Written by: Don Ciccone

Martin Newell is a man who wears many hats (besides his trademark Dickensian topper).  Poet, author, singer-songwriter, musician, gardener… he’s equally great at all of these trades.  In Britain his name is a household word… as a poet.  (where else but in the British Isles can one make a living as a poet?).  In Europe, America, and Japan (at least) he’s a cult hero: as leader of The Cleaners From Venus, he’s become the godfather of DIY pop music.  Many regard him as the greatest songwriter to come out of the UK since Ray Davies.  He’s been the subject of a recent film called Upstairs Planet: The Cleaners From Venus and the Universe of Martin Newell.  He’s written two volumes of his autobiography, This Little Ziggy and The Greatest Living Englishman. (we’re hoping for a third).  The Cleaners’ latest album is called Dollybirds and Spies and it’s brillliant.  He spoke to us about that and many other worthy subjects, by phone from his home on the east coast of England.  

Stereo Embers Magazine: Hi Martin.  Is this a good time?

Martin Newell: Yes, it’s 8 o’clock here and I’m just crushing some garlic like in I saw in The Godfather.  Slicing it nice and thin so it liquidises in the pan.

SEM: Are you making tomato sauce?

Martin: No, I’m actually making sort of Bombay Potatoes, but very loosely. Some tomatoes, par-boiled potatoes, garlic, curry powder.  Bombay Potatoes. 

SEM: What better way to start our interview than with a Martin Newell recipe? 

Martin: Well it’s not perfect. I really should use tinned tomatoes but I’m looking after some French people’s garden next door and they’ve got this amazing tomato harvest and there’s more than I can eat.  The overripe ones, all they’re good for is making tomato sauce or Bombay Potatoes.

SEM: You make a good Cheese on Toast.

Martin:  Oh really?  Did I do Cheese on Toast when you were over here?  

SEM:  You did.  There was a cheese on toast scene in Detectorists.  Have you seen that tv show?

Martin:  Yes, of course.  It’s brilliant.

SEM:  That was made in your neck o’ the woods, wasn’t it?

Martin:  I know the area quite well.  It’s a very good example of a very traditional type of English show.  They don’t make enough of them any more.  There was one called The Last of the Summer Wine.  They made it for years but it was done in a Yorkshire accent and they sent it to America and the guys in charge there were New Yorkers and they said, “We can’t understand what you guys are saying.” It’s what we call “a marmite show”– you either love it or you hate it.  I loved it. Detectorists was very popular here.  

SEM: Do you like Gervais’s After Life as well?

Martin: Oh, that’s fantastic.  It’s got a huge amount of humanity in it.  He irritates a lot of English people but a lot of people think he’s a genius.  I happen to think he’s great.  He can make you laugh, he can make you cry, and he’s got all those embarrassing nuances.

SEM: Best get down to business. The Stereo Embers connection with you goes back years ago when our editors were in college.  There was a poetry contest at San Francisco State University and you were invited to enter.  Your poem won first prize.  It was published in a book called 20 Pounds of Headlights.

Martin – I remember it. It was one of the few poems I ever wrote that doesn’t rhyme.  It was called “The Weather Backcast”.  That’s quite a way back.  I must’ve written that in 1997-98, maybe. 

SEM: The judges didn’t know your work and didn’t know you were a musician and songwriter.  They were totally unbiased and chose the poem solely on its own.

Martin:  I’m a very published English poet and my relationship with the poetry world in England is much the same as my relationship with the music world: they think I’m a yob.  They don’t understand why I do what I do.  Poetry is populated by a bunch of people in tweed jackets who talk garbage and write terrible stuff.  I just write popular stuff and they hate it. That’s how come I get in the papers.  I’m rhyming and I’m being funny and that’s regarded as cheating.  But that’s mostly popular if you’re a poet.

SEM: Like that lady in England who rhymes.

Martin: Pam Ayres. She’s probably Britain’s most popular poet ever, certainly Britain’s most popular living poet, I would say. Most of the people who like her don’t read poetry, but they like her.  It’s the same with John Cooper Clarke, who’s a very good friend of mine.  Have you come across him? 

SEM:  Yes, sure.

Martin:  He looks kinda like Johnny Thunders–he looks the dark side.

SEM: Or Dylan in ’66.

Martin: Yeah, that’s right.  John had that look, originally…yeah.  

SEM:  People in England seem to know you more as a poet or a newspaper writer rather than a musical artist.

Martin:  Oh yeah, of course, because I was a very famous poet.  But the people who were the self appointed custodians, Oxford and Cambridge— I took no notice of them.  I kinda jumped the queue.  Once there was an academic here and he was drunk and he said, “I didn’t think much of that thing you had in The Independent“, referring to one of my poems.  And I said, “Really Kevin?  I had no idea you could read.”  And that’s why I made myself unpopular with the cunts, so they can fuck off.  It’s none of their business.  I do not accept their authority.  I do not accept their judgement.  It’s the same with rock critics.  What I do with music and with poetry is my business, not theirs.  And I’m not gonna let those fuckers stop me.  I’m not interested in their accolades or their condemnation.  And now I seem to be getting popular as a musician– at the age of 67.

SEM:  Do you still write poems for the newspaper?

Martin: No, I stopped two years ago.  I’d realized I’d been writing poems for national newspapers–broadsheets–for something like 28 years. I’d been doing it at least weekly.  Sometimes–at the height of my time with The Independent–three times weekly.  And writing features.  That’s why people you asked probably knew me as a writer.  And because there was a bit where I was doing music but I wasn’t doing that much.  People are only just discovering: “Hey, he’s got this wealth of music.” I had this film premiere in the West End of London last summer and people were surprised: “How did he fuckin’ get that?” This is what they’re like in England.  They’re not very nice to you but they’re especially not very nice to you if you walk around like you’re perfectly legitimate and they haven’t recognized it yet.

 SEM: And then there’s your radio show and, as you mentioned, the movie.  

Martin: There’s a new movie coming and there are two concert videos waiting in the wings.  All the chickens have come home at once, basically.

SEM: There’s another movie coming?

Martin: Yes, it’s called The Jangling Man.  Upstairs Planet came out about a year ago. The Jangling Man is being produced and there are two concert videos: one is called Golden Afternoon and it was made by a quite a famous TV director here.  It was made in 2003.  It’s just a live concert, something I did about my 50th birthday.  People came over here from America.  It’s very peculiar; I don’t really fuck with fame too much.  I have friends who are famous, certainly more famous than me.  I don’t know one who’s not been a bit scarred by it.   So I don’t take it too seriously and up until now I haven’t really pushed for the money.  Although I have to say it’s staring to come in a bit.  At 67 it’s happened in exactly the right order for me.  I can’t remember who said it, they usually say it was Oscar Wilde: “To have fame and youth and money all at the same time is too much for any soul, really”.  So I haven’t.  I had youth and I had fun, then I got a little bit of fame…a small dose based on that thing… who was it?  Mithridates.  He took a little bit of all kinds of poison to inoculate himself against it with the idea that if it didn’t kill him it would make him stronger.

SEM:  The Jangling Man is a documentary?

Martin: Yes, it was made by a British director with a bit of American collaboration and it’s going to be out possibly in the next three months.  Certainly in the next 6 months. It’s got interviews with all kinds of people.  Mac Demarco, R. Stevie Moore and, I think, Jessica Pratt.  I really like her stuff… she’s great.  

SEM: What about Giles Smith?

Martin: Giles won’t go on television, generally.  He keeps himself studiously apart.  We’ve never fallen out or anything.  In fact he came back a bit, in 2003 or 2004, to play on one of my albums.  He ran in a different world to me.

SEM: That’s funny, wasn’t he the one who wanted to be the pop star?

Martin: Yes, he was, when he was younger.  I think he’s a bit embarrassed about it now. He was a correspondent for The Guardian and he wrote for The Telegraph which is a seriously right-leaning newspaper.  He was Sports Journalist of the Year.  He’s won a lot of awards.  

SEM: There was another documentary wasn’t there?

Martin:  It was only a half hour.  ITV made it.  It was called A Life of Rhyme.  I’ve done a lot of tv.  I’ve presented a few programs for the BBC.  The director of The Jangling Man asked me if I had any old footage.  My webmaster took a box of all my tv appearances that my mum had collected over the last 20 years and digitized them.  And I found three dvd’s packed with my tv appearances.  Various poetry things and even stuff with me playing music. There was an open air concert from 1986 or ’87.  A treasure trove.  So James Sharp, the director, cut some of it into the documentary.  This documentary is going to be more glossy and glitzy and packed full of stuff from the past than the other one which was more of a psychiatric study, I would say.

SEM:  You didn’t happen to go to the American premiere of Upstairs Planet did you?

Martin:  No, of course I didn’t!  I don’t go on planes.  It was in New York wasn’t it?  It was in that place where Martin Scorcese trained.  New York University.  The Cinema part where they train directors.  The odd thing is, it’s on Broadway.  That was the second showing of my film.  The first showing was in Regent Street, West End, London and the second showing of my film was on Broadway!  And they all said, “how the fuck did you get that?  Who let him in there?” 

SEM:  Ha!  Well that part of Broadway might not even be as wide as the High Street in Wivenhoe.

Martin: Yes, I know.  It must be a posh end of it rather than an important end.  Whatever.  I can legitimately say that in two weeks I’ve done the West End and I’ve done Broadway and that fucks everybody up.  I generally just use it for its comedy value. It’s only good for that.  It’s not as if I believe all this garbage.  I did say to the people in the West End, “If you want, I’ll get up and do a few songs for you after the film…from the stage.”  It’s England’s oldest cinema.  It’s where the Lumiere Bros. first showed their Cinematographé.  It’s in Regent Street, the Regent Street Cinema.  It’s been lovingly refurbished and they show art films there and it’s right in the middle of the West End.  It was just amazing luck.  It’s typical of me.  I’ve had very bad luck and I’ve had very good luck.  The good luck (laughs) hasn’t really made me money or anything but when there’s some put-down-snuffy person talking to me and says (posh accent), “Oh yes, that little film of yours…how’s it doing?  You’ve got a little film out, haven’t you Martin?  Where’s it showing?  Round here will it be?  In the local hall or something?”   And I’d say, “No, West End.  Regent Street.”  And they’d say,”Well, we have a film society, we could be showing it”.  And I’d say, “You’re gonna have get in the queue cause they’re showing it on Broadway next week.”  So that is really good fun doing that.  

SEM:  You mentioned that your mother had saved all these videos of you.  One of the most moving parts of your latest book, The Greatest Living Englishman, was when your mother looks at you from her hospital bed and says…

Martin:  “Your life has been about music, hasn’t it Martin?” Yes.Well, she knew.  She had very modern taste in music.  She always liked pop music.  She sang, herself.  But it was the whole family schtick that you get– and you get it in America as well — where your sensible mum says, “Don’t do music, get a decent trade to fall back on… get a job to fall back on cause you won’t make any money at music.”  Everything they know about it, understandably, is that you won’t make any money.  I might well have said the same thing to my children except I know that if they got that fucking bug they’re gonna do it.

SEM:  Does your daughter do any music?

Martin: Lilly?  Well, there’s an interesting tale because she was always really musical.  I got her in front of a mic the other day singing “A Street Called Prospect.”  It’s kind of amazing.  She’s 24 but a lot of her youth got sacrificed on motherhood, really.  Now, I’ve gotten her in front of a mic and in one take she did “A Street Called Prospect”.  She’s got a naturally jazzy voice.  I’m not an emotional guy, really, but I cried when I heard what she’d done.  She did it so well.  Do you know that one?

SEM: Of course, yes.  It’s from The Greatest Living Englishman album.

Martin:  I played it for my manager and a couple of other people.  I asked, “Is this just fatherly pride or is this girl actually good?”  And they said, “No, she’s got a fine voice.”  That was the first time she’d done any singing, for me anyway, since she was about ten.  I told her we should do more of this together.  She likes the jazzy stuff… the stuff that I’m not much good at singing.  I can write it but I can’t always sing it.  She’s got that voice for it.  So between me and my manager, we thought if she’ll do it, we’ll record another three songs and we’ll put out a little downloadable ep and see how the public like it.  I’ll play that one on my oddcaste if she’ll let me.

SEM:  You should.  You’ve got two new songs like that on the latest Cleaners From Venus Album, Dollybirds and Spies, that are kind of jazzy:  “Perfect Smile” and “Call Me Aspie”.

Martin;  That’s right.  It’s my hobby.  It’s kind of a guilty pleasure of mine to do some jazz.   I’ve always really liked it.  I can actually write it and compose it since it’s like all of the best work from home jobs but I don’t think I can do it very convincingly.  I know how to do all the chords on the piano but you wouldn’t trust me in a band.  I can compose it.  Richard Shelton, who did a show here called Rat Pack Confidential, went into Abbey Road and did six of my songs back in 2004 or 5, with Jools Holland’s brass arranger.  A massive orchestra!  I went down one day just to sit in on a session while they did it.  People here kind of ignored it but the Americans didn’t.  People in America like Richard.  He’s a successful actor as well, he’s been in lots of stuff, especially in America.  He’s in a couple of mainstream shows now, I think.  He’s a good all around, Sinatra type singer.  He made a second album and two of Sinatra’s sidemen were playing on it.  On my songs!  I thought, “fuckin ‘ell!”  I’ve had all this stuff happen but I don’t put it out there because if you do, people think that you’re just showing off or lying or something like that.  But the people in the industry know that it’s true of me.  Richard Shelton lives in America now.

SEM: Have you ever been to America?

Martin Newell:  No.  I would love to go if I could be teleported there.  What I’m not putting up with is how we’re treated in airports.  It’s only gotten worse since terrorism and now with COVID-19… no, I’m not doing that.  

SEM: You’ve been to Japan, right?

Martin:  Yeah, twice.  I’ve been to the Far East… I grew up there.  I’ve been to unusual places.  I went to the Falklands.  A national newspaper asked me if I would go, this was in 2007.  The editor said it had been 25 years since the war and the Argentinians were rumbling… threatening like it could start up again.  They sent me on a military flight.  I was one of the only civilians on the flight, like a war correspondent.  That was a real adventure.  I didn’t have a sideline of people or anything… just me.  I didn’t have a typewriter or keyboard or anything…just went out there with a pen and paper.  I took a guitar with me.  I played a gig out there, in Port Stanley, to a sort of mixture of soldiers and islanders.  The Falklands!  Eight thousand miles south of here.  500 miles from the Argentinian coast, kind of opposite Tierra del Fuego.  So I’ve been there and in the north I’ve been to Iceland.  The Falklands in the South, Iceland in the North and as far as Japan in the East.  I haven’t been to Australia or America.  But I really kind of like America.  I’ve got so many friends there and occasionally I’ve been tempted to run away and go there.  I know I’d find people who understand me there and like me.  The top of my list of American places to go would be San Francisco.  Maybe San Diego, I’ve got friends there.  Possibly one or two places in New Jersey… I’ve heard that’s really nice.

SEM:  New Jersey??

Martin:  New Jersey is kind of like Essex. As New Jersey is to New York, Essex is to London.  They look down on us but they don’t fuck with us.  And Greenwich Village maybe.  I’ve heard there are some really good bookshops there.  Is that still true?  I think it was big in the 60’s wasn’t it?  But it’s Brooklyn now isn’t it?  All vegans with long beards.

SEM: Are you a vegetarian?

Martin: I didn’t eat meat for 20 years and I don’t eat much meat.  I eat fish sometimes.  I’m an older guy now and in the middle of winter when my bones ache I feel like I’ve got to have some fish or maybe a minute steak or something like that.  I didn’t eat any meat at all for twenty years.  No political thing there, I’ve just never really liked it.  I’m certainly not your standard rabid carnivore.

SEM:  There was your song, “Christmas in Suburbia” which has that line, “You can let the turkey go, I’m not killing over Christmas”. 

Martin:  That’s right.  That was a point when I hadn’t eaten meat at all for years.  I tend to eat whatever the people around me are eating.  At that time I was living with vegetarians.  I went from one vegetarian woman to another.  One time I was doing a literary festival and went to this Chinese restaurant in Cornwall and I had fried rice and when it came I was told, “You know there’s a little bit of duck in there”.  And I said, “I need to eat… I can’t be on tour and not eat”.  

SEM: Are you still doing gardening?

Martin: No.  I occasionally help my partner, Hilary, out.  She’s got a big garden.  I do hedges and all the bonehead stuff.  I do like that.  I could go back to it except I’m a bit older now and I wouldn’t have the stamina for an entire day’s work.

SEM: You’re not doing it professionally anymore, then?

Martin: I haven’t been a gardener for twenty years.  I haven’t really had to do it for thirty-something years but I always kept up.  I never thought of it as something I had to do, because I liked it.  It’s something that’s always been very good for me whether I’m getting paid for it or not.

SEM:  When you’d be gardening or washing dishes did songs come to you?

Martin:  People used to ask me, “I expect you think of all your poems when you’re gardening, don’t you?”  And I’d say, “I don’t, actually.” When I’m gardening, my mind is fallow but when I was washing dishes… of course then I was a younger man.  Put it this way:  I didn’t have to use my mind for some terrible exhaustive work and so it was free to be this very muscled up creative entity.  

SEM:  Did songs come to you at inconvenient times, like when you weren’t near a tape recorder?

Martin:  If it was a lyrical idea, I’d rip a piece of paper off somewhere and write the gist of it down, but with tunes…I didn’t have a portable tape recorder for years.  I would have to painstakingly write down the names of the actual notes of the melody off the piano and the chords that went with them, and that would be just enough to trigger me.

SEM:  What if you were not near a piano or a guitar?

Martin:  Well then, the musical ideas–melodic ideas–don’t usually occur to me.  Sometimes.  One song, when I was 18, was in my head and I knew it was a breakthrough and I went around all day with the melody in my head.  Humming it over to myself, all day.  When I got home from that washing up job I just immediately got to work on it and put it down.  I generally think if an idea is really good it won’t go away.

SEM: What song was that?

Martin:  It’s on a solo album of mine, A Summer Tamarind.  The last song.

SEM: “Dawn Smile”?

Martin; That’s exactly it, yeah.

SEM: That song goes back to when you were 18?

Martin: Yeah, I wrote it when I was 18.  I was on a bus going to work–it was spring/summer–and the idea of it just wouldn’t go away.  One day I found the lyric sheet.  I had kept the lyric sheet because I felt it was something of a breakthrough.  I came across it one day when I was tidying up, and I thought, “Well that’s interesting.” By this time I was in my 50’s.  In the end there was nothing sophisticated I could do to it other than just play it on a guitar and sing it.  I played it on a nylon string acoustic guitar.  With a bit of Rickenbacker.  No drums.

SEM: There was another great song on that album called “You Made It Rain”.

Martin: Oh, yeah, some people like that one.  That was about some trouble I was having.

SEM: Let’s talk about your latest album, Dollybirds And Spies.  Or rather, the latest Cleaners From Venus album.  When is it a Cleaners from Venus Album and when is it a Martin Newell album?

Martin: It seems to me that it was a Martin Newell album when I was with Cherry Red, mostly.  The first solo Martin Newell album I did was The Greatest Living Englishman in 1993.  For a while I thought, “I can’t call myself The Cleaners from Venus– that was yesterday.”  But in the end, when I started making records again with a 4 track, it struck me:  This sounds like The Cleaners from Venus.  And of course The Cleaners From Venus was usually me anyway… I was in charge of it.  Only when I was with Giles Smith was there more input than you would get from a normal sideman.  The idea of the Cleaners from Venus had become popular and I just thought it doesn’t have to be a band, it can be a brand. I hesitate to call it a “brand”– sounds a bit post-modern doesn’t it? “‘The Cleaners From Venus isn’t a band anymore, it’s a brand’ says Martin Newell.”  That sounds terrible. The Cleaners From Venus is an idea.  It seems to be a name that has annoyed a great many people.  It was a joke, in a pub. We were both [Martin and Lol Elliot] cleaners.  And you know… stoned and havin’ a drink.  “Well what shall we call the band?”  Neither of us can remember who came up with “Cleaners From Venus”.   Lol swears it was him.

SEM:  Does anyone else play on Dollybirds and Spies, or just you?

Martin:  Just me, I think.  Yeah.

SEM: So it could have been called Martin Newell.

Martin:  I could have been called it that, yeah.  But it’s Cleaners From Venus.  Everyone seems to remember the name who’s interested in it.  The other thing is it gets away from my name, Martin Newell, as a writer or poet.  I think it’s a good screen to have.  It’s a good suit of clothes to put on.  It was my musical name.  A reviewer in one of the magazines begrudgingly admits we “gained some traction in the 80’s.”

SEM: But Martin Newell’s The Greatest Living Englishman may be at least as big as anything The Cleaners did.  

Martin: It might be. But album for album, the Cleaners from Venus have now sold, on aggregate, many many more records.

SEM:  Okay.  Let’s go through some of the songs on Dollybirds and Spies.  There’s”Essex Princess” which seems– like “Mercury Girl” and a recent song of yours, “Good Guy Sun”– it seems as if it could be aimed beyond the UK.

Martin:  Well, I just write what I write. They’re aimed at people.  If Americans and Germans… well, the British are beginning to pick up on me now.  With poets, I think the British would rather have you dead because it’s less embarrassing that way.  There was a poet who said, “A poet is like a puppy.  Everyone likes the idea of one but nobody wants to clear up the mess”.  And it’s sort of like that.  People have difficulty — especially where I live because I lived here for years and I’m this, I don’t know, slightly awkward guy with an unusual appearance and they have to kind of admit that I’ve done alright.  And they find it very difficult.  I don’t think that would happen in America.  When I go to France or Germany people just treat me normally.  Here there’s a sort of awkwardness.  The closer to home you get, the more awkward.  I don’t think that’s unique to England.  I don’t know.  I just kind of get on with it, really.  I don’t make it easy for myself.  I’ve discovered in recent years that I’m aspergic.  I’m mildly aspergic.  I’m likely to say the wrong thing at any given point, which sometimes works to my advantage.

 SEM:  “Essex Princess” seems immediately accessible in the way that “Mercury Girl” was.

 Martin: Yeah.  It’s commercial.  I’ve got another one, I don’t think you’ve heard it, called “Statues”.

 SEM: Yes, that’s a brand new one.

 Martin:  That’s done something like 55,000 Spotify downloads in  two weeks, which is in a league with some pretty well known people.  So there will be people in the industry at the moment in various places noticing this is happening who I might hear from — I don’t know.  It doesn’t matter if I hear from them or not.  I’ve got a young manager who understands this medium very very well.   We’re witnessing the death of the old music industry, really.  Since I’ve always been a futurist, that’s fine.  I’ll just walk away and watch it die.  It’s never done me any fuckin’ favours.

SEM:  There’s another song called “The Madison Sisters”.  Who were they?

Martin: That song is based on an oil painting.  I can’t find it.  I think it might have even been an American one.  I had a calendar with a bunch of pictures and one was two young women, late Victorian period.  And I just made up the song.  It’s kind of set in America, almost.  It’s not like an English story.  It’s one of those stories that… who’s the woman who wrote Ethan Frome.  Her name is Edith… 

SEM: Edith Wharton?

Martin: Edith Wharton.  It’s kind of like an Edith Wharton story set to music.  That’s what it is. It’s definitely not England.  I would imagine it’s America or somewhere like that.

SEM: It’s a beautiful song.  With the birds in the background it brings to mind the group, Heron, who you played on your radio show.

Martin: Well, I hadn’t heard Heron since I was 17.  It was nothing to do with Heron.  There was a guy who lived in the house I was in who used to listen to Heron.  He was opportunistic attractive guy–older than the rest of us– and he used to try and play on our girlfriends.  Entice them, make them a cup of coffee and play them Heron!  (laughs). So that’s how I found out about Heron.

SEM: “Ragged Winter Band” has a kind of an eco message, doesn’t it?

Martin: It mentions it but basically it’s just a nice, optimistic, cheery Christmas song.

SEM: You don’t drive, do you?

Martin: No, I can’t drive.  I’ve never fancied having a car.   I think it’s attached to the Asperger’s– it’s an annoying add-on–but I’m dyspraxic, which is why I can’t play a drum kit.  I can’t drive a car or play a drum kit.  And my piano playing style is very, very strange.  I don’t regard it as a disability but it’s a condition.

SEM: Your song, “Wow! Look at that Old Man”… that’s you bicycling to get around.  In California people put their bikes on top of their cars and drive to go bicycling.

Martin:  It’s like fat people who drive to the gym.  They drive to the gym and they do whatever they do– I don’t know–I’ve never been to a gym in my life.  They do their bench presses or whatever they do and then get in their car and then they go home and then they go to the bar and say, “I’ve done 50 bench presses today, so, yeah, I’ve muscled up.” And I’m thinking, “Why don’t you just not get in the car and bicycle to work?”

SEM:  Exactly.  Getting back to the album, what about”A Distant View of the Hills”?

Martin: Well, my brother, who’s 14 years younger than me is a soul dj, is in touch with a black female soul singer in Florida and I though she might need a song.  I’m always up for a challenge.  It came out more sort of Steely Dan than Otis Redding.  Johnny, my manager likes that one and also my daughter likes it.  I’ve got another one like that coming along soon. There’s a bit of me that really likes that kind of music.  

SEM – Did you play the lead guitar on “Tradewinds”? It’s very David Gilmour-ish.

Martin- Yeah, I did all the guitars, yeah.  I must know a few tricks cause I’ve been playing guitar for a long time but I don’t really think of myself as a guitarist, as such.  Not with a capital G.  To this day, I don’t know what a hammer-on or a pull-off is.

SEM- Are you still using a Copycat Echo Unit?

Martin – No, I gave that to a singer I know.  I keep meaning to get another one.  I’ve got a tape echo feature on a guitar pedal.  I’ve got a very cheap one that’s quite good.

SEM- What is the Martin Newell sound that we hear on your guitar very often?  Is there a particular effect you’ve used over and over?  Chorus or flange?

Martin – It’s just jangle, really.  It’s based on Hank Marvin of the Shadows and middle-period George Harrison.  It’s twang as opposed to shred.  I like things that go twang.  What I used to do was slow the tape down, or before I had vari-speed, I’d detune the guitar just a fraction and then play the same thing.  I just called it “twang” not chorus or anything.  Like the solo on “Nowhere Man” or something like that.

SEM- But now you’re using a pedal for that sound?

Martin – Not always, no.  Sometimes I do the same thing to this day.  I’ll slow one one guitar down or I’ll detune the guitar a bit.   I have got a very cheap Zoom pedal and I use #2 on that.  I know what the sound is but I get it in different ways.

SEM- Do you still use a Hofner solid body guitar?

Martin – I’ve got a Hofner V3, 1961.  Solid body.   That’s my most used electric guitar.  Sometimes I use an acoustic and make it sound like an electric.  And I’ve got a Rickenbacker 12 string.

SEM- And what about bass?

Martin – For bass, I use a handmade one.  But I also have a Chinese copy of a Paul McCartney bass— a Westfield.  It looks like a Paul McCartney bass and has the same features.  It only cost a 150 quid or something like that. I do keep meaning to buy myself a proper Paul McCartney bass.  I daren’t mention it because a bunch of bearded men all over the world will write me letters saying, “do this, and don’t do that and make sure you get the set-up right…”  I just get a guitar and use it.  I go in a guitar shop and try something and say, “That’s good. 150 quid? Right, I’ll have that.”  They’re tools to me.  I don’t get too sentimental over them.  I do tend to keep my guitars.  Occasionally I’ll get rid of one, but the Hofner V3 I’ve had since I was 17.  And I do occasionally get things fixed.  I heard this story about Donald Fagen and Walter Becker and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter who’s now Senior Nuclear Weapons Advisor– you probably know that– he was in the Bush administration.  He was a computer nerd and he was really good at ballistics so he became Senior Ballistics Advisor to the Dubya Bush administration.  I think he possibly left music to do that.  He’s still a fucking good guitarist.  But anyway, he left Steely Dan and, the famous story is that they asked Donald Fagen, “wow when Jeff “Skunk” Baxter left, I’ll bet you got a lot of guitarists to apply for the job.”  And he just said, “We got a lot of guitar owners.” (laughs)

SEM –  Getting back to the album:  What about “James Thorne, Antiquary?  How did you get turned on to him?

Martin- It was just a book I bought, or was given.  He was an antiquary.  He walked all around England.  He walked around a 30 mile radius of London, which was then villages, and he noted topographical features.  I can’t find out much about him other than that he died in relative poverty, leaving a family.  He was an educated guy and he wrote for Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine.   Most of what I know about him is in that song.  I just thought, “This’ll be an interesting thing to write a song about”.  Most people are writing about how “my woman done left me” and stuff like that and I’m writing about James Thorne, Antiquary! (laughs).

SEM – Did you just sit at the piano and say his name and bang out some chords and go from there?

Martin – No, I had a tune on the guitar which I’d been strumming and I thought, “I wonder if this would fit?”  It was most unusual chords.  (plays the song on guitar and hums the tune)… that’s what I had and I put it down on a little recorder.  And then I thought, “…James Thorne, antiquary…”  It is quite unusual, isn’t it?  I just used it.  I have no musical training so there are no rules for me not to break.  I’ve tried to willfully hang on to my amateurism.  I think it’s been the host of most of my ideas.  

SEM – Do you ever go the other way around?  You have so many poems that rhyme.  

Martin – It’s very rare that I write music to words.  Andy Partridge does.  We spoke about it at some length.  Elton John does.  It’s not that I can’t do it.  I have done it once or twice but I can’t give you an example — not in my own work.  I’ve done it for one or two other people, I think.  Only when asked to– it’s not something I do.  I’ve got a natural sense of cadence and the shape of a thing.  I’m good with words — I say that without false modesty.  I’m bloody good with words.  I can write words that fit with music.  I may not be as good with music as I am with words.

SEM – Why are you so good at words?  Did you listen to lyrics growing up?

Martin – I read a lot.  I was ill quite a bit as a kid.  John Cooper Clarke, who’s a friend of mine had TB when he was a kid so he was a year in bed.  I’ve been in a lot of places where I had to read a lot, and I did read a lot.  I learned to read late.  I think I was nearly seven when I learned to read.  I took to poetry.  As soon as I learned what poetry was– as soon as my dad told me what poetry was — he was a poetry fan– I tried to do it.

SEM – What poets did you read?

Martin – The big one for me was Houseman.  Alfred Edward Houseman.  A Shropshire Lad is very economical.  Very strict on meter and scansion.  Very kind of soulful, in a restrained English way.  And quite rural.  I also like Betjeman.  I’m very widely read in poetry but not so much modern poetry.  Not because I don’t like it but because most of it I consider to be shite, it’s as simple as that.  I think a lot of what purports to be poetry is rubbish.  As long as I’ve been in the game there’s a very bad case of Emperor’s New Clothes doing the rounds.  I see this poetry and I’m thinking, “How is that poetry? How does anyone relate to that?”  It seems to me that since academics have had the whip hand they’ve made it obscure.  Like false prophets who wanted to keep this thing that really should be quite simple, profound — out of the reach of the common herd.  So they sit there making up little rules for it saying, “Oh no it’s got to be like this and it’s got to be like that.” And actually, it doesn’t.  But anyway, I was very keen on poetry.  I read it alone.  I was what you call an army brat and what we call a barrack rat.   I was 13, and in October, in Autumn, my favourite season, back in England–the English teacher said, “you can do some comprehension on the book we’ve been studying or write an essay, or, your third option — and I don’t suppose for a minute that any of you are going to take this up– you can write a poem”.  I was living with my grandparents at the time in a very humble English house and I sat down and began to write a poem about autumn.  My grandad, an old  bus driver, said to me, “Ain’t you finished that yet? It’s nearly 8:15. Our program’s on in a minute!” And I noticed the time had been swallowed by my absorption in this thing.  Anyway, I finished it, handed it in, and then we went on a break from school for a week where we start collecting stuff for bonfire night, as English kids do. So, 10 days or two weeks later when I saw the English teacher again he comes in and does his usual thing of throwing the pieces of paper around.  He says, “Mr. Newell has written a poem”.  And he says to me, “Would you care to get up and read it?”.  And I thought, “Fucking hell, they’re really gonna take the piss out of me here” And I stood up in class and looked down at the paper and noticed it had red writing on it: “10 out of 10.  Excellent work.”  He said, “Read it, then”.  And I read this poem and that was my first poem and I was 13 years old and I suddenly realized I was good at something.

SEM: Do you still have it?

Martin: No.  I can only remember the last two lines about the leaves being on the ground / now that Autumn’s come around.  But the thing is, it was rhyming and the meter and scansion were point perfect.  I didn’t realize that all I’d been reading was poetry and that I actually knew how a poem would work.  I read poems and I liked poetry but it wasn’t something I thought about and it isn’t something that you readily admit to– in male company! (laughs)

SEM: Chuck Berry is an underrated poet.

Martin:  That’s what John Cooper Clarke says.  He always used to say that Chuck Berry was America’s greatest living poet.  Coming from John Cooper Clarke, that’s a big fucking thing.  Keith Richards would probably tell you the same thing.

SEM: A lot of it has to do with his meter.

Martin: Yeah, but the way he threw it into a song.  He’d build a hook in the scansion and the way he said it made it sound perfectly legitimate.  “No Particular Place to Go”– that’s a very good example of it.  It kinda hops around all over the place and it sometimes even sounds slightly awkward or something.  He had a very natural sense.  I think he probably invested a lot of his time in jail doing a lot of reading.

SEM: Let’s talk about The Off White Album because that’s being reissued isn’t it?

Martin: It is, yeah. 

SEM: It’s underrated.  It kinda falls in the shadow of The Greatest Living Englishman.

Martin:  It’s the second album and actually it probably has better quality songs on it but they weren’t done in such a glitzy way as Andy [Partridge, who produced The Greatest Living Englishman] had done.  I consider it my french album because I had a french producer and they like the vocals, as we used to say, “sticking out over the pyjama elastic” (laughs).  So the vocals are bit loud, they’re over the top like french records are. 

SEM: How did you get hooked up with Louis Phillipe [producer of The Off White Album]?

Martin: He was on the same label as me.  Louis wanted to produce my album. He came across me and liked the way I wrote songs.  I often told him what a francophile I was.  Louis  was magic.  He produced a string quartet and came up with the arrangement… stuff like that.  He was fucking great.  He’s a real anglophile.  He lives in England, he’s got an English wife.  I don’t think he appreciated that I was a huge admirer of all these french things.  Or maybe it was the french things that I liked that maybe he didn’t like.  There’s this french singer called Léo Ferré.  He’s my favourite.  And there’s Georges Brassens. And the Belgian, Jacques Brel. These guys are roughly contemporaneous, all of them polymaths of some sort.  Of them all, the most obscure, at least for the English, is probably Léo Ferré.  As soon as I heard him, I felt this affinity with him.  He tells a story.  I realized he has something that the French have that the English don’t.  If you’re a chansonnier, you can tell a story, you can tell a joke, and you can sing a song, or you can mix them all up.  You can be a raconteur, you can be a poet you can be a composer, a songwriter, a balladeer, and an actor.  All these things can be wrapped up in one bag called chansonnier..  But everywhere west of France, it’s kind of compartmentalized.  Almost unionized, so that you have a situation in England where the comedian does a song at the end of the act but no one wants to hear it. You don’t want to know that a comedian is a very soulful singer.  Or telling a story for that matter.  Tom Waits, for instance, he’s kind of pretty close at times. 

SEM: You mentioned autumn as being your fave season.   “When the Damsons Are Down” from the Off White Album, that’s an autumn song, isn’t it?

Martin: It is.  Most definitely.  Some of the songs I’ve written are autumn songs and yet they don’t mention autumn.  A song called “Golden Lane” looks back on my boyhood, really.

SEM:  In the liner notes to Off White, you pretty much explain what every song is about except for “She Was Never Drowning”.

Martin:  I was still talking about Julie Andrews, probably.

SEM:  Yes, you kept on talking about Julie Andrews.  But it’s not about Julia Andrews.

Martin: No, it’s not.  (laughs).  I had spoken about Julie Andrews and then when we get to the next song, instead of talking about that song, I just went on: “It’s funny, really, cause she wasn’t the same when she did…”  You check those notes, you’ll find that.  It’s an absolutely mad, English idea… comic.  I half expected someone to tell me off and make me correct it.

SEM: “She Was Never Drowning” is great song.  Where are you going to find “Mr. Magoo” mentioned in a song?

Martin: Did I mention Mr. Magoo?  In what context?  I possibly did.  I can’t remember.  You know, I’ve written a lot of songs, Don. 

SEM: That’s true.

Martin:  If Bob Dylan had to do an interview on his own lyrics, he’d probably fail.

SEM:  It goes, “Wake up, Mr. Magoo, you’ve been dragging your feet down Myopia Street”

Martin: Yeah!  

SEM:  Did Louis Philippe play the organ on that?

Martin: Most likely, yeah. Louis Philipe really likes that song.  I can barely remember writing it.

SEM: It’s a fantastic song and there’s this climbing guitar thing… was that Dave Gregory?

Martin: Oh…I think Dave Gregory did have a lot to do with that one.  Yeah, he did.  

SEM: Was that song written about somebody in particular?

Martin: No.  Believe it or not… It’s like why I hate hearing about Beatles songs.  Surely the best book ever written about Beatles songs was Ian MacDonald’s.  What’s it called?

SEM: Revolution in the Head.

Martin:  That’s the one.  Everyone likes that.  That is the bible.  And you think, “What about such and such a song?” and you go and look it up and it says, “The Beatles wrote this one as filler because they needed 13 songs and they only had 12 so Lennon quickly knocked  this off.”  And you think, “Aw, that was one of my favourite songs ever... that meant something to me”,  You find these things out.  I think the song you’re mentioning was possibly a filler.  I can’t remember being particularly engaged with it.

SEM: Do you have a fave Beatles album?

Martin: Oh, that’s really tough.  It is really tough.  Desert island Beatles album?  Probably, A Hard Day’s Night.  It’s fucking great.  It doesn’t belong to their early period and it doesn’t belong to the breakthrough period.  It resonates with me. After that, I would choose either Rubber Soul or Revolver over Sgt. Pepper’s.  Of the two, Rubber Soul and Revolver, I’d have to think really hard, but I’d probably go with Rubber Soul.  It was only with shock I realized the other day that I actually I really love Sgt. Pepper.  But A Hard Day’s Night was the girl next door that you always loved and you always knew you were gonna marry. (laughs).  She wasn’t as glamourous, she wasn’t as exciting, but she was who you really wanted.  It was black and white.  It was black and white with a bit of blue in there.

SEM: Did you see the movie when you were a kid?

Martin: Christ, yeah!  I saw it when I was eleven.  I wanted to be a farmer.  Or maybe be a farmer and do a bit of writing before that.  I’ve just written an article about that.  I wanted to be a fucking farmer.  I didn’t want to be a soldier. [Martin’s dad was a soldier]  I wanted be either a farmer or a writer.  When I saw A Hard Day’s Night, that just decided me.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do from that moment on.   And it hasn’t really left me!  (laughs)

SEM: Is it naive to think you could be as lucky as the Beatles were and get a manager like Brian Epstein or are they all like your song, “Dandy Leigh”?

Martin: Erm…  No, they’re not actually.  I’ve got a manager at the moment.  I asked him to be my manager.  He’s a very good guy.  Probably about two or three years ago… I said, “Look Johnny, I need a manager, do you fancy taking this on?”  And he did.  He’s made me financially secure, basically.  But he’s done it in an ethical way. He’s a very good manager. He realizes that I’m a naive git and I would like a bit of success but I’m not greedy.  Money isn’t my main motivation.  I was just a boy who wanted to do music.  And I’m doing music at 67 and I’m very happy about it; I enjoy it.  I’ve met so many people who’ve been more successful than me and they don’t enjoy it.  Mostly I’ve had a really great time doing music.  It’s the business part that…what I’ve done, unlike a lot of people, I’ve walked away from it.  If it’s a real hassle, I’d just go “ah fuck it, you have the money, I’m going off to someone’s place in Suffolk and go do their gardening.”  That money thing is not good.  But it’s nice to have…to be secure.

SEM: Your latest book reveals a lot of near misses with record contracts with labels– EMI and Charisma,  for instance.   Had you had a manager in those days, say when, “Young Jobless” came out, or “Drowning Butterflies”, do you think things would have been different?  Or did you have a manager then?

Martin:  There are managers and there are managers.  One of the best managers I had was Jane Lindsey.  She managed Bernie Tormé from one of those Deep Purple things, and she looked after Colin Towns who is a composer and runs a kind of small music empire.  She was great.  She kept me calm.  I generally flourish better under female rule than I do under male rule.  I’ve had about three or four managers.   I can’t really complain about any of them.  I liked them.  This guy that I’ve got now, Johnny, he’s very unusual.  He’s very good.  I care about him.  

SEM: You mentioned on your radio show that you went back and listened to The Off White Album, now that it’s being reissued.  Did it sound pretty good to you?

Martin:  Very often what I feel about an album depends on what I was feeling at the time.  The Off White Album...there was a lot of struggle involved in that.  Not necessarily to do with making the album– I always enjoy being in the studio–but in the things that went around it.  My personal circumstances.  I was a bit short of money.  There were things going on– changes in where I lived.   It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t — during The Greatest Living Englishman, that was catharsis time.  All sorts of things went to the wall there.

 SEM:  You’ve published two autobiographies now.  This Little Ziggy took us up to the Cleaners and The Greatest Living Englishman goes up just past the album of the same name.  Are you working on a third book?  

Martin: I’m currently working on the Cleaners from Venus Songbook. This will be 25 of my best-known guitar songs: manuscripts, chord diagrams, keys, tunings, lyrics and anecdotes.  I’m also working on a new book of children’s poetry.  The drawings will be by my friend, James Hunter, the R&B singer. 

SEM: Great news!  But how about a third volume of the autobiography?

Martin: Yeah, I mostly likely will write it.  

SEM: The second volume, The Greatest Living Englishman, talks about your ’70’s bands– pre Cleaners.  There was Gypp and also The Stray Trolleys.  The Trolleys’ recordings have come out.  What about Gypp recordings?  Any chance of them coming out?

Martin: The one thing about Gypp that people never credited us for…we were a fucking great live band.  We were not very trendy.  It was the punk era.  One thing we weren’t very good at, and didn’t do a lot of, was recording.  The band were very studio shy.  Not me– I think that was one of the chief reasons I left.  They were a great bunch of guys.  It was very easy to be in that band.  It was like being in a family.  They were country boys from Suffolk. East Anglia. But in recording it was like taking a very dependable Army lorry–something practically indestructible–and entering it into the Grand Prix.  Grand Prix cars wouldn’t last on a good long haul.  Gypp was a good, dependable long-term vehicle. But they didn’t want to do what I wanted to do.  I wanted to do pop songs.

SEM: What about Plod?

Martin: Plod should have been fucking...stars. But if we had been stars you wouldn’t be having this conversation with me now.  We all would have been dead, or at least two of us.  We weren’t suicidal but we didn’t know shit from shinola.  

SEM:  The last thing to ask you about is Martin Newell’s Oddcaste, your podcast.  Which is wonderful.

Martin:  Oh good, I’m glad you like that.  There’s a London radio station that rebroadcasts it.  

SEM:  One big surprise was hearing our old local boys, The Sneetches, on your show… a couple of times now.  As well as Al Levy, Mike Levy’s (of The Sneetches) uncle, who’s kind of our John Shuttleworth.

Martin: Yes, there are many parallels between Uncle Al and John Shuttleworth.  And the Sneetches… I can’t remember who sent them to me but I thought, “fucking hell, these guys are great.”  We’d listen to them during breaks in recording and Nel said, “sounds a bit like you”.

SEM: The “Oddcaste” is always interesting, you never know what you’re gonna hear on there.  Looking forward to the new documentary and more music.  Thanks very much for the chat.  

Martin:  Thank you as well.