Pissabed Prophet share Self-Titled debut album - out now!
Pissabed Prophet was born in the resonance field of an MRI machine, as the Rev’d Matthew Simpkins tried to keep himself sane by mentally harmonising over the deafening noise of the medical scanner. Excited by the potential of the sounds, the Rev recruited Dingus Khan and SuperGlu frontman Ben Brown to help him turn these ideas into an EP.
Working over the summer of 2022, the pair formed an immediate intense friendship and working relationship, and ideas for the EP quickly blossomed into an album’s worth of material, overspilling with joyous and ruminative songs, born of an emotionally turbulent time in which Matthew underwent unsuccessful immunotherapy for stage 4 cancer.
Their debut single Spooling, released in March 2023, was possibly the first song created by placing a vicar in a powerful electromagnet and passing radio waves through his head. Its strange provenance led to an unlikely premiere in Survivornet and propelled the band into the pages of the Church Times. It also generated coverage on BBC Look East, in which anchor Amelia Reynolds refused to utter the band’s name on teatime telly, despite the Rev’s assurances that the word ‘piss’ occurs eight times in the King James Version of the Bible.
Second single Telling the Bees is a three-part psychedelic fugue, sung in the incomprehensible dialect of the Essex-Suffolk border folk, honouring the tradition of staving off ill fortune by informing bees of a recent death, so the hive can be put into mourning. It features guest vocals from Suffolk-born furniture restorer ady johnson and an introduction by the Reverend Canon Lionel Simpkins (Matthew’s dad).
Pissabed Prophet the album is a riotous explosion of unfettered joy from the fevered musical imaginations of two of East Anglia’s most prodigious talents. It’s a tale of friendship and shared passion for melody and harmony; a testament to the power of creativity to turn dark times into an exuberant celebration of life.
The Rev’d Matthew Simpkins is priest-in-charge of St Leonard’s Church in Lexden, Essex. In 2019, he was diagnosed with a rare form of malignant melanoma. His illness inspired him to return to his original calling and in 2020 he released the critically acclaimed album Big Sea. He followed this in 2022 with Saltings, a meditation on the wilderness years of Covid and his regular pilgrimages to the Essex coast.
Ben Brown has shaken the stages at Latitude, Leeds, Reading and SxSW with SuperGlu and Dingus Khan, and has released numerous singles on Fierce Panda, Communion and antigen records. He has most recently worked with chart-topping folk punk Frank Turner, who described him as “the world’s greatest songwriter”.
Note to publishers and broadcasters: A 'pissabed' is what normal people from outside East Anglia call a dandelion. The term is printable in the Church Times, but too rude for pre-watershed use on the BBC.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bzOuo7YYkw
Bandcamp: https://pissabedprophet.bandcamp.com/album/pissabed-prophet
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/album/5XoTLXMH9wYHy2QVvYuBAV?si=VVLiXShcSkChUD8UxqRj8A
Credit: Jamie Niblock
(L-R: Jimmy Simpkins, Matty Simpkins, Toby Bull, Ben Brown, Nick Daldry)
