Martin Newell

First post relating to cool and underknown artists should certainly be about Martin Newell. Back in the 90s when I was working at the Border's music department in Ann Arbor, one of my principal amusements was combing through the bargain bin to find the little cheap treasures my meagre paycheck would allow. It was always strange for me as a musician looking at CDs that people had put their hearts and souls (sometimes) into, sitting in the unloved swill bin of a lousy corporate mega store. Every album has a story. And one day, puttering around there, I found this CD with a strange looking cover..."The Greatest Living Englishman" by Martin Newell, produced by the "New & Improved" Andy Partridge. Well, Partridge I knew from XTC, a band I knew and loved, so I paid the four dollars and took it home. I was floored by what I heard. Newell had played all the instruments (save some drums and a few keys done by Partridge), sung everything, and wrote songs that connected with me in a strange, dark beautiful way.

I used to try to explain Martin's work on that album as "Imagine if John Lennon had come to his senses and left Yoko, gone back to England and his Beatles roots, gotten a little more mature and a lot more cynical, and made another album". But really this album is very different from that, it has a different kind of poetry and Martin never really left England or his amazing Post-Beatles sensibility. There's an incredible beauty and a strange Autumnal quality that, if you're the right kind of listener, will draw you in and keep you there forever.

And if you like this particular record, there's a lot more. Martin Newell had a lot of great albums, mostly self-produced and released as underground cassettes, with his band The Cleaners From Venus back in the 80s, and many of those songs are available now on collections (obtainable through Amazon for one, yet another corporate monster although perhaps a slightly friendlier one). And with his spin-off project from that group, his Brotherhood Of Lizards was the first (and only, I think) band to tour England by bicycle as an early green experiment. The BOL album is wonderful, by the way, and seems to go in and out of print, but it's well worth seeking out. Although his later solo CDs are more eclectic and sometimes more uneven, there are fantastic songs on all of them as well. Martin makes his living these days as a journalist, and is also famous as the most published poet in England, due to his years as resident poet for the Independent newspaper. He performs poetry readings and occasional music, usually not straying far from his home in Wivenhoe.

Martin's own website is at http://www.martinnewell.co.uk/ and if you enjoy reading blogs (which if you're STILL with me I must assume you are) I'd highly recommend checking his out. Literate and hilarious! I'll leave you with a few songs from "The Greatest Living Englishman".