The Murderous Project

Over the past few months I’ve been working on something that I started referring to in my head, and then eventually on Twitter, as The Murderous Project: a website for Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds (occasionally NSFW). After a couple of years of on-off conversations about the band’s web presence, things stepped up a gear three months ago. The site went live in mid-May. Now seems to be a good time to tell you about it in a bit more detail.
By the start of this year, the band members found themselves in a perplexing position. Having parted company with their locally-based record label in the Spring of 2008, they’d spent a year re-grouping and re-forming, writing and recording new material. They had mostly completed their third album, but had no idea what to do with it. They’d talked to a few record labels, but no conclusive deal had been finalised.
I went for a drink with Mr Crook at the start of March. We talked about internet-based self-publishing options for his all-but-completed novel. He wasn’t sure what to do with the album. Self-release it too, I suggested. It’s something they’ve talked about occasionally over the past year or so and now seemed to be the right time to do it. But how would we promote it, he wondered out loud. I nearly choked on my pint of Spitfire.
Cue a lengthy rant on my part about how this band is a marketer’s dream. Admittedly they’re something of an acquired taste, but they certainly encapsulate most of the aspects that have drawn me to music and art over the past three decades. They’re musically accomplished, a beguiling mixture of melodic simplicity and frantic complexity. The lyrics are brutally honest and tangentially elusive. They’re one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen.
It doesn’t stop there – they are so much more. Their restless, multi-media creativity also encompasses painting, drawing, writing, lo-fi film & photography and even jewellery & clothing. There’s a purposeful, artistic seriousness to what they do that manifests as depth and substance. There’s also a healthily subversive, anti-authoritarian, prankster element to this band that riddles their output with playfulness and humour.
So, it’s not that they’re difficult to market. The raw materials are amazing. They’ll never be mainstream – thank fuck – but there’s huge potential for wider appeal. You need to be more visible, I suggested. You need people to see what a talented, prolific, funny, annoying bunch of cunts you are. You do so much on a daily basis that many people would find fascinating, if only they had access to it. You need a website.
And that was that. Ideas flowed thick and fast from that point onwards. Fundamentally it had to be a blog, of that I was convinced. I showed them what it could look like, how it would work. They quickly grasped the potential and got to grips with the concept. We bounced ideas back and forth, tried out different approaches, reacted to feedback. By the start of May we had something that was ready to face the world.
What you see might not be to your taste (who knew you could do that with a Bounty bar?). Visually it’s loud, riotous and, in places, deliberately tatty. It’s certainly not “finished” and there’s a To Do list as long as your arm, with time and imagination the only limitations. Like the band itself, it’s a work in progress. But I think – I hope – that it’s doing exactly what it needs to do at this moment in time. The site stats and comments seem to back that up.
I keep joking that I want the band members to expose themselves on the internet. It wouldn’t surprise me if one or more of them takes that suggestion quite literally at some point in time; a Crook in a thong has already featured in one post. More seriously, the site has four objectives at present. First, it’s a place for self-expression, an outlet for an ongoing flow of visual and audio material that hasn’t been made public previously.
Second, it’s a more traditional “news” vehicle for promotion: gigs, CDs, downloads, t-shirts, and so on. Third, it’s an un-dependent space in which the band can build and strengthen the relationship with its fans, away from the gated, corporate communities of MySpace, Facebook, etc. Fourth, it’s a means of documenting the fascinating phenomenon of the DIY, punk-driven ethos fuelling the band’s current self-release initiatives.
The music business is thrashing around in agony at the moment. No one knows where things are going. What this band is doing might well be a glorious but ultimately doomed experiment. Alternatively, it might be turn out to be the dominant future model for bands and solo artists – a craft-based, artisan culture that steers music away from its temporary dalliance with commerce and back to its pre-contractual roots.
That suits this band down to the ground. Take the new EP, for example, due for release in early July. As well as downloads and “standard edition” CDs, there’s a limited edition version released in a safety-pinned canvas sleeve, designed and created by Lupen Crook himself. I’ve been on the sidelines of this project, watching canvases being splattered and slashed, filming studio performances, driving to CD production companies on out-of-town business parks.
The whole process is fascinating. I’ve loved being involved, coming up with mad suggestions to be seized upon or ignored, helping to document their activities, hoping to inspire them with my boundless enthusiasm for what they’re doing and, in turn, being inspired myself by their fearless, frenetic spirit. It’s this level of energy and inclusiveness that, to me, makes their activities – as revealed via the website – so compelling.
So, that’s the story of how I got sucked into the crooked family. As well as helping to set it up, I’m an occasional contributor to the band’s website too. If you’re one of those mad unfortunates who simply must read every word that I write, there’s somewhere else to keep an eye on now. If I’ve tempted you to find out more about the band (I told myself I wouldn’t sermonise, but I can’t seem to help it), their site is, obviously, the right place to start.
It doesn’t end here. The Murderous Project might have come to fruition, but three further sibling projects – Crooked, Regal and Bestial – have already been conceived and will be born when the time is right for labour to begin. Before then, we have to grapple with PayPal, RawRip and TuneCore to work out how the hell this EP gets released to the wider world. The learning curve is steep, but the view at the top will be amazing.