Painted Bird 'Purgatory Man' single launch

Painted Bird 'Purgatory Man' single launch at The Old Blue Last, with special guest support Eistir + Josephine Illingworth.

Painted Bird is the moniker of Angus Rogers, poet and frontman of cult jazz-punks Opus Kink. His solo outfit repurposes familiar morbid tendencies in a litany of old-world folk, classic country, hymnals and wonky chanson. In recent years Painted Bird has haunted London’s underground scene and brought his particular brand of melancholy to Lisboan boxing clubs, grand Parisian halls, Spanish lighthouses and a thousand top floor apartments. Often accompanied by a revolving cast of crooners and players, his output has remained fluid and evasive.

Painted Bird’s debut single ‘Purgatory Man’ represents a landmark in a quest to write ‘THE existentialist pop song’ and draws on themes of meaninglessness, love, fear, rebirth and condemnation. Recorded by the ‘vast indifferent sea’ in Rogers’ hometown of Brighton with the stars wheeling above, ‘Purgatory Man’ brings together his penchants for folk, garage rock, chintzy pop and Euro-romanticism in what must surely be one of THE definitive existentialist pop songs of our time…