- 1)
Destined to be unlucky in love, the main reason cited by partners leaving
Newell has often been "I now realise that I need to go out with someone
more conventional."
- 2)
Newell worked as a postman for 8 months in Harpenden, Herts. during
1972.
- 3)
When arrested with a small amount of cannabis that same year, Newell
said he was carrying it for a girlfriend, an American hitchhiker who'd
now moved on. The headline in the St Albans evening paper that July,
read "Postman carried drug as 'Act of Chivalry'.
- 4)
Newell went to school with Pierce Brosnan.
- 5) Newell
aged 20, met Dave Dee, then A&R man for Atlantic. His first words
were: "Ere, my mum used to like you
 on
the telly. Are you still working then?"
- 6) Newell
can't drive, has never been to a football match and is partly colour
blind.
- 7)
Newell once fell face down, drunk in front of Elkie Brooks who was judging
a best band competition, which he had entered in 1974.
- 8)
While filling in his passport-form when Newell was ten, his father came
to the section entitled SpecialPeculiarities. "My God...I could write
a bloody book." he said.
- 9)
Late for a Red Wedge meeting in London in 1987, Newell and Captain Sensible,
charging up a staircase at The Conway Hall crashed into a large clergyman,
winding him. "Take more care boys." gasped Msgnr. Bruce Kent.
- 10)
Newell has trained his dog Wulf to attack imaginary lawnmowers.
But only rip-started ones.
- 11)
Newell's mum was once on Opportunity Knocks, when it was a radio
show in the forties.The song she sang, 'Beyond The Blue Horizon' is
still sung by Newell sometimes.
- 12)
Newell's middle brother is a dead ringer for Ian Botham.
- 13)
Newell's Auntie, Molly Bolt is also a poet and has two collections published.
- 14)
Newell is distantly related to Dennis Wheatley. They are not in
touch each other.
- 15)
Before working as no.1 back up singer for Boy George, Helen Terry was
a sixteen year old Joplin sound-alike in Maldon, Essex, where her mother
lived on a barge. She had a band, which she used to rehearse with which
at one point featured a nineteen year on pedal-harmonium. Guess who
he was.
- 16)
At an R.A.F base in Lincolnshire in 1974, Newell's glam rock band, The
Mighty Plod couldn't be bothered using the toilet, some distance from
their dressing room. They utilised a revolving drum, generally used
for Tombola tickets. At the end of the gig, realising that the military
police were checking thedressing room to make sure everything was in
order, Newell and the drummer, Ex, emptied the half full drum out of
a first floor window. From the darkness came a shriek from a woman and
angry oaths from a man. They never found out anything further.
- 17)
For two years, Newell suspended a large inflatable seagull from
his ceiling. He named the seagull Eric after the author of Love Story.
- 18)
Aged seven, Newell once jammed part of a brick into his mouth as
an experiment. It took his mother 5 minutes to extricate the object.
-
- 19)
After ingesting three very strong microdots of LSD, Newell was discovered
by friends 12 hours later, in a neighbours garden, wrapped in a tartan
blanket and repeatedly singing Marilyn, an old Pink Fairies song.
- 20)
During a period of overwork in autumn of 1981, Newell's girlfriend called
Cleaners drummer Lawrence Elliot and told him to come over straight
away. Elliot found Newell in a state of hyper mania following a lunchtime
drink and a bottle of cough medicine. He was engaged in the act of cooking
two seven inch reels of master tapes under the kitchen grill. "That's
no way to deal with this Martin." reasoned Elliot. "You're perfectly
right." said Newell and threw the objects into a hot frying pan where
he began basting oil over them with a wooden spoon.
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