Another year, another album from Cleaners from Venus. Yer man Mr Mule seems to drop these almost monthly now - that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point; productivity somehow naturally balanced with a laid-back slackness governs his own micro world.
And so here we have Beryl and Ruff Go Shopping. But OF COURSE they do. I’ve not dug deep enough yet to find out the meaning behind the title. I’m sure I’ll read about it on Facebook in another 5,000-word essay.
All the usual themes appear to be present and correct. We’re talking seasonal change. It’s four seasons in one album. There’s no one else who quite paints a picture of the changing small-town England landscape than Mr Mule.
The sense of Englishness lingers heavy throughout the album. That’s Englishness being celebrated for all its quirkiness, rather than any flag-waving nonsense. It’s like life stopped in 1983 for Mr Mule, yet somehow he still manages to make these DIY records at a remarkable pace.
For all his self-confessed Luddite tendencies, I don’t think he recognises that he is actually something of a digital disruptor and maverick. Self-recording, self-producing and self-distributing music at such a pace is very much for the modern world.
He’d hate to hear this comparison but he’s something of an Estuary Wilde’s Prince. ARF. That made me chuckle.
The music is pretty timeless. He knows how to pen a bloody good tune and then add his usual jingle jangle and reverb all around it.
I tend to lose track of the amount of music he’s creating these days, but that’s not the point. It’s some legacy that is being built up.