The Cleaners From Venus

Event information

Upset The Rhythm presents…

THE CLEANERS FROM VENUS
Wednesday 30 September
Islington Assembly Hall, Upper St, London, N1 2UD
7pm | £18

THE CLEANERS FROM VENUS will be performing this Autumn in London. Martin Newell will be on guitar and piano, joined by Nelson Surfquake Nice - an original member of Cleaners back in the 80s, and half of The Brotherhood of Lizards alongside Martin. The group will be performing some classic Cleaners songs, with a Brotherhood of Lizards cameo-set thrown in!

Martin Newell is a purveyor of ingenious pop music. His music is refracted from late 60s rock only shot through with invention from the rough-and-ready explosion of DIY tape releases in 80s Britain. As a songwriter, he’s right up there with Syd Barrett and Ray Davies, capturing a peculiar Englishness that’s very much his own.

Martin started his career in music aged 19 when he joined an Essex glam-rock band called The Mighty Plod as a singer and gigged in rough clubs, pubs and colleges for the next two years. In his early twenties he joined a hard rock/prog band from Ipswich called Gypp and gigged in the UK as well as touring northern Germany several times. In 1979, he won his first record contract and shortly afterwards his first single ‘Young Jobless / Sylvie In Toytown’ was released, first on an indie label and then with Liberty Records. In the 1980s he formed the anarchic and wonderfully offbeat Cleaners From Venus, who after much defiance of music biz convention, signed to a London record company and began making proper records which were well reviewed and well-received. He began co-writing songs with Captain Sensible in 1986, a relationship which endures to some extent to this day. In 1989 he and his friend Nelson, now of New Model Army formed The Brotherhood of Lizards, were signed to make an album and proceeded to promote it, touring the record by bicycle. This led to many TV appearances and some notoriety and amusement in the media. In 1993, with XTC's Andy Partridge in the producer's chair Martin made what was to become his most successful album ‘The Greatest Living Englishman’, hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as a rock classic. Over the last ten years Martin has continued to release exhilarating albums under his own name and as Cleaners from Venus, most recently a winsome new Cleaners album called ‘K7’ was released on CD and cassette.

A highly-entertaining live act, Martin Newell performs infrequently, refusing nowadays to tour at all.  He has been the subject of  a highly-praised documentary film Upstairs Planet (2019) which enjoyed premieres both in London and in New York. A second documentary The Jangling Man, the director James Sharp’s intimate portrait of  Newell’s life and work,  premiered in London and Los Angeles in October 2022. The Cleaners From Venus track ‘Corridor of Dreams’ was just featured in the film ‘Smashing Machine’.

https://www.cleanersfromvenus.com/