Championed on Radio One by Peel and Janice Long 20 years ago, perhaps the Cleaners’ own surliness stopped them from becoming a bigger name. Certainly, they appeared more marketable than most of their mid-80s Yorkshire agit-prop contemporaries (The Three Johns, Age Of Chance), but baulked at the pop star life and disbanded in 1987 as their single, When I Feel Strange, became an unlikely US college radio hit.
Reunited via the internet last year, the four members cut four new songs, which complete this collection of original singles and their never-finished first album. For the most part, Shine is a blast of ramshackle guitar rock, not dissimilar in places to The Wedding Present (with whom Cleaner Simon Smith later collaborated). Among the heartfelt social protest is a healthy dose of humour, not least on the ironically politically incorrect Bastard (which advocates bombing New Age travellers!), and there’s even a smidgen of acoustic moodiness on Eating Raoule.
It would be easy to file the Cleaners away on the same shelf as other well-meaning but annoyingly po-faced ‘right-on’ groups of the era (Chumbawamba, Easterhouse, etc), but on this evidence they could have mutated into a more thoughtful and provocative band who never made the mistake of taking themselves too seriously.
