Bio
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 a 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.
Keen to perform the songs to a live audience, the pair enlisted Dingus Khan founder Nick Daldry and Essex headmaster Tony Ball to complete the line-up.
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”.
