I start a lot more projects than I ever finish, all too often running out of time or motivation, or finding that they just don’t work. The annual overreaction to some idiot burning a poppy reminded me of Bulletproof Poets.
The Bulletproof Poets are an indie rock band with a political edge. They’re just on the verge of success*, touring like mad bastards and developing all the rock ‘n roll quirks that destroy bands. Everything looks rosy, until they release a single entitled Piss on the Cenotaph. That’s when the death threats, and the deaths, begin.
This was going to be mostly about the presentation. I wanted to do it as a comic-cum-fake-scrapbook, adding depth to the graphic narrative of the final interview by adding in reviews, gossip column pieces etc. It was going to be square format, so it could be packaged to look like a special 7″ or a CD. A version did get made, but all it was was thumbnails on post-it notes. They were scanned and put up on Spinneyhead some time during the Jurassic, but having moved servers, house and PC several times since then, I can’t lay my hands easily on either the originals or the scans. No doubt some of the themes and ideas will make it into other tales, but it’s unlikely that Bulletproof Poets will ever exist as originally intended.
Snippets– The title was originally going to be Ballad of the Bullet Proof Poet, and came from a song by Dogs D’amour. For a while it was a title without a story. Piss on the Cenotaph wasn’t a song title I came up with, I stole it from someone else, I never really knew what the lyrics would be. I like to imagine they’d be something damning about the way governments fail to honour the fallen by sending ever more troops off to die for pointless causes. But the singer/songwriter character was going to be portrayed as an arrogant tosser, so he would probably have thrown in some stuff about service personnel being idiots for falling for the lies over and over.
*Success being defined as the point where the hipsters at the NME stop saying your band are the next big thing and start convincing themselves that they never liked your music, not even a little bit.
