Midnight Cleaners - Cleaners From Venus

Midnight Cleaners from 1982 is probably the most well known Cleaners From Venus album. This was originally a tape only release. Martin Newell’s diy post-punk lo-fi psychedelic pop is glorious. 

Midnight Cleaners starts out with doomy basslines, then drums, glockenspiel & synths follow through via his bedroom's echo chamber. 

Wow the splendid melodiousness of this never ceases to amaze. In a parallel universe... 

When they hit their stride with superior jangles, angular tangents and ecstatic bursts of majestic bittersweet melodic pop, it’s almost too much.

A month or six ago Martin Newell announced on instagram that this wonderfully blissful anthem had hit 6 million streams on Spotify. Not bad for an unknown 80s band who were always in between scenes. A true cult pop phenomena finally reaching critical mass forty years later.

This. Just when you're thinking this is some Saxamophone instrumental noodle with amazing bass a verse comes in, then bang just the ecstatic everything. Anthem!

Martin's got wistful deep within his bones down to his socks. This is psychedelic raindrops. Cleaners From Venus pack an emotional punch that few bands ever do, all the while being quintessentially English. 

This despondent paean to drudgery, gentrification and dystopia is quaint by today's standards. Nostalgia for nostalgia. If only dystopia was this cute.

"The sun unfolds but it never shines" The glorious gloom of it all. 

Not to forget the dubbed out saxanophone jamz. At this point they were only comparable to The Homosexuals at their most sublime.

Like most of the population I didn’t discover Cleaners From Venus during the 80s. I came across them in the 90s via the compilation cd that came with the book Unknown Legends Of Rock 'n' Roll. Then in the early 00s I found a shonky cdr copy of Midnight Cleaners in a 2nd hand record shop in Melbourne. Anyway it wasn’t until thirty years after the initial release that Midnight Cleaners got issued for the first time on vinyl and yeah I know you really only need this on tape or a shitty cd but I hope Martin got some money from my purchases of his reissues.