Dig. David Nichols S.

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.

      8 It’s a Flash!

       THE EARLY TO MID SEVENTIES

      Australian rock is probably the most advanced in the music world because this country has never known success, that perverter of truth and destroyer of progress. By the very virtue of its separateness and isolation Australian rock has weaved itself into its own thing; it has a distinction, an original and exciting dimension so totally its own. Even our pop-hype groups are so much better than many so-called ‘International-Heavy-Super-Hype’ bands, our pop-hypes have to achieve on stage the same sounds English and American bands achieve in a million dollar studio. Put them in good studios with open-minded technicians and you get LPs like ‘the Masters” English LP, a very good LP for a band that musically is still learning what it’s about. Put the Aztecs, Chain, Spectrum etc. into the same studios and watch out ears.’¹

      Lobby Loyde was expressing a minority view when he trumpeted these forthright, insider opinions on the state of Australian music in 1971 in the high-quality weekly Melbourne music paper Daily Planet. He appears to have forgotten about his childhood rivals the Bee Gees, along with other Australians who’d had major success in the 1960s (though these omissions can perhaps be explained by his definition of ‘rock’).

      Within the next few years Australian groups and artists such as AC/DC, Rick Springfield, Olivia Newton-John and Little River Band would experience major international success. None of them was obviously Australian in sound or style, but all emerged quite organically from within the Australian pop/rock industry, even if only the first was likely to have met with Loyde’s approval – appropriately so, since AC/DC owed a significant debt to his own work.

      Loyde was already a well-known player when he wrote these words. He had gravitated from Brisbane to Melbourne in the late 60s, had joined and then left the Aztecs, and was currently playing with a final, ad hoc line-up of the Wild Cherries, who had an extraordinary single on the Havoc label, ‘I’m the Sea (Stop Killing Me)’, the B side of which also bore the title ‘Daily Planet’. Loyde would shortly