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7 Knights in Yellow Armour

PIP PROUD

my music has brought young people to tears, to exclaims of ‘genius’, yet, still, there are these incredible people who think im a child. Gosh, i was screwed up too, i used to cry at night, but i got out of it, i created my self out of the mess my parents manufactured, but it seems theres not many like me. isnt there anyone who values truth before pleasure? i have no resentment, only a rather compassionate repulsion, and hence, a lonliness.1

– Pip Proud, circa 1967

In 2006 Lobby Loyde described Australian music of the 1960s and 70s as ‘bloody sissy pop. The worst elements of pop.’² This view, coloured by insider experience, has its merits. Sissy pop – a valid form in itself, with Johnny Young’s song ‘The Girl That I Love’ perhaps a prime and marvelous example of it – certainly thrived in this place and time (the alert reader may also have noticed that Adelaide even had a group in the mid 60s called the Syssys). But it is also undeniably true that some of the best pop music ever made came about in this era. If Pip Proud was pop (folk pop?), then he proves it.

While much of the flowery and celebratory puff which seems unavoidable in writing about the 60s should be viewed with some scepticism, the short public career of Pip Proud between 1967 and 1969 demonstrates, at the very least, that major record companies of the period were happy, even eager, to release experimental and entirely original Australian-made music, however possibly harrowing and uncomfortable (or, for that matter, valid and rich) it might have been for some listeners. Such companies were no doubt operating on the principle that the hippie and/or rock market was too difficult for them to understand, and that therefore anything might sell (the punk/new wave market was treated in much the same way a decade later), and this included albums of strange, surreal, whimsical-cum-scary songs sung in a hesitant yet eloquent way to the accompaniment of a solitary unplugged electric guitar.

Philip Proud was born in 1947 in South Australia; his father was a state public servant whose work required that the family – Pip, his parents, older brother Geoffrey and a number of Aboriginal foster children who would now mostly be classed as members of the ‘stolen generation’ – move around the state. He introduced himself to the readers of Australian Poetry Now!, an anthology of work by new poets that included his friend Michael Dransfield (through whose influence he was included in the book) thus:

My name is Phillip John Proud, and this was naturally shortened to Pip Proud a few years ago . . . My parents are middle class and so on, and so on.³

The ‘middle class’ admission might indicate a desire to avoid the kind of exposé Bob Dylan underwent in 1963 when Newsweek revealed he was merely ‘a Jewish kid from the suburbs’.⁴ Though Proud had not made the outlandish claims about his origins that Dylan had, like many others he had reinvented himself as transcending considerations of class, time and material status. As mentioned in chapter 3, the Proud family had lived for some time in Elizabeth, so Pip had lived there at the same time as the likes of Glenn Shorrock, Doc Neeson and Jimmy Barnes, though he did not know them.

Pip and his brother Geoffrey were creative types; Geoff would go on to become an extremely well-known and successful painter. Pip, diagnosed with motor coordination difficulties at a young age, prescribed guitar for himself as therapy – and it worked. As a teenager he was anti-authoritarian (he enticed an early girlfriend to run away from home with him; the experience is explored in a masked fashion in one of his early songs, ‘Latin Version’), but he was never anti-learning; he had a strong interest in both the theoretical and practical aspects of science and left school to become an electrical apprentice and/or radio technician in his mid-teens. He spent some time as an apprentice in that line of work for the Federal Government’s extensive and wide-ranging Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme, then abandoned this to live with Geoff in Sydney, where the brothers endured Gothic poverty for some time until the elder Proud began to receive some recognition and find supporters for his art. Forty years later, Pip wrote:

All this lugging my guitar around trying to figure an E chord from an A chord. My brother trying to paint pictures. Once we rented a laundry to live in. It had a sloping cement floor with a big old cement laundry tub and a bunsen burner for a stove, but somehow we didn’t mind. We had our dreams of fame and wealth one day, but the pleasure was from the sheer iconoclasm of it all. It was bloody hard and cold but each day seemed new . . . It was cool to see how many days we could stay awake without sleep. We used to compete like that. I think five was our record though I’m not sure who won. My brother painting and me trying to figure out how a damn guitar works.

Geoff’s rising star aided Pip in another way, as two men stepped in to further the younger artists’ careers. One of Geoff’s patrons, a stockbroker named Michael Hobbs, purchased a tape recorder for Pip and then, on hearing the songs Pip produced, paid for 50 (some sources say a mere 20) copies of an album, De Da De Dum, to be pressed on a pretend label called Grendel. Garry Shead, a painter like Geoff but also a cartoonist (for Oz) and maker of experimental short films, directed a 20-minute film called De Da De Dum, which was essentially a documentary about Pip Proud.

Pip wrote many letters to Hobbs, primarily to reinforce Hobbs’s Medici-like patronage. He assumes throughout that Hobbs has his best interests at heart, but does not wish to draw on his goodwill more than necessary. He also, plainly, intends to use Hobbs’s monetary gifts and/or loans to secure an ‘in’ with the conventional pop industry in Australia; the letters refer to important industry figures of the day, such as Ivan Dayman, Jim Sharman and Harry M. Miller. Hobbs was apparently not interested solely in Proud’s musical career but rather in his overall development as an artist, so the letters also refer to books he is writing (Proud completed numerous novels, most of which he destroyed in the early 70s), film scripts, and a play, Almond, which was performed in Sydney in 1968. One letter reads (typing errors, aside from idiosyncrasies of capitalisation, corrected):

My latest book will be finished in a few weeks. i showed it to Garry and his friend today and they were most impressed, as have been every one who has looked thru it. It is in two parts, describing the developments of a young man and his friend thru five years. the first part describes their meeting and relationship and the tentative changes L.S.D. has on them near the end of that section, and the second part is simply of a picnic they both have five years later, their thoughts and reminiscences.⁵

Usually, though, the letters are about Proud’s music. They begin at the time Garry Shead embarked on the De Da De Dum film (Shead also wrote to Hobbs with a recommendation, saying ‘I think Pip’s music is so authentic and good that he is potentially the most original pop musician in Australia.’⁶) and occasionally refer to recent phone calls or interactions between Proud and Hobbs. One letter discusses the kinds of records Proud might go on to make, including an option in which he appears to place himself in a writer/producer position rather than a performer role:

Well, Mr Hobbs, i have two kinds of music that are possibly capable of getting the success we want.

the first kind of music is the kind on the film, and this is very simple to produce in all respects, but, as it is, if i am to continue with the sole guitar and my voice, nothing much can come from this, save a small name and following. to escape this nothingness and still keep the words to this type of song, i must orchestrate that the music has a beauty of its own, with the words and their feeling still guiding the melody this would require harpsichords and the like. there is no hope, and indeed, i feel, very little point in doing this, as i would produce only a very weird and beautiful sound. i think people would have to be led to like it, and i would have nothing to lead them with, except the film-type songs, but as i said, the following would be too small to bother leading. of course, business would improve as the word spread, but i am too impatient to wait for that sort of thing.

the other type of music i have is a gentle but earthy sort of pop music. this would be very lucrative from near the beginning, after i had made the necessary adjustments to my self and thinking, which would be no trouble. the difficulties in doing this are these. firstly, i would need a very obedient group who were paid a regular wage, and this would be fairly impossible to get, as well as bringing many new problems such as where to practice etc.

the second difficulty is brought with the second possibility, and this concerns musicians also. for, i could write out each song in full detail, hire musicians from their union for an initial charge of $20 a piece, and get them to play it whilst it was recorded. there are a few singers who do this. of course money is the problem.⁷

In De Da De Dum, Proud holds up the record of the same name, so it (or at least its sleeve, complete with track listing) plainly existed prior to filming. However, the versions of the songs that are heard in the film differ from those on the album; some of songs are not on the album at all. A letter to Hobbs claims that EMI had the ‘record of the film music’ though whether this refers to De Da De Dum, to the recordings in the film, or to something else is unclear. The same letter suggests the promoter Ivan Dayman as a possible industry contact, and Proud indicates he is on the verge of hitchhiking to Brisbane to introduce himself to Dayman.⁸

During the short and heady period in which he began his musical forays (probably around August 1967) Proud met Alison Burns. ‘She had on a purple, woven dress and a hat, with thick, long, dark hair, and purple stockings. We started talking and she showed me her poetry,’ he told Australian Women’s Weekly.⁹ The two of them (with another friend) appear on the cover of the album and in extensive scenes in the film, strolling along and exploring the beauty and horror of late-60s Sydney to the backdrop of Proud songs like ‘An Old Servant’ and ‘De Da De Dum’ itself. In a short interview segment, Proud claims as his inspiration ‘knights in yellow armour’.

It is clear that the film – which was made available via the Ubu Collective, an experimental and low-budget filmmaking and distribution group – brought no little publicity to Proud, though whether it was seen by a broad audience is uncertain. Unlike many short films of the time, for instance, it does not appear to have been shown on television. Bob Cooley, an A&R man at Philips (and/or Phonogram; the company was transitioning at this stage, its parent having merged with Deutsche Grammophon),¹⁰ was alerted to the Proud phenomenon by the film and arranged to re-record the material on the De Da De Dum album with a slightly altered track listing, to be released on the Polydor International imprint. In 1968 magazine writer James Oram quizzed Cooley on Proud and reported thus:

‘He is,’ said Cooley, ‘either a genius or an oddball.’

‘I am,’ said Pip Proud, ‘a romanticist, an idealist, a writer of fantasy.’

Whatever he is, Pip Proud is in danger of becoming one of Australia’s biggest singing sensations. I shouldn’t use the word ‘singing’, for he recites rather than sings and does it to a badly played guitar and a cowbell tinkled by his girlfriend.’¹¹

It may be that Cooley anticipated hiring session musicians to back Proud on these new recordings, but Pip’s erratic timing and inability to record his guitar and vocal separately would in any case have made this impossible. In the end, only two tracks were given additional instrumentation: the feminist parable ‘Adreneline and Richard’ (which became the title for this new version of the album) and ‘Purple Boy Gang’, which Proud had originally written for the Aboriginal singer Black Allen Barker and was transformed here into a rollicking R&B number. Proud did not hear these transformed tracks until after the album was released.

Philips/Phonogram allowed – indeed, required – him to appear on television, where he was often ridiculed by smarmy hosts and where the freedom of live TV allowed him to turn the tables on producers and cameramen who tried to make him stay in shot and play particular songs. In July 1968 he wrote to Hobbs from Melbourne, where he may have travelled specifically to appear on Uptight. ‘If you wish to see the fulfillment of your ambitions concerning my abilities then you could tune into channel 10 on saturday morning on the 5th of July at 10 AM I do not know precisely at what time “I” shall be on.’¹²

Proud was in some respects an early example of a music phenomenon better suited to television than live performance, since he was soft-spoken and needed strong, separate amplification on his vocals. He did not shy from performing in front of an audience, however, particularly at the anti-war Arts Vietnam concerts in Sydney, and at his own series of concerts which he dubbed ‘The Best in the World’.

The press coverage from this time displays an undeniable ambivalence with regard to Proud’s unique style of half-spoken, half-sung, often absurdist and wry but never absurd or clichéd, guitar-based songs. Gil Wahlquist, music writer for Sydney’s Sun Herald (also widely available in Melbourne, which lacked its own Sunday papers at this time) praised the album, concluding rousingly: ‘If he can keep it up (he’s only 21) he’ll go places. If he doesn’t, his contribution so far is considerable.’¹³ Go-Set, on the other hand, would only refer to the album at arm’s length as ‘described as the most poetic disc ever made in Australia.’¹⁴ Proud clearly felt that Go-Set should support him; given the general sycophancy and uncritical outlook that characterised most of its editorial coverage, he certainly could feel unjustly singled out when it did not. David Elfick, who ran the Sydney edition of Go-Set, was less than thrilled, in Proud’s view. He wrote to Hobbs:

The man from the Go-Set magazine simply doubted his own judgement with the songs it seems. we were foolish in that we mentioned andrew loogold ham [sic] and his rejection of us, and the go set man brought a tired looking beatnick around to listen to the songs, he undoubtedly didnt like it, and so Mr david elfick simply became shy with us . . .

The reference to Andrew Loog Oldham is curious – it is probably connected to the Paul Jones/Who/Small Faces concert that took place in January 1968, when Proud met the Small Faces¹⁵ – but the wider meaning is clear: Elfick was kowtowing to someone he saw as an international arbiter of opinion. On the other hand, says Proud:

Some people who came to our house on friday heard the music and began exclaiming and laughing, they said i had a ‘whole metaphysical complex’, what ever that means, and they became quite elated, so isn’t that good?

He continues, baffled:

People who meet us seem to get initially very excited, as david elfick, who then suddenly withdraw, and im not sure what this is. we think it may be due to the personal neurosis of inadequacy with some, whilst with others its perhaps a contempt derived from their inabilities they discover from comparing.¹⁶

Proud told Oram that if the public decided ‘it’s a send-up . . . well, all right. I will be disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’¹⁷ At the same time, he mixed an insistent dedication to success with despondency: ‘there is no market that can be easily reached. i do not wish to spend this year cultivating one.’¹⁸ Similarly, he schemed:

There are probably 50 people just like me in Australia, all saying the same things in different ways, and so how I am to succeed is by working into areas where they would not go. – The first album was a good example of this.¹⁹

And . . .

For, you see, the artist sets the fashion in music and so people buy his music, which has made itself fashionable. If i cannot succeed in making myself fashionable, then some one else will make me unfashionable.²⁰

‘I am already regarded as Australia’s top underground singer,’²¹ he told Hobbs. Proud was in his early twenties at this time, and it’s possible his arch personal style was working against him (even more so than his unconventional musical style) in a scene which prided itself on being both mellow and unassuming. Penniless – he often did not have enough to eat – he boasted of a largesse that was plainly beyond his wildest dreams. David Elfick reported in Go-Set that Proud had ‘tried to go into the Sydney Public Library last week but was barred because he had no shoes on’ and quoted Proud declaring he had ‘decided to offer the director of the library $1,000 if he would allow bare feet into libraries.’²²

As we have seen from the Missing Links’ experience (see chapter 4), Philips/Phonogram was one label that did not seem to object to fairly low record sales. In any case, Adreneline and Richard must have been extremely cheap to make – the product of less than a day’s recording, and very little mixing. While it is uncertain how well it sold, it was evidently enough for the company to request further product. Proud wrote to Hobbs that he had written a song he thought appropriate for a single: ‘We took a tape to Philips – they liked the song very much but will not record it until we get a drummer. This could be recorded privately for about $50 . . .’²³ Elfick wrote that the song was ‘one of a series of songs that Pip wrote on the Titanic disaster’²⁴ – an unintentionally amusing slip, but telling nonetheless, although there are no songs on the second album, A Bird in the Engine, that would seem to fit this description. In March 1969, the Bulletin told its readers that ‘his new record will have the music of bass, drums, and even a cello, so perhaps some musicianship will be managed without the pretentiousness he says he dreads so much. Certainly, if he’s only feigning his dread, he’s taking a lot of trouble to maintain the pose.’ (Of his fans, Proud apparently said: ‘I think half of them come along to see how bad I am.’)²⁵

The short-lived Pip Proud Group featured two young men he met at a party: John Black on bass and Peter Fairlie on drums. ‘Tomorrow,’ wrote Michael Symons in the Australian, ‘he spends five hours at another studio recording four possible singles and a fifth if he has learnt piano in time.’²⁶ He might have done so, and he might have involved Black and Fairlie, but no single or Pip Proud Group recording emerged.²⁷ In 1969 Proud recorded a second album accompanying himself on guitar in a small cheap studio in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Most of the tracks on this album were in the same vein as the first; there was, however, a truly extraordinary title track in which Proud was accompanied by a friend, Harry Johnson, banging a microphone on a cardboard box to create a thunderous, evil sound which anticipated art-punk by a decade.

Proud played very few live shows in Sydney in the late 60s. His debut was at one of a series of anti-war concerts presented by Arts Vietnam at Paddington Town Hall on 3 October 1968, along with Nutwood Rug and Peter Anson’s group, the Id. The following February, Proud presented his play, Almond, ‘involving four characters. They are Ellis, who is the protagonist, a girl named Madrid, her sister Ruth and another character of doubtful definition called Osborne.’²⁸ By all accounts this production was not a major success; audience members booed during its performance. In April 1969, he organised two concerts under the title “The Best in the World”. This was the name of a new song he had written (not about himself), but his use of the title in this context was, of course, typical Proud. He told Hobbs that ‘over a thousand people attended both concerts.’²⁹ One of these people was Michael Dransfield, an up and coming poet who was besotted by Proud’s music and introduced himself backstage. The two men would become inseparable for a time: Dransfield went out with Alison Burns’s sister Hilary, and the four of them shared a flat in the six months before Proud and Alison Burns left Australia.

In October 1968, with no obvious impetus from Proud himself, Go-Set had used a picture of the singer in a competition they were running, which rather irresponsibly for a ‘teens and twenties newspaper’ offered one lucky reader the chance to ‘win a one way ticket anywhere.’ Even more ridiculously than usual for Go-Set, the competition – for which a winner was never announced – was described as ‘for people who want to pursue their groove. Once you find your groove, you probably won’t want to come back.’³⁰ A year later, Proud was working to find his groove, mending washing machines and saving money to go to Europe.³¹ In November 1969, Go-Set readers were told:

Pip has left for England where he hopes to crack the big time. He already has a couple of people interested in his work and has a contact in Apple Records. Pip has become very interested in Archeology and hopes to do some field work on the subject when he goes to Abyssinia.³²

London was, however, a disappointment. Apple were, of course, deluged with tapes from hopefuls. The BBC DJ John Peel was more encouraging; he had a label, Dandelion, at this time. Accessing a golfball typewriter with only capital letters, Proud wrote to Alison Burns’s mother:

I WENT AND SAW JOHN PEEL, AND HE IS VERY KEEN ON MY MUSIC AND ONLY APOLOGISED THAT HE COULDN’T GIVE ME A RECORD CONTRACT STRAIGHT OFF, BUT HE SAID HE’D SEE WHAT HE CAN DO, AND I’LL RING HIM TOMORROW. NOT WISHING TO SOUND TOO CASUAL, ACTUALLY IM IN UTTER EXCITEMENT.’³³

‘I AM REALLY TRYING FOR A HIT SINGLE,’ he bellowed across two continents and an ocean. ‘IF I GET THAT, JUST ONCE, WE CAN ALL RETIRE . . . THIS ISNT AUSTRALIA.’³⁴

Burns joined him in London, but the experience was profoundly unhappy. Proud finished a novel, The White Forest, which Dransfield was going to publish (but didn’t). Starving in London is much like starving in Sydney, only much colder – the pair began their return to Australia by traveling across Europe and Asia (no Abyssinian archaeology is known to have been undertaken). Whilst they were in India, they learned that Proud’s adopted sister had killed herself; his parents flew him back to Australia.

Until this point, most Australian artists who had travelled overseas for fame were funded by record sales, perhaps even record companies, and had at least the slightest hope of hitting a chord with an existing industry: Proud, his major label experience notwithstanding, had nothing comparable behind him. Back in Sydney he wrote some more songs – recorded at home – and by the mid 70s was writing poetry and radio plays for 2JJ (amongst them a series called Vlort Phlitson), but his initial reach for the stars was concluded.

Some years afterwards, in the late 70s, Proud wrote to Michael Hobbs after he’d just heard the Clash on the radio:

‘”I have no will to survive, i cheat if i can’t win” . . . That’s a line out of a “punk rock” song I’m listening to. You know, I’m starting to get this feeling of “what are the young coming to?” I say all of this to you because you thought maybe I was worth encouragement or something.’³⁵

Pip Proud was an unusual, in some ways unique artist (and he would be again; his revived career in the 1990s is just as extraordinary). Many have dismissed him on the basis of their mistaken estimation of his idiosyncratic style (although few with a more evident display of ignorance than British ‘psychedelia’ expert Vernon Joynson, who – typically for a writer who has no issue appropriating the ideas of others as his own – offers a cursory ‘Both albums are reputedly awful.’)³⁶ It would also be far too simple to write off his work from this time as being of interest merely as an example of how ‘out there’ major record labels were willing to go in the late 60s, even though this is true as far as it goes. The more important thing to note about Proud’s work is that, regardless of when it happened, he was reinventing pop with an injection of artistic and literary experiment and a brash, rebellious attitude. The story of Pip Proud in the late 60s demonstrates one of the core truths of not just Australian music history but the history of all art, everywhere – great visionaries are not always recognised in their time, and great art is not always rewarded, yet this fact should neither enhance nor diminish the value of the art itself. Proud’s biggest error – though it is an entirely understandable one – was to quit music so early in the piece and let circumstances, together with others’ ignorant low estimation of his abilities and his own self-doubt, define the narrative.

In his provocative 1970 ‘bio’ for Australian Poetry Now! Proud had taunted its readers, whom he assumed to be eggheads. ‘Any displeasure,’ he wrote, ‘is due to your blindness or illusion.’³⁷ This statement could serve as an epitaph to his 1960s career.