do if, suddenly, your musical career sort of “took off” in a conventional way? I mean, if one of the majors came calling about re-releasing English Electric and giving it a big marketing push, would you send them packing?

Martin: At my tender age, what I would do is say, “Look: You can have it as it is. Go out and sell it. And I will do you some interviews, and I will talk to people. But I am not going to jump through hoops for you. I don’t want an advance; what I want is a big royalty.” So, no advances; they pay me for what they sell. If they don’t sell any, they don’t have to give me any money.

They don’t understand when I don’t light up like a pinball machine when they offer an advance. I can’t be bought like that. But I do want money.

BK: You’re well known in the UK as a poet. Is there a difference in the manner in which you approach song lyrics as opposed to the words to a poem? And do you ever start something out as one and have it end up as the other?

Martin: I’ve pretty much given seminars on this. I think of poetry and lyrics as being related, but I think of them as being cousins that are allowed to marry. They’re most certainly not brother and sister. When I write a song, I think, “I mustn’t approach this like a poem.” It’s got to be more spontaneous. There are just certain technical things: what word do I use at the end, the cadence of the thing. It’s important that when you’ve got a nice uppy, cheerful tune that the lyrics follow that.

BK: Do you ever start out writing a poem and then discover that it’s a song, or vice versa?

Martin: No. Because when I’m writing a song, I nearly always – in about 99.98% of cases – will write the words to the music. The music will have come first. When I have a tune, the first thing I will ask is, “What season are we in? What is the mood of this? Is it angry, or is it about lost love?”

Or sometimes a title will suggest itself to me. There’s a song on English Electric which I really like called “All the Lights in This House.” That one I wrote for my daughter. Because she was kind of coming in late, and things like that. And I just wanted her home. And at the same time I saw a film called Geisha. And in the film there was a line about the Geisha having done really well: “Every light in this town was burning for you tonight,” or something like that. So that was a real song about a real person. But I haven’t written any other songs about her.

The Rolling Stones-y one you mentioned earlier, “Call the Wrecking Crew,” that’s [a story] about twenty years ago. I had had to move in with a friend whose girlfriend had left. I moved in, and the two of us were very bad for each other, really: “What should we do: cook dinner or go out for a drink?” I remember him knocking about to get the key in the fucking door, and things like that. One window pane got broken three times because he’d have to punch it out to get back into his own house. He couldn’t find the keys, though usually they were in his pocket.

BK: Your music has what I’d call a timeless quality. What do you listen to for pleasure?

Martin: Everything! Well, no, not everything. What have I got on at the moment…this bloke called Jake Thackray. A lot of French stuff. High Llamas. Kimberley Rew; he’s a friend of mine.

BK: The Cleaners From Venus enjoyed – or endured -- a brush with the big time in the UK around the release of ‘Ilya Kuryakin Looked at Me,’ didn’t they?

Martin: Yes. But I didn’t always like the show biz stuff. And I didn’t like some of the people who were around it. And I didn’t like the way people suddenly appeared; people you’ve never met before who seemed to know all about you. They’d be very schmoozy, and I didn’t trust them.

In fact there’s a huge chunk of show biz in me. But in the eighties I got a sort of reputation as being like a Syd Barrett. I had broke up the band, and people were saying, “He’s gone ‘Brian Wilson.’ He doesn’t want to go out on tour.” The thing is, I’ll do gigging. But touring isn’t, I don’t think, a very healthy environment. And the other thing is drugs. You see, I did loads of drugs between the ages of seventeen and twenty. And then I stopped! And apart from a couple of temporary aberrations, I never went back to it. And the result of that is that I’m enthusiastic, healthy, and very interested in what I’m doing most of the time.

I’m fond of a drink. And I’m also fond of wearing tight black trousers, so that rules out drinking too much beer these days. But I want to hold onto my marbles; I think I still have most of them. I’ve gotten tweedier; I’ve gotten interested in books, history, things like that. And I think that’s as it should be. It would be really sad if I were prancing around in leather trousers with my foot up on the monitor.

BK: I know what you mean. I’ve recently started listening to jazz.

Martin: I love jazz. Stan Getz, bits and pieces of Miles Davis, things like that. I don’t like jazz when it sounds like people torturing small animals and banging sticks together. Oddly enough, the kind of jazz I like is almost lift [elevator] music. I’ve got a huge soft spot for “loungecore.” And I could put up with some Carpenters in my collection now; Carpenters were fucking great.

At the height of Deep Purple’s fame, Ritchie Blackmore was asked, “What do you listen to after a Deep Purple gig, Ritchie?” And he said, “The Carpenters.”

BK: You know what he’s up to these days, don’t you?

Martin: Well, according to someone he was in a band with before Deep Purple -- a guy called Chas Hodges – Ritchie spends a lot of his time in Central Park walking around in a tall hat being medieval or something…

BK: He plays renaissance fair-type music with his Missus. But with the odd bit of Stratocaster. Of course that comes as a bit of a shock if you’ve just been listening to “Highway Star.”

Martin: When I was working on Chas’s story [for BBC’s Inside Out series -- ed], and trying to research very early English bands, I interviewed people who I regarded as salient in the birth of British rock’n’roll. And of all of them, Blackmore was the one who was most difficult to interview. I had to go through a number of record companies; it was almost like, “Oh, you want an interview with the king, do you?” Finally someone in America put me in touch with him in New York, and he eventually answered a few of my questions by email! I mean, he could’ve just made a phone call and told me what I wanted. I didn’t want to know about Deep Purple or any of that rock-god shit; I wanted to know about the birth of English rock’n’roll in a period which I call “somewhere between half-past-Elvis and quarter-to-the-Beatles.” 1961-62; he was there.

BK: He was a session guy; he was on all kinds of stuff.

Martin: He was a very good one.

BK: There’s a proud tradition of British session guys. John Paul Jones…

Martin: He played on Lulu records, Donovan records…and Jimmy Page as well. I hold Jimmy Page in particularly high regard. I’ve never met him or anything. With that generation of rock musicians, unless you got really, really famous, you didn’t meet them. The people who are the pioneers of the sixties, I mostly haven’t met them. But during the Cleaners From Venus I had Dick Taylor from The Pretty Things ask me to write some songs for them, But then Phil May came back from wherever he was, and he said, “No, no, he’s not writing any songs for this band.”

The songwriters that I adore -- everyone from Irving Berlin to Carole King – if they write a good song, they’re up there with the gods.

Bill, you’ve got quite an impressive CV; I’ve looked you up. You’ve gotten some very difficult interviews.

BK: Besides the Chas Hodges feature, you’ve done some music journalism work yourself.

Martin: I don’t often interview people myself, but a very very good music mag here asked me if I would interview Rod Stewart. I said, “I can’t.” They said, “But you write for The Independent.” I said, “And you’re Record Collector. I can’t tell him I’m doing an interview for them when you’ve asked me to do it. It would be very difficult.” But they gave me a number and said, “Well, just try.”

So I rang up this number, and the guy who answered said “He’s only in the country a short time, and he’s not doing any interviews.” So I said, “But I have a really new angle.” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Well, you know how everybody talks to him about his cars and his wives and his money and football and all the rest of it? Well, I would like to just interview him about his music.” And the guy said, “You’re right; that is a good angle.”

A week later the phone rings. And I’ve just got in from the early evening drinking. The guy on the phone says, “It’s Rod.” Rod who? “Rod Stewart.” And I’m thinking, “Fucking hell!” I asked him everything I ever wanted to ask him, and typed up the whole interview in a day and a half. It was three thousand words; I cut it down to two thousand. And after that they thought I walked on fucking water.

I interviewed Mick Fleetwood too, but he wasn’t nearly as interesting. Because he couldn’t remember as much stuff. Rod Stewart has the memory of an elephant. And he’s a nice man as well.

BK: So are the Cleaners back to stay, was this a one-off (two-off, really) or haven't you decided yet?

Martin: I’m recording at the moment. I’m making the follow-up to English Electric. It sounds like English Electric, only a bit different because I’m writing different songs. But it’s like boys’ day out in the shed: you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like you don’t know how your kids are going to turn out. You can make all your plans, but they turn out the way that they turn out. And my songs are like that.

BK: So, any idea when the next Cleaners album will be out?

Martin: Well, Dave who works with me, teaches Tai Chi. I call him Tai Chi Dave. He helps me record, and I like one of his songs so much it’s actually going on an album. I play in a three-piece band with him that mostly does very old Bob Dylan stuff. And I used to hate Dylan. But I’ve really got to like it very much now. So I play bass for them and just do some backing vocals. And we play country pubs where nobody throws anything.

Anyway, we’ve already got four tracks. Once we get about sixteen or twenty, we’ll just pick the best of those, print it off and say, “That’s an album.” We’re not sure about a title for it yet. My significant other came up with a title last night. There’s an area in England called the Lake District; when she was a kid – about six or so -- she called it the “Late District.” So I think that would be a really good title for an album. But it doesn’t matter what it’s called; I just want to carry on doing more of the same. So working whenever Dave can record me, we’ll finish another album. We’ll finish about June – or maybe earlier – and then we’ll put it online, see if Ray [Gianchetti of Kool Kat Muzik] is interested in it, and just see what happens.

BK: Any plans to tour?

Martin: I haven’t ruled out going to America, but I’d probably have to sail there. I don’t want to go to an airport, standing there at four in the morning with your shoes in one hand and your belt in the other while someone x-rays your aftershave. It’s so stupid; if they’re gonna kill you, they’re gonna kill you. Why not just get on the plane?

English Electric and The Stopping Train are available from Kool Kat Muzik. Keep up with Newell at www.martinnewell.co.uk

In This Section...