“If you can’t tempt a man with fame and money, what are you going to do with him? Ignore him, simply enough.” Martin Newell is explaining his situation over a cup of tea in his front room in Wivenhoe, England. With over 25 albums to his name, plus many more songs besides (think of him as the British Robert Pollard), as well as being England’s most published living poet, how come most people have never heard of him?
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| Martin Newell in Wivenhoe Woods. Photo by Andrew Partridge. |
“I mean I love Paul McCartney to death, he’s such a charming man, isn’t he? He really is, he
goes around being utterly charming to everyone. Oh right, he’s got all that
money, hasn’t he? (laughs heartily)
But you know, supposing you don’t want it? All that stuff. Cause I think fame
is like a mask that you wear. And once you’ve got that mask on, you can’t take
it off. Your dog dies or your missus gets cancer or your children go missing or
something utterly appalling happens and it’s like it hasn’t happened to you,
you haven’t even got that privacy. So that’s why I’m wary of fame and I’m glad
that I didn’t take it. As I got older and it became within reach, I started to
study fame in more detail and the kinds of things that happened to people that
have got it. The money would sometimes be handy. But I haven’t died because I
haven’t had a lot of money. I’ve always had a shilling or two around. I can’t
understand how people want so much money all the time. What do you do if you’re
Paul McCartney? He must do it because he really loves the music, otherwise
there’s no reason for the man to get out of bed, is there? In fact, judging by
some of the girlfriends we’ve seen him with, he’s every reason to stay in bed (laughs)
“The truth is, I have this body of work that I did. Some of
which is quite enjoyable to listen to, still. And this latest lot is good too,
actually.” We had been discussing The Cleaners From Venus’ Living With Victoria Grey album (a pop classic released on cassette
in 1986 and vinyl and cd for the first time by Captured Tracks in 2014). “Living With Victoria Grey was a better
record than Songs For A Fallow Land,
I think. It was a bit of a ragbag but some of it was really nice to listen to.
1985 was a good year for me. The Miners’ Strike was over. Although it produced
great music - lots of Under Wartime
Conditions and Fallow Land came
out of the Miners’ Strike - that had really hung over me, I knew guys who were
in it. But in 1985 I would have been
writing a lot of Living With Victoria
Grey. And at that time, Giles (Smith, who later became a journalist and
penned the book Lost In Music about being
a music obsessive and his time in the band) had just got involved and started
breathing new life into the Cleaners. I was recording a song of his, ‘What’s
Going On In Your Heart?’, and I just said ‘yeah, do you wanna join?’ I thought
‘at last, someone who can write songs’. I’m always doing things like that. The
whole of the Cleaners is littered with me taking somebody on then finding out
we’ve got different pop ambitions.
“Giles Smith is a very very good piano player with a huge
pop sensibility and a lot of melody in him. He had genuinely good ideas.
Especially when it came time for us to record ‘Illya Kuryakin Looked At Me’ for
a record at a 24 track studio in Denmark Street. It’s a very breezy piano part, lovely. The record
got good reviews in the music papers as well. One reviewer said that it was a
great song but it collapsed every time it reached the chorus. And he was right.
I should’ve worked harder on the chorus for that. I should’ve done something a
bit more adventurous.
“By 1985 I just felt things had collapsed. I’d given up
hope. I’d thought I was gonna be signed to Charisma Records, and this was gonna
happen, or that was coming out. And it was all bullshit. And suddenly we get to
the summer of 1985, and actually it was quite pleasant. It was a carefree time,
really. There was nothing to worry about. Every so often I’d get to a point and
think ‘I’ve had enough of the music industry now, why bother? We’re happy,
let’s just make some music.’ We can always sell cassettes, it doesn’t matter.
I’ll go and do some gardening or I’ll do some washing up. Let’s just do some
stuff. I remember 1985 very fondly. I was perfectly happy. And then I came home
from painting a house in Whitby in the North and there were 25 copies of Under Wartime Conditions waiting for me.
An actual LP. And that lit the torch paper again. And review copies had got
sent out to the English press, which I would never have done. I just thought,
‘No, let’s not bother with those fuckers’. A bunch of London bastards. They’d
just talk about London. I’m not interested in them, I’m not sending them my
records. And later on the mantra got to be ‘I’m not sending free copies of my
records to people who can’t even write
as well as I do. Let alone play as well as I do.’ There is a corner of
arrogance in me but that is hard won, I learned how to write. And I look at
people’s appalling writing and I just think ‘I’m not sending you a record to
review’.
How do you feel your songwriting or way of working
progressed from Blow Away Your Troubles to
Victoria Grey?
MN: I was writing proper songs before I started writing Blow Away Your Troubles. There was the
whole period of The Stray Trolleys. When I started doing Blow Away Your Troubles, I went to a different approach cause Lol
(Eliot, drummer) wasn’t used to sitting down and writing a song, verse chorus.
I had been writing verse chorus songs since I was 14. I knew what to do. But
with the new wave and Lol’s generation of musicians, they didn’t necessarily do
that. They got this kind of indie groove going, and then they built stuff
around that and slung vocals on top of it. I thought it could be interesting so
I worked like that for some time. And I was very surprised and sometimes delighted
at the results I got. I was used to how The Beatles would write songs or anyone
in the 60s. Which in itself stretched back to Tin Pan Alley – Lerner &
Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein… So I had to unlearn that and I started using
a punk ethic – ‘oh that sounds alright, let’s leave that.’ But soon enough it
crept back to writing songs again. I could not not do that. I’m a tidy sort of fellow in a way, I will make things
into innate patterns. And I’m constantly having to unlearn those patterns
because if it becomes too ordered, it can get boring. So when I write a song,
very often I’ll go to something completely wrong. Like taking a familiar song
and then playing the next chord sequence wrong to see where it goes. Something
strange then happens, and very often it’s something very attractive.
Blow Away Your
Troubles had lots of different stylistic ideas which led up to Midnight Cleaners, a pure Pop record.
MN: When Lol started taking more of an interest in going to
see his girlfriend in Bath, I was left to my own devices and the songwriting
started creeping back to pop songs again. And my obsession with the 60s. The
60s was then at that time twenty years away. Which to a man still in his late
20s, was very very interesting. I thought ‘what did they have? what did they
have that we don’t have now?’ Cause I’m listening to people like Spandau Ballet
and ABC and they’re not singing in nasally voices with twangy guitars. They’ve
got this great big very important voice (mimics
Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’) And he’s wearing a tablecloth and waving a cutlass
about and I’m thinking ‘WOW! Am I getting something wrong here?’
Then you’ve got Martin Fry, who I believe was a very nice
man, but again the big dramatic gesture. Big shoulders, big hair, big
everything. He’s got the dinner suit on, a bird in an evening gown, dressed
like Audrey Hepburn, gloves and pearls, swanning around in the background. (sings ‘When your world is full of strange
arrangements’) You know my world is pretty full of strange arrangements. I
remember when I was growing up we lived in this terraced street, me and my two
brothers, and once a year we’d have to move out. My mum would take us off to
the seaside for a couple of weeks and this woman from a couple of streets away
used to come around and give me dad a bath. That was a pretty strange
arrangement (laughs). But when you’re
22 and you’re working in an office in London and you’re going out, you’ve
probably had a little of this or that and you’re thinking (coked up voice) ‘gosh, my world is full of strange arrangements’.
No, you’ve just had a cocktail and a bit of cocaine and some girl said
something cryptic to you, that’s all it is.
And then Billy Mackenzie, ‘Party Fears Two’. Takes it right
to the other extreme where he’s almost having a nervous breakdown (imitates ‘I’ll smash another cup’) ‘This
is the sensational voice of rock n roll’ and I said ‘no, it’s the sound of
someone who needs medicating’.
For me, the two best bands of the 80s were The Smiths and
XTC. If I had to do a desert island Sophie’s Choice of which would you rather
have ‘The Smiths or XTC ?’, it’d be a very tough call. I didn’t like everything
XTC did but where I liked them, I really liked them. Some of it was a bit noisy
and overcomplex. Those oblique changes of Andy’s where you think ‘it’s gonna go
there’ and it goes over there somewhere!
Whereas I admired that, it didn’t always work. And I think they over-egged the
pudding sometimes as well, which is probably what stopped them being The
Beatles of the 80s. When XTC do pop music it is like bizarro-Beatles really,
they get very close. But The Smiths! They were amazing. I really like The Queen Is Dead. And ‘Last Night I
Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’is a great song. That’s nearly The Beatles, the
changes in there. Only a Northerner could write a song like that. Something about
those changes, something cold and frosty in the air about them.
With both bands, XTC and The Smiths, the one thing they
really lacked, that would’ve made them absolutely five stars instead of four,
is neither of them have a really top-notch singer. Morrissey just sounds silly
sometimes. He’s great, he’s witty, and he’s a national treasure and all the
rest of it, but he’s a kind of singing Alan Bennett (imitates). Andy’s voice also goes into a kind of caricature. I
respectfully suffer from the same thing – rather overmannered, too recognizable
vocals. I’ve since learned to sing.
How did you start
working with Andy Partridge? (Partridge produced Newell’s first proper solo
album, The Greatest Living Englishman)
MN: Kevin Crace, at Humbug Records, liked The Brotherhood Of
Lizards, the project I did after The Cleaners, with Nel from New Model Army. At
some point in 1992, Kevin rang me up and said ‘How would you feel about writing
an album for me and I’ll put it out?’ And I said ‘Yeah’. He said ‘I’ve got
someone in mind to produce it.’ ‘Yeah, who?’ And he said ‘Andy Partridge.’ I asked
if he knew him. And Kevin said ‘not that well but I know how to get a hold of
him’. And I said ‘well I’ve actually spoken to him before.’ Andy had bought my
second book of poetry. In fact, we swapped. Someone had given him my first
little poetry book, I Hank Marvinned, and he thought that was great. One spring morning
in 1992, round about the time my second book, Under Milk Float, came
out, I got this phone call. ‘Hello, this is Andy Partridge’ and I knew it was
him from the voice. He said ‘I’d like to get your second book’ and I said ‘right,
I can send you one of those’. He asked, ‘do you like XTC?’ and I said ‘well,
yes’ and he offered ‘we’ve got a new album, do you wanna do a swap?’ So he sent
me Nonsuch.
I was turning out songs all the time. I wrote at a huge rate
of knots. The only person I can think of who probably writes at the rate of
knots that I do would be Elvis Costello. He can turn out songs. A lot of the
songs I wrote then, looking at them now, could’ve benefited from a bit more
work. I was actually ablaze with songwriting. Just writing and writing and
writing. That’s all I did. I presented a lot of these songs to Andy Partridge
when he came to do The Greatest Living
Englishman. I sent him about twenty songs. But Andy Partridge is a creature
very similar to me and he just said ‘well I reckon we got about half an album here’. And I had sent him
twenty of what I considered to be my best songs! I was incredulous. I went out
for a walk and brooded about that for a while and thought (jokingly malicious) ‘right, he wants some new ones, does he?’ So I
wrote a whole load of new songs as well. And then to my surprise he said ‘we’ve
got a whole album here, Martin, easy’. That’s why Greatest Living Englishman was good, it was condensed down,
distilled. And of course it had Andy being very strict on production.
As a proper first solo album, I didn’t know where it was
gonna lead. It became popular in America very quickly, we sold 11,000 copies in
five or six weeks with no publicity. There was a bitchy remark in one of the
English papers at one point, that I’d ‘unaccountably sold lots of records in
America’. I think that was the feeling here. I never found out why, maybe I just
didn’t play the game properly. I remember when Chery Red brought out The Wayward Genius Of Martin Newell and
there was a review in either MOJO or Q which began ‘All things considered,
this album is really not bad’. It was probably a good example of twenty years
of my very best work and they’re saying ‘all things considered…’ Above all, it
puzzled me, ‘all what things considered? what have I done to you?’ People talk
about what pop songwriting should be and then they’re confronted with someone
like me that can really write and it’s like they’ve held a Halloween party and
a real monster has turned up. It discomforts them.
I just accept that when I’m gonna make a record, some of
it’s gonna be good and some of it’s gonna be a bit strange. But with this one (Return To Bohemia), I’ve got a rock
solid collection of songs. I think some people would like them, that’s all.
They don’t do this to chair makers, do they? Mr. Chippendale didn’t get this
kerfuffle, did he? They’d ask Mr. Chippendale ‘what are you doing?’ and he’d
say ‘Making a chair. You sit on it. And they look quite nice as well.’ Right,
I’ll go round Mr. Chippendale’s and get some chairs. You can’t do that with
music. ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s Mr. Newell.’ ‘What does he do?’ ‘He writes and
records songs. And the songs are a bit rough hewn at times but they’re always
quite good and listenable and you can play them a few years later and they
still sound ok.’ ‘Oh right, well I shan’t be listening to that then.’
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