The Cleaners from Venus Volume 2 is a collection that covers a three year period between 1983 and 1985 for the Brit combo, now being described as a “D.I.Y Beatles.” While the rest of the 1980s rock world had immersed itself in epic and often empty gestures, the Cleaners concentrated on neat little lo-fi pop songs of a quality and standard that, as one critic later noted, “pop music elsewhere had pretty much forgotten.” By then, one of the band’s founder members, Lawrence Elliott had left the band, but chief songwriter Martin Newell, like the captain of a strange pirate ship, took charge and Cleaners from Venus went sailing…

Within this second fractured pop feast, there are three remastered albums by The Cleaners: In the Golden Autumn (1983), Under Wartime Conditions (1984) and Songs for a Fallow Land (1985). There is also a fourth disc; A Dawn Chorus – Early Cleaners and Beyond contains all previously unreleased tracks, many genuine treasures. The Cleaners had a back story and you can now witness some of its fragments.

Still today, the chief question asked about the Cleaners from Venus is, “Why they weren’t huge at the time?” The answer is that Martin Newell believed that if they involved the music business in their work, the music might be spoiled. They therefore never bothered approaching a record company. For most of their existence, in fact, they didn’t even have a telephone. The Cleaners weren’t so much independent, as genuinely feral. You won’t have heard pop music like this for quite some time. Now listen to a few tracks below.