Martin Newell: A Lifetime In Subordia

As cloud time continues to wreak anachronistic havoc on the linear way that artists rise to prominence and “important” musical happenings unfold and evolve, Martin Newell - and his longstanding home recording project, the Cleaners from Venus - is but another example, if not one of the examples, of a shadowy artist who seems to have had his hands meddling about in almost every era of pop music over the past 50 years, without really existing in any of them at all.

With the exponential rise of the nostalgia industry - home recording, the odd nod and cover from the likes of Ariel Pink and MGMT, plus the continued re-release [30 years later] of now highly regarded Cleaners from Venus box sets on Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks - Newell finds himself in the awkward yet increasingly common position of discussing, often for the first time, 30 year old recordings as part of contemporary culture.

While musicians and performing artists were busy trying to fight the system with hippies, punks, the eighties, grunge, etc, Newell was busy being “almost delusionally” prolific in obscurity, and as a result, accidentally pioneered a now-ubiquitous philosophy of solo home recording and distribution, alongside the likes of R. Stevie Moore and Chris Knox. But what makes Newell’s legacy so alluring and sets the Cleaners apart, though, is how consistently accessible the music is: album after album of melodic, jangly, spontaneous pop, full of clever and fun lyrical bathos. From the first few distributed recordings on Blow Away Your Troubles (recently re-released) right through to today, Newell’s songwriting and approach is consistently fascinating, unique, and retrospectively, way ahead of its time.

In light of this, we caught up with the insanely prolific home recorder - 50+ albums and counting - to discuss the early days and his elusive legacy.

Noisey: Could you talk a bit about your early days home recording? What lead you down that path rather than sticking with the band setup that was really big in those days?
Martin Newell: Well, I was always infatuated with the idea of recording, and at some point I discovered that there was this thing that Sony invented — TC630 Reel to Reel, way before portastudios — that you could open up and do a sound on sound recording, you could bounce between the heads. And it also had an echo thing on it. I got my hands on one when I was about 20 in 1974 using all the money I could get [about $1000 today] and I just spent all my spare time writing songs and learning how to record them and use this thing. I had a homemade bass, an old harmonium, a bunch of homemade things, and that became my main thing. If whatever band I was in collapsed, I always had that. I was always writing songs and that’s how I wrote my songs using that thing, and it was wonderful. Self contained.

What was the perception of what you were doing? Did people think you were out of your mind or that you were breaking new ground?
They did think I was mad. They did. You can hear some of the early recordings on A Dawn Chorus. To show people, you would have to bring them over to your house, really. The currency was cassettes but listening to recordings was an event, so people came around. They’d say, “Well, what have you been doing?” And I’d explain the tape recorder, and then fiddle with it and turn it on, and I’d have to lace up the different tapes and play these things. They were mostly just me trying to be original and write unique sounding stuff, but people would look at me like I was completely mad. Frightened for me almost, you know? Because it didn’t sound like .. you know.. anything else. It was definitely not perceived [as hip or cool] like I gather it is now. [laughs]

Was there any kind of romanticizing that someone would eventually appreciate this or that maybe even a lot of people would?
Yeah, there was yeah! All the time, I thought, “They’ll discover me one day!” But they didn’t, or maybe they did eventually, I don’t know. But mostly, nobody, not even people in the music industry, shared a hint of my vision. I was just left alone to flounder.

Now we know there were a couple of other people doing this sort of prolific home recording back then, like R. Stevie Moore and Chris Knox. Did you guys know each other or at least of each other?
Not at first, but a bit later, yeah. R. Stevie Moore I’ve collaborated with a couple of times, and Chris Knox, we met at a gig in Berlin once, and I just thought he was brilliant.

Why do you think there’s heightened interest in this work now as opposed to back then?
I don’t know. [Laughs].

But what do you think has changed between then and now?
I don’t have any idea. But, I think that the standard of pop music, as is purveyed on the world pop radio stations, is poorer. We are worse off than in the 60s and 70s. At some point, the music industry, or whatever you want to call it, maybe it was just society, just lost sight of it. The corporate system eventually became so good at latching onto threatening subcultures and transforming them into anodyne, slightly more energized versions of what they were selling in the first place that they almost got people doing it to themselves – and their own music or art – without really realizing.

[Artists] pretty much have to [hand the system the whole package now], and it’s a package that the music industry created itself. And the people involved haven’t really got the right training or approach. They tick off the boxes required to be known and off they go, rarely questioning [the impact it might be having on culture]. And because of this, I think that the real potential artistic prodigies of any generation, are now either never even discovered, or taken in as part of the norm, and most people don’t last.

But yeah. I have a cure for all that. That is: If you want to do music, actually do music, not this other stuff, you mustn’t involve the music industry too much, because it would ruin everything. And that fame is a pollutant. It’s actually poisonous. Like very good alcohol. It’s great fun, but very dangerous. [Youth and money and fame] are too much for any mortal. And it doesn’t lead to happiness, certainly. But what you’ll find with this “model” though, is that not many people actually want to “do music,” they want the other stuff.

So did this sort of view help keep your home recording vision in tact?
Well, it wasn’t difficult. [Laughs] People say, ye know, that I never sold out, but I wasn’t asked very often. You know, in those days I’d even meet punk rock stars who thought I were sloppy. They’d wanna record something with me, and after recording I’d think “Yeah this is okay” and they’d say “But its got some bad notes in it,” and I’d be like, “Oh no no no leave it! You people should understand.” But often they wouldn’t. But thankfully some listeners always understand.

When you were starting out, home recording was not such an easy or cheap thing to do, whereas as now it is the easier and cheaper thing to do. How do you feel that the sort of “model’ that you were pioneering has sort of become..
The norm? [Laughs]

But do you think the abundance of this is a bad thing now?
Well I think that something has happened with the digital revolution, or the industrial revolution, I think that people have still got futureshock. It has essentially brought on an egalitarian thing, that anyone can now be a songwriter, or an artist with Photoshop, or a photographer, everyone can now do everything, and there’s a pervasive saying that art is for all. But I do not believe that art is for all, anymore than I believe that eye surgery is for all. You have to [work at it and train for it].

When you were doing Cleaners’ home recordings, were you trying to make them sound as professional/studio-like as possible, or were you actually aiming for the sort of sound that was coming out?
[Laughs].. We were doing the best we could with what we had! We had no money, we had really rubbish equipment, and we just thought, ‘ahh fuck it’ you know?

So do you find it a bit peculiar that that particular sound has become in itself an aesthetic?
Well, I’m amazed! I can’t hear it. I’ve heard this guy called Ariel Pink, right, and many people say, “He sounds like you”, but, when I hear Ariel Pink - I came across something the other day that I thought was just utterly lovely - I just think, “This guy is fucking great, I really like his songs”, but I don’t think he sounds like me, I cant see that. He is not my son. [Laughs] There’s somebody else actually, who I’m supposed to be an English version of, but I guess that’s forgivable.

I think what people are referring to is more the production sound, with the earlier stuff like the Doldrums etc.
Well, what I did, during a very boring period of music in the eighties, umm, I just used the echo button. [Laughs] I had a cheap tape echo. You know, sometimes my voice just didn’t sound very good, so I put echo on it. And it was tape echo, and I wanted it to sound like some of my heroes from the 60s, like maybe The Pink Fairies, or the more psychedelic aspects of the Beatles. But because you very rarely get to sound like what you really want to sound like, I developed my own thing. It was partly accident I think.

Do you think too much emphasis is put on making a living out of art, or being an artist, and that most people should do something else whilst maintaining a pastime?
Well, you know, art and music are very difficult things to make a living out of. And sometimes I feel a sense that I am slightly aggrieved, but it’s always been tenuous and it’s always been fashion based, and you have your Warholian fifteen minutes and that’s it. I don’t think anyone has a right to make a great living out of any kind of art, pop music or whatever, but, then again, its probably a good idea to recognize that, and go about it that way.

Because of your anarchistic ethos of music creation and distribution, what’s your stance on piracy? Would you be happier that people are downloading your albums for free rather than not hearing them at all?
Well I think that the way that the record companies and industry used to work was kind of piracy, but it was organized piracy. So the pirates, instead of being called Captain Jack or Napster, they were called things like Jeff or RCA. [Laughs]. Because you’d see a picture of them, at some publishing convention, a big guy with a beard, hat and earring, and you’d think, “This is my bloody publisher? Where’s my fucking money?” [laughs] But you know, in the music industry there are no victims, there are only volunteers. If you’re dumb enough to do it, I mean.

Steven Viney is a writer, he is on Twitter @helloximage