The booklet that accompanies the new vinyl reissue of Martin Newell’s 1993 album The Greatest Living Englishman is adorned with photographs of British icons such as Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward, and the Kray brothers. It’s a slight misdirect as to what’s actually inside the album: a bucolic collection of whimsy-tinged pop songs that are much more modest than the grandiosity those photos suggest. The album does, of course, bask in the intrinsic qualities of Englishness, but Elgarian pomp and circumstance is the furthest thing from Newell’s mind. For instance, in the rustic, mandolin-plucked “Home Counties Boy,” he could easily be singing with a blade of hay between his teeth: “There was no way I’d dress in gray/And go up to London to earn my pay… Now I’m as free as the times let me be/And no-one’s the guv’nor apart from me.”
This wonderful new vinyl version of The Greatest Living Englishman comes by way of Captured Tracks, the American label that’s re-released the discography of the Cleaners from Venus, the lo-fi recording project Newell fronted in the 1980s (and has returned to in years since). This album was an attempt, of sorts, to shape Newell’s prolific songbook into something slightly more conventional than the endless home-recorded cassettes he’d made with the Cleaners. To that end, he was paired with XTC’s Andy Partridge—himself quite the documentarian of the eccentricities of English life—who produced and played drums. But the homespun quality remains, and the pair recorded its 12 tunes mostly by themselves in Partridge’s shed on a digital eight-track recorder. If it is more polished-sounding than much of Newell’s output, it is still a winningly raw and unfussy recording.