The Cleaners From Venus - Live in London
Schedule
Wed, 30 Sep, 2026 at 07:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Islington Assembly Hall | London, EN
Upset The Rhythm presents…THE CLEANERS FROM VENUS
Wednesday 30 September
Islington Assembly Hall, Upper St, London, N1 2UD
7pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Jeae6ca73fca
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/
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A note from Martin…
With the Cleaners from Venus, it was always about the songs. Even back in the 1980s when we first began. Earlier still when I was a young teenager, taking my first songs around the London record companies, a kindly record producer called Fritz Fryer gave me some advice. He said, “If a song will stand up and sound good, with only one voice and the instrument upon which it was written, then you’ve pretty much got the record.”
Having struggled in bands throughout my 20s -- and got nowhere -- I decided that if the music business wasn’t going to give me a game, then I’d have to start my own game. It began as a very small game indeed. We recorded at home on cheap or homemade instruments, using kitchen percussion and swamping everything in psychedelic echo. We sold our early efforts on cassettes. Back then, if we managed to sell between 50 and 100 cassettes, it was deemed a success. With that kind of ethos, if we’d had the internet back in the 1980s we could have conquered the world. That was then.
Now, in 2026, Cleaners from Venus songs stream in their millions across many platforms. We sell many records and cassettes and our popularity has grown organically -- and internationally. We were surprised and touched to discover that the bulk of our listeners are young, bright people, often with an inclination to dress rather eccentrically. They’re not exactly hipsters but perhaps fashion-wise, they tend to be non-conformists.
A tour manager informed me, by the way, that he thought that our people were quite the nicest audiences he’d come across. At gigs, therefore, instead of hiding in the dressing room, I like to hang out by the front desk, meeting the gig-goers. We don’t have much of a guest list, because we don’t issue press passes or encourage broadcasters to attend our events. They’ve never been part of our story and to tell the truth we don’t really need them now.
The reason that Cleaners from Venus don’t play many gigs is because quite honestly, we’ve found that our time is better spent trying to write bomb-proof songs and great records, many of which are destined to last longer than gig memories. But when we do come out to play, we like to dress up and be a bit silly with it. Audiences never know what they’re going to get. But then, a bit of general unrehearsed chaos, never goes amiss, does it?
We can reveal, however, that on board for this year’s events, will be Nelson Surfquake Nice who was a Cleaners from Venus member way back in the 80s --until New Model Army borrowed him on a long loan. Nel was also one half of The Brotherhood of Lizards, who made the Lizardland album. So what we figured we’d do for you this time, was to play a good mix of Cleaners classics, with a Brotherhood of Lizards cameo-set thrown in, as well as some songs, from The Greatest Living Englishman album.
That’s right, we’re playing to the gallery. Because we think that you’ll probably like it. The Gallery, this year, incidentally, will be in London at Islington Assembly Hall. We hope to meet you and to play you some songs. Because, as I stated at the beginning of this epistle, with Cleaners from Venus it’s always been about the songs. See you soon!
(Martin Newell, March 2026)
Where is it happening?
Islington Assembly Hall, Upper Street, Islington,London, United Kingdom
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