Exciting things are afoot and ahead.  Recordings are coming, live gigs… kill cats and t-shirts for acrobats. Shiny, new, precious things. However, let’s not forget that this music comes with a four-year history. Today we crawl like dusty spiders across the web, highlighting some memorable interviews that you might have missed.

Fly – Introducing Lupen Crook
April 2005:

Early on he played two ‘songs’ called ‘The Murderbirds’ and ‘Sex Scene #1′. He said that he’d like to make a classical album and these songs were ‘extracts’, “more like biro sketches that might appeal to those with less able attention spans”. Is he taking the p?

Shakenstir – Lupen Crook: The Man, The Myth, The Truth?
Autumn 2005:

… it is clearly my job to both ask and answer each question whilst the curious Crook perches, featherless and fortuitous in each of his matted manners and nervy words. The music he has written is uncomfortable and in places wildly unfashionable, he admits “perhaps I have endangered myself,” and I agree that he may well be walking on dangerous grounds.

Sabuhi Mir – Interview: Lupen Crook
May 2006:

He would like to call his next EP Caterpillar’s Friend. Does he like caterpillars? “Yeah, they’re ok, they turn into butterflies.” I point out that butterflies only have a very short life, and he replies that “they have a good life. They flit about pointlessly. Then they die. It’s a well good life.”

pennyblackmusic – Lupen Crook: Interview
July 2006:

“People insisted to me that fatherhood would relax my desperate enthusiasm and redirect my energies, that I would write ‘nice songs’, ‘happy songs’. Perhaps they thought fatherhood would make me a happier person. Quite the opposite. Knowing that my child will grow up within this society has changed me in the sense that my feet are now firmly on the ground and my sights are set.”

Subba-Cultcha – Lupen Crook
November 2007:

“We’re out of a record contract after our next release, so I want to start putting records together and sell them on the road – get 1,000 vinyls pressed and knock them out, then do some more – just keep it coming constantly. We’re gonna concentrate more on the live stuff… we’re just going to be like a gang stomping all over England, saying, ‘we’re here, and you’re fucking having it whether you like it or not’. That’s our attitude: just go and attack towns. In the nicest possible way.”

BBC Oxford – Marc West speaks to Lupen Crook
December 2007 (audio – RealPlayer required):

“Medway’s weird, you should come and visit it.  It’s sort of… I guess all towns, when you’ve lived there for your whole life, become weird.  But Medway’s definitely got something.  I dunno what it is… whether it’s particularly good or not, but it gets you.”

BBC Kent – Kent’s Unsigned
January 2008 (audio – RealPlayer required):

“It’s a mobile-a-zone!”

Rehearsal Space: Lupen Crook and the Murderbirds
April 2008 (video – YouTube):

“There’s flaws all over [Iscariot The Ladder].  It’s got a sort of really organic feel to it, just because we’re quite tatty people, so it’s naturally a bit shabby… but that’s alright.”

Hydragenic – Loss, Love & Lust: An Interview With Lupen Crook
June 2008:

“In previous works I have felt – perhaps through insecurity – that I must cover my subject and songs with lyrics layered heavily in cryptic analogies and puzzling nonsense. I am trying for simplicity… I am digging deeper than ever this time and the results shall have to be completely honest if they are to reach into people and sit as I intend them to be sat.”

Those were the best ones we could find.  If you come across any more, let us know.  Hopefully fresh interviews will be forthcoming over the next few months.