“I am just a jangling man...

...Been in the cold too long-along-along

And I live with a Raggedy-Ann
We never had any money, is it really so wrong?”

Whether or not the end results are to your liking, it's never been easier to get hold of very cheap but good quality gear with which to make music. Guitars, amps, effects, keyboards, drums, even PA systems, are more affordable and also more feature-packed than they've ever been. What you can get guitar-wise for 150 pounds, dollars or euros today is amazing - great sound and quality. A £150 guitar in 1980 was usually rubbish - now it's eminently playable. Go second hand and you get even more for your money. 

Music making has become fully democratised.

The same goes for recording gear. Once the province of the professional or the very wealthy, multi-track recorders appeared on the market in the form of cassette tape based machines in 1980 and, by the middle of the decade, they were affordable. (I say "affordable", but the retail price of the model I bought was about £400, which translates to around £1400 in today's terms.) I have the model shown below, although I no longer use it as I went "digital" a long time ago. The cassette medium had its drawbacks in terms of sound quality, but as long as you were careful and used quality tape, you could produce some reasonable recordings at home - certainly good enough for demos and the like. Of course, you could also go mad and bounce the tracks down - "ping-pong" them - so that you ended up with a lot more than four "tracks" but also a lot more unwanted noise - including plenty of extra tape hiss and other unpleasant artifacts! What's more, this process could not be undone, so that you had to live with your mistakes or start all over again - but then that's how you learn...

1980s home recording stalwart - the Tascam Portaone - exactly like the one I still have!

By this time, the "cassette culture" was well established, having begun with the proliferation of cassette recorders in the early 1970s. This movement led to the sharing and distribution of music on a scale that would have been totally impossible with vinyl recordings. Of course, this eventually dovetailed very neatly with the endeavours of aspiring musicians who had the means to record their own music on the "new" cassette multi-trackers, but lacked the marketing and distribution facilities of a record company. Cottage industries developed with home-produced recordings and mail order cassette distribution.

One such lone wolf was Martin Newell, who still produces music in a broadly similar fashion, having fully embraced the opportunities brought about by the internet, in order to continue to produce his own music on his own terms.

Great cheekbones!

Starting in bands in 1973 at age 20, Newell met with little success in Plod - a glam rock band. They got signed to an independent label which went bust before their debut album was finished. He then joined Gypp - a prog band. They recorded an EP, but punk had just erupted on the scene and prog had suddenly become unfashionable. After terrible reviews, Newell left and became, in his words, a "musical recluse". After a period writing, he formed "The Stray Trolleys" - a four piece rock band and yet another failure, despite recording a couple of albums.

However, by 1983, he settled into what was essentially a permanent band - "The Cleaners From Venus" - with himself as the only constant, after loosely collaborating with a handful of other musicians under that name from time to time. Throughout this period, Newell was busy with his cassette multi-tracker producing cassette-only releases with relatively lo-fi results - inevitable given the resources available. However, he looked upon the strictures of only having four tracks as a challenge. He slowly upgraded his recording gear and today uses 8-track digital. He describes the results as gradually moving from lo-fi to "mid-fi".

Anyway, back to Newell's timeline...several Cleaners albums followed, essentially Newell solo efforts, with a brief stint with Peter Nice in the duo "The Brotherhood of Lizards". Captain Sensible of The Damned lent them an 8-track recorder as a temporary replacement for Newell's 4-track machine. They lasted long enough to make an EP and an LP, promoted with an eco-friendly tour of the UK by bicycle.

Martin in Andy's shed

It took until 1993 for Newell to produce a non-cassette production and release when he employed XTC's pop genius Andy Partridge to help make a solo album. Sessions took place over several months in Partridge's Swindon home studio, situated in his garden shed. With an 8 track digital recorder and a Mackintosh computer, the resulting sound quality and overdub facility was a big step forward. Partridge contributed a guitar solo, some keyboards and also percussion, using electronic drum pads. It turned out to be Newell's best selling and most successful album to date,

 

 When two Englishmen collide...

Three more solo albums followed, but none of them sparked much interest. Consequently, Newell reverted to the Cleaners moniker, abandoned his quest for solo stardom, and continued releasing albums. A dozen or so appeared over the next 20 years or so, up to the present day. The music became gradually less lo-fi, but with the recording tech offering more and more professional features over time, this was hardly surprising. However, Newell continues to record using a home set up and his music is now distributed through Bandcamp, regular outlets and the usual streaming services. 

 

Martin with a cuppa!

 

But what of the music itself?

It's essentially English pop with lyrical nods to the Kinks, with its many songs about small town misfits and other tragicomic figures. Whimsy and nostalgia also play a large part in the world Newell inhabits. There's even a pleasing quotient of "jangle" from time to time which often crops up in the more "power pop" songs. He's not the most polished singer, but his determination to sound like himself means that there are no faux-American mannerisms and, similarly, the music very largely avoids anything remotely resembling rock clichés. Guitars are seldom distorted (not on purpose, anyway!), and when they're prominent they're usually acoustic or clean electrics - that's when they're not being jangly.

Speaking of jangle - here's Newell describing his Rickenbacker 12-string:"...at the sound of it, the very creatures of the forest will run around mad with joy, while all of the town's children follow its player out through the gates and over the hills, never to return."

My one bugbear is his acoustic guitar sound. Probably to exclude any extraneous noise, he often seems to DI what sounds like an electro-acoustic. This gives a sort of 'quacky' and unnatural sound that you just don't get with an acoustic through a microphone. Newell plays everything else himself - keyboards, bass, percussion and drums. The drums may be programmed but, if they are, the later recordings don't make that sound obvious, so he's doing a good job.

 Newell - in his kitchen

Amazingly, Newell's overall sound and lyrical thrust don't seem to have changed all that much over the years. He's still exploring his self-imposed technical limits to create his unique musical vision and his lyrics continue to define his own "small" world, but he hasn't run out of subtly different ways of sharing them yet. 

Martin Newell and Cleaners fans have never had it so good - regular new material, a busy re-release schedule and a recent documentary film - and Newell himself is attracting international attention that's been long overdue.

[Three albums for you - something from his early "lo-fi" days, the album he made with Andy Partridge, and a more recent "mid-fi" offering.]