Showing posts with label Cleaners from Venus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cleaners from Venus. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Lost In Music: a pop odyssey by Giles Smith (Picador 1995)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20200909220611im_/https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0ZRnirp_1fQ/Si__S-GpfQI/AAAAAAAACr8/B15yxN8nXfM/s320/Lost+In+Music+Giles+Smith.jpg)
In 1985, the year before I became an official band member, one of Newell's regular mail-order clients in Germany took the cassette version of a collection of songs called Under Wartime Conditions, pressed it up as a vinyl album and distributed it to the stores. Newell was jubilant. This was, he reckoned, a real anarchist's triumph, a giant petrol bomb through the record companies' corporate windows. An album of songs made in his house in his spare time, using only a raddled guitar, an old piano with drawing pins in its hammers, a bass which was a barely modified plank, and a rusty xylophone, had gone down the system's blindside and made it right into the shops. 'And', he said victoriously, 'no one with a pony-tail and stupid plastic glasses came anywhere near it.'
So this was the Martin Newell whom I joined full-time in the Cleaners from Venus: an angered pop guerrilla with his own agenda, a one-man music-biz resistance unit.
So this was the Martin Newell whom I joined full-time in the Cleaners from Venus: an angered pop guerrilla with his own agenda, a one-man music-biz resistance unit.
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