I sat with a two-litre bottle of cider in one hand and a roll-up in the other, watching the video screen in my landlord Steve's living room. Roger Maynard, then a news presenter at BBC East in Norwich, was interviewing a young man. The young man, in his twenties, was dressed almost entirely in black, his thin face appearing more gaunt for a surfeit of smeared mascara. He lurched uneasily in his seat as he fielded the interviewer's questions. Did he think, asked Roger Maynard,

July 1979 - age 26 - a small residency on an American Air Base Having lost my home and my girlfriend, then rejected the idea of going to university, I was in a pretty nihilistic frame of mind. First, though, there were a number of gig obligations to complete. One problem which we faced was the financial hangover from our ill-fated EP Yaaah! from the previous summer.  Quite apart from the fact that in my mind at least, the NME had publicly laughed it out of town, we'd not even

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! Tickets here: https://link.dice.fm/Jeae6ca73fca

Pre-orders are now live for TWO new Cleaners From Venus reissues. In The Golden Autumn and Songs For A Fallow Land. On cassette and CD. Artwork properly restored from the original. Find them here: https://thecatcollects.bandcamp.com/

It's early spring of 1971. Two teenage boys (17) and (18) pose in a suburban garden 30 miles north of London. They're on the threshold of adulthood and don't quite know what to do with it. The one on the left is at college, the one on the right has already been at work for over two years. Having quit his job as a labourer on a pig farm in Essex, he's temporarily out of work. He's turned up at his friend's place with no more than a bag of clothes and an electric guitar. He wan