The Fall and Rise of P J Proby (2024)

PJ Proby was the best of singers. A big, buck-skinned Texan who had the ability to take the most banal, middle-of-the-road ballad, dismantle it, and rebuilt it as a great fly-blown work of romantic art. Listen to Proby's version of Leonard Bernstein's Maria—an easy listening standard made uneasy by Proby's absurd vocal style, one minute moaning and slurring like a maudlin pub singer, the next minute soaring and resonating with the most awesome vibrato, as he pulls out every last vocal trick in the book. The cliché made heroic; never mind the quality, feel the myth.

PJ Proby was also the worst of singers. Though a brilliant mimic (Gene Pitney, Frankie Valli, The Beach Boys, The Righteous Brothers, were all sampled), Proby cut some of the worst versions of soul classics ever heard. His cover of James Brown's I Go Crazy saw the Godfather's scream become a batsqueak and his versionof Jackie Wilson's Lonely Teardrops is indescribably ghastly. He waged a war on the conventions of pop balladry with a berserk schizoid-syllabic vocal style, that left the listener floundering and completely unsure quite how you were meant to take the songs. Ludicrous or visionary? A pile of slop or a work of art? Probably both. Accompanying the music, Proby reinvented himself as the great tragic artist of our times, a composite of Saint Sebastian, Randolph Hearst and Ernest Hemingway—a showbiz martyr crucified by his obsessive dedication to TOTAL PERFORMANCE on and off stage. "I am an artist and should be exempt from sh*t," he was fond of saying. But he never was. Financial problems dogged him, and the constant boozing only made it worse.

1986 finds Proby up to his neck in sh*t as ever. In the hot summer of his forty-eighth year, Proby has left Manchester, his home of many years, to return to Texas, in order to die. Behind him, he's left the most extraordinary of epitaphs—a collection of cover versions of songs holy to a generation (Heroes, Anarchy in the UK, Love Will Tear Us Apart, The Passenger...) as well as a startling rendition of T S Eliot's The Waste Land over an Edgard Varèse electronic backing and his own song, The Mugwump Dance, where Def Jam seismic syncopation meets Cajun rock and Mancunianart-funk dislocation. Plans for Proby to record some e e cummingspoems and Captain Beefheart covers have been shelved indefinitely.

The people behind this bizarre project are Dave Britton and MikeButterworth of Savoy Books in Manchester. Britton initially metup with Proby in order to write his biography, but his thoughtsoon turned to re-launching Proby's career within an '80s context.

"We've always rated Proby since the '60s. For me, he's the great original pop star, the archetypal pop singer. He can do everything—country, rock'n'roll, ballads. I think his main talent is for burlesquing all these styles, because he upsets pre-conceived ideas of what these forms are—he takes the piss out of everything and everybody.

"The bottom line is that in working with Proby we usually chosesongs a. which would suit Proby's voice, b. which meant something to contemporary musical generations, c. which are commercial, d. which we dislike. Using Proby's tendency to burlesque, we attemptedto further debunk the songs, sometimes by going for feeling atthe expense of musicianship. Thus if the music is occasionallyoff-key or out of sync, so much the better; it adds to the kineticthrust of our intention. Tainted Love is a sh*t song and Marc Almond is a crap singer, and it deservesthe suck-off treatment we gave it. Heroes and Love Will Tear Us Apart get most of the generation of the last ten years, those peoplewho would never dream of rating Proby, it gets them really going.They get upset at an old-timer coming along and doing these songsthat are sacred to them. And yet they deify people like ScottWalker who was always a figure of the establishment."

Having released Tainted Love and Love Will Tear Us Apart , Britton intends Heroes to be their next single.

"We intentionally cut the song like an overblown military requiem. We did it this way—pompous, relentless and obtrusive—because when we got Proby into the studio to sing it we discovered that his young wife Allison had that very day left him and he was telling us, very abjectly, that this recording would be his last. He was intending to shoot Allison (whose folks own a gun shop) and then 'join his father in the sky'.

I asked Britton what it was like dealing with the notoriouslytemperamental Proby in such a state.

"The last year has been very sad. It's difficult to talk aboutthis in an interview but he's a man who has deteriorated a lotsince we've known him. When he's sober he's nice and sweet andwhen he's drunk he's angry and bitter and wants to die. His liver'sshot and he's got all the problems that come with being an acutealcoholic. I'm told he's lost all sensation in his feet for instance.He's too ill to perform. Before he left he was doing the sameact that he'd been doing for the last 15 years because he can'tlearn new songs sufficiently well to do on stage."

The most bizarre aspect of an exceedingly bizarre project is Proby'sversion of The Waste Land which is pitched somewhere between Max Bygrave's Deck of Cards and Richard Burton's reading of Under Milkwood with some extraordinary Southern belle female impersonation thrownin by Proby for good measure.

"I was looking out of the window of Peter Hook's (New Order) studio in Rochdale. There's a great, big wasteland in front of the studio and I've always been a fan of Eliot's. It just seemed appropriate for Rochdale and the North of England—something as ludicrous as P J doing The Waste Land. It was also an attempt to get back at those superior people at Faber and Faber (Eliot's publishers and self-appointed guardians of the Eliot memory)—English academic types who wouldn't let Proby through the front door. Though they've stooped enough to publish a Paul Morley book. They'll probably have a fit when it comes out."

Britton and Butterworth could be criticised for pushing theirown cultural ideas onto Proby. I mean, does Proby actually likeany of this weird stuff he's recorded?

"There's probably some truth in what you say. The problem is that Proby has always mixed with cabaret people—he's never mixed with his equals. He's got such a fantastic voice that if he had mixed with his equals during the last 15 years think what he could have done."

Mind you, it's not as if Proby hasn't done off-the-wall thingsbefore. In the mid-'70s he recorded a version of Roxy Music'sIn Every Dream Home a Heartache.

"He can't even remember doing it. He's played me many tapes wherehe claims, for instance, that it's him and Willy Nelson singingtogether. When you listen to them it's obvious it's neither. Buthe really believes that these tapes are of him and Willie Nelson.So you've just got to be polite about it and nod your head inagreement."

Britton insists that no matter how bizarre his work with Probyappears, it is designed to be a commercial proposition. But thereaction from the major record companies has been at best apatheticand at worst actively hostile.

"We were so pissed off with the ignorant reaction we receivedfrom most A & R departments that we hurtled Proby back into thestudio and just kicked the living sh*t out of Anarchy in the UK. It isn't better than the original—which cannot be improved—but it possesses more internal berserkness than the Pistol's version."

Ironically, probably the most commercial track is Proby's owncomposition The Mugwump Dance with it's vicious dancefloor beat.

"We'd been listening to the Beastie Boys a lot at the time andwe tried to get it to sound like Def Jam. I don't think it quiteworked. Proby liked what we started with, but hated what we finishedup with."

The irony of Proby's present situation is that if he was to die tomorrow, then those same record companies who spurned Proby while alive would be banging on Savoy's door looking for a piece of the necro-retro action. Better Proby alive, say I, if only to show up the contemporary celebritariat for the hum-drum nonentities most of them are. •