A slightly weird excursion with glimpses into the many ‘lives’ of PJ Proby – with Alan Dearling
Before dipping into some images and some newly discovered ‘relics’ from a loft in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, which at one time Proby rented, we can learn from Wikipedia that PJ Proby was born and originally raised in:
“Houston, (actually in Huntsville) Texas. He is a great-grandson of Old West outlaw John Wesley Hardin. His father was an affluent banker; at nine, his parents divorced and as part of the custody deal, Proby was sent to military school.
By the time Proby left school, he had already wanted a career ‘in the movies’ and moved to California to become an actor and recording artist. Given the stage name Jett Powers by Hollywood agents Gabey, Lutz, Heller, and Loeb, he took acting and singing lessons and played small roles in films. Two singles, ‘Go, Girl, Go’ and ‘Loud Perfume’ appeared on two small independent record labels. In 1960, songwriter Sharon Sheeley persuaded him to adopt the stage name P. J. Proby, the name of a former boyfriend from high school…”
From those beginnings in the US of A, PJ Proby travelled to the UK in 1964 and under the management of Jack Good, secured a spot on the ‘Around the Beatles’ TV special. His UK-based career flourished, blossoming with a string of UK top 10 hits in 1964 and 1965. These included ‘Hold Me’ (UK Number 3), ‘Together’ (UK Number 8), ‘Somewhere’ (UK Number 6), and ‘Maria’ (UK Number 8). These last two songs had featured in the musical, ‘West Side Story’. He also recorded the Lennon–McCartney composition ‘That Means a Lot’, a song the Beatles recorded in 1965, but never officially released until 1996. A 1965 live recording of PJ in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJMbEYuxeGw
Proby’s burgeoning career hit a massive brick wall in 1965 when, according to the ‘Daily Mail’ (29th March 2019, Daily Mail Online:
“Proby is best remembered by UK audiences for splitting his tight trousers on stage because of his demanding dance routines. After it happened at two concerts in Luton and Croydon he was banned from performing in Britain and his music career plummeted. At the peak of his fame, when industry experts said his raw rendition of Somewhere, from West Side Story, was the best ever, he owned three houses in Beverly Hills and one in Chelsea.
He had three Rolls-Royces, his own Learjet plane and a luxury yacht. But he also had a penchant for drink-fuelled fights. Having squandered his fortune he retired to a sleepy bungalow in Worcestershire, with his pet dachshund Tilly and a sign outside saying ‘Trespassers will be shot’.”
So, back to the recently found trove of PJ Proby memorabilia. It seems that in the 1980s PJ lived in the Longfield area of Todmorden in the Pennines and donated a guitar, a vinyl record and signed ephemera to local pub landlords. The items were put up for sale in 2005 through Christie’s auction house. One was inscribed:
“To Jim and Margaret, from me to you, Be Happy, See Ya Blue, P J Proby, Jim Bob”
Therefore it seems very likely that the carrier bag full of material which I have examined was left in the loft around 1986 or a little later by PJ when he moved on from one rental property to another. The material includes three copies of two 12” singles, a variety of photos, set lists, complete lyrics to a range of songs (some his own and some from other writers), contracts for gigs, doodles, drawings, shopping lists, to do lists and snippets of diary-like ‘thoughts’ from PJ. The images found in this ‘collection’ include photos taken by local photographer Roger Birch, one of which was used on the back of a 12” single ‘Carlsbergs and Cocktails’ from 1986 (featuring PJ and Calderdale artist, Slavo (Bohuslav) Barlow, who has the Shade Gallery in Patmos, Todmorden).
ID magazine produced an interesting critique on PJ’s ability to almost literally shoot his career in the proverbial foot by seemingly alienating himself from many of his own fans and with a number of folk in the record business. Here’s a snippet from the on-line article: “But to those who like their pop fantastical and excessive, obsessive and epic, narcissistic and otherworldly, PJ Proby is the total pop star, the ultimate pop fetish.”
https://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/pjid.html
PJ continued to have oodles of self-belief and an ever-evolving fan base. He performed in a variety of venues across the world but by the mid to late 1980s, he is said to have had a major problem with his alcohol intake. And in 1992 following a heart attack on a beach in Florida, PJ became sober. Indeed, it was believed that he had briefly died. In the collection of materials, it includes addresses for rental ‘homes’ around Haworth and Linthwaite, Huddersfield. Locals in Todmorden, whom I have talked with, remember PJ being a regular in a variety of local hostelries including the Royal George and the Golden Lion, and of PJ singing for a couple of pints! Here are the words to one of his songs which became the title of an album.
Rob Chapman produced a fascinating article about PJ for ‘Mojo’ May 1997. Rob comments on PJ’s ‘problems’ in the mid-1980s, quoting Dave Britton from Savoy Books/Records: “He was in the grip of alcoholism and had a thousand and one problems around him, as he always does. He had this young girlfriend Allison who he’d met when he was working as a stable hand. She was 14 at the time. [“She’s 10,” Proby told a visibly unamused Noel Edmonds on one of those bring-out-your-dead TV appearances of the early ’80s.]”
Rob’s article is still on-line: https://www.rob-chapman.com/p-j-proby
Rob Chapman added after reviewing his own interviews with PJ: “Only while playing back the interview tapes do I realise who Proby really reminds me of. All through our meeting it’s been bugging me – that declamatory pomp, those short staccato sentences, those audacious non-linear leaps from subject to subject. Where have I heard that before? I consult the oracle – Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop, which: hymned P.J. Proby just as he was hitting the skids. ‘He is the great doomed romantic showman of our time,’ Cohn declared… ‘along with Muhammad Ali’.”
Some of PJ’s own notes are reminiscent of Dickens’ Mister Micawber contemplating penury and debtor’s prison. It wasn’t just (Joy Division’s) love that was tearing him apart.
PJ’s relationships have had a knack of turning sour. For example, according to Wikipedia after a previous partnership turned pretty ugly much earlier, way back , “…in 1973, Proby was jailed for the shooting of an illegally-possessed weapon after threatening his partner Claudia Martin, daughter of Dean Martin, with a gun and firing several shots.”
Wikipedia adds:
“Proby married and divorced several times. He had a relationship with singer Billie Davis. In a March 2019 interview, he said he had married Marianne Adams when she was 16, Judy Howard when she was 17, and Dulcie Taylor when she was 21.”
But as other commentators and folk who have met and talked with PJ have discovered, he does sometimes offer alternative ‘histories’ of events and his ‘lives’, and the vagaries of pop stardom if you happen to be PJ Proby. Perhaps he has been so used to playing other people’s songs and portraying their lives, his own memories become somewhat befuddled. He has played the part of Elvis in ‘Elvis – The Musical’ a number of times and Roy Orbison in ‘Only the Lonely’. Indeed in his notes before a performance he reminds himself, ‘Don’t’ over do the Elvis Bit’. It’s an interesting glimpse into PJ’s preparations for his shows.
During his time living in the North West of England, locals around Calderdale have told me that he was rarely seen without his cowboy hat. These photos must have been taken from that period. One wonders if he considered himself as the ‘Real’ PJ Proby, aka James Marcus Smith, or was it another persona?
Looking through Proby’s notes, photos, old contracts, doodles in the carrier bag left in the loft of the house in Longfield, Todmorden, it is impossible not to feel great sadness. PJ Proby had moments of greatness, but seems somehow destined to self-destruct. Probably the most detailed account of some of those incendiary moments were recorded in a five hour interview with Robert Chalmers for an in-depth feature article published in the ‘Independent on Sunday’ (30th September 2007). Talking to PJ about his life in the 1970s during his time living in the North of England. Chalmers recounts that:
“The setting for the final scenes of his tragedy was not Beverly Hills, but the Pennine moors. He married his third wife Dulcie, a Mancunian croupier, in 1975. ‘He wanted Westminster Cathedral’, Dulcie said. ‘We got Bury register office’…” The wedding photo is one from the Longfield carrier bag.
Chalmers adds that, “Proby’s reputation for unpredictability gathered pace. He returned to the West End to star in Jack Good’s 1978 Elvis: The Musical in 1978, but was fired for not sticking to the script.
His third marriage was, he concedes, unharmonious. A few months after leaving Elvis, Proby was prosecuted for shooting Dulcie five times with an air pistol. The singer was acquitted.
‘Dulcie and her friend got drunk,’ he recalls. ‘I took a shower. I heard shots. Dulcie said: ‘You shot me.’ She called the police and they arrested me bigger than hell.’ Later that year he was fined £60 for attacking Pamela Baglow – described in court as his secretary – with an axe, ‘for over-spending on groceries’…”
However, PJ was next found often penniless living and working around the farming communities in the Pennines. PJ moved around a number of rented properties, living particularly in or near Haworth, home of the Brontës. Chalmers recounted some of PJ’s activities:
“It was a prescient remark. He drifted into labouring jobs, and acquired sufficient expertise as a shepherd to be in demand around lambing time on the Pennines. In the early 1980s he was muckspreading on Gerald Hardy’s farm, outside Huddersfield. He was heavily featured in popular press on account of the rapport he developed with the farmer’s daughter, Alison, 14.”
The bag includes a lot of PJ’s diary notes concerning his relationship with the school-girl, Alison/Allison, including a lot of details about access. Better left in the carrier bag, methinks. A sample of his doodles from his marriage and drawn around this time (remember he was still heavily drinking) is included next.
PJ Proby’s career was never back on any sort of a steady path. But there have been frequent attempts by his friends and musicians to resuscitate both the man and that hazard-strewn career. Wikepedia informs us that he worked with Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and had a single, ‘Yesterday Has Gone’, a duet with Marc Almond reach number 58 in the UK singles chart, late in 1996. Wikepedia then recounts that,
“In 1997, Proby toured with The Who in the United States and Europe, performing as ‘The Godfather’ in the road production of Quadrophenia. After Quadrophenia, Proby played the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Proby collaborated with Savoy Books, reading for a 1999 audiobook of David Britton’s formerly banned novel Lord Horror.”
But Robert Chalmers in his ‘Independent’ article remembered how the financial arrangement with Savoy ended:
“Butterworth says Savoy stopped working with Proby, because he asked for £2,000 to read one poem. I said: ‘Jim: it’s only nine lines.’ He said, ‘Maybe – but you will have my voice forever.’ “
From the carrier bag we have two hand-drawn images of Proby, which is probably how PJ saw himself.
The roller-coaster ride of 1960s’ Pop Reunion Shows, comebacks, and attempts to reignite interest in Proby’s music continued well beyond into the 2000s. It was widely reported in the media when in 2011, Proby who was by then living in Worcestershire, was charged with nine counts of benefit fraud, totalling over £47,000. In March 2012, he was cleared of all charges at Worcester Crown Court. Wikipedia says, “To celebrate, Proby recorded ‘I’m PJ’ and ‘We The Jury’ (which Proby wrote). Proby said: ‘I was not dishonest when I claimed benefits, which I needed in order to live’.”
Van Morrison supplied a real shot in the proverbial arm for PJ Proby when he released his track:
Van Morrison: ‘Whatever happened to PJ Proby?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1Fyab6E2U
And Van Morrison duetted live with PJ Proby in 2015 in East Belfast is really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6tY4WTWmk
And PJ Proby’s 75th birthday present in 2020 to Van the Man was the really rather good new song: ‘Calling Van Morrison’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1PLOQm07Y
In 2019 a planned PJ Proby Last Farewell tour was totally cancelled following PJ’s interview with the ‘Daily Mirror. The ‘Daily Mail’ reported that Proby had:
“…told the Daily Mirror: ‘I won’t marry a girl I can’t raise from the age of 12, 13 or 14. I like that they’re young and fresh-looking and don’t come with baggage – nobody’s messed with their heart and broken it.
‘They’re still in school so I can have a hand in their education and make sure their grades are all right, make sure the way they think about religion is all right, and what is and isn’t proper.’
He said the last ‘lady’ in his life was Elizabeth Conway in 1997. He met Ms Conway when she was a 13-year-old girl. They met again 20 years later and embarked on a relationship.”
The article also claimed that Proby had explained that , “(He) the singer was raised in America’s Deep South and tries to justify his obsession with underage girls by saying: ‘I was raised in Texas and most girls do marry by 12.’
Proby said he does not do online dating because the ‘agency would get in trouble’ and would go to prison for setting him up with the ‘woman’ of his dreams.”
An update, links and endnotes of sorts:
Late August 2024: Charles Blackwell has sadly died. Charles Blackwell was PJ’s first musical director and producer in England. Charles Blackwell and PJ worked a lot together in 1964. Charles was working for Jack Good and Decca. He produced PJ’s first two singles ‘Hold Me/The Tips Of My Fingers’ and ’Together/Sweet and Tender Romance’. This was followed by PJ’s first album ‘I am P.J. Proby’.
The UK Heritage Show on-line encourages viewers to vote in each week for their favourite tracks. The PJ Proby Fan Base is extremely active!!!
Currently, his fans are, at the time of compiling this piece, voting for ‘Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya’, written, arranged and produced by PJ Proby and sung by Tuesday Knight. And before that, on 25thAugust 2024, Tuesday Knight doing her father’s song ‘The Wonder Of You’ together with PJ, went to number one on the Heritage Charts. Mike Read is one of the main hosts of this on-line ‘chart’.
https://www.heritagechart.co.uk/chart-archive
Other links:
Early PJ Proby live in 1965 in TV show, stills and footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZxEXweEsM
Proby in 1968 recorded with New Yardbirds. The last line up of the Yardbirds (Led Zeppelin) with PJ Proby on vocal, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant on harmonica (Led Zep) ‘Jim’s Blues’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0g-bieASfY
Focus Con Proby 1975 with five tracks with PJ on vocals, including on ‘Wingless’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4c6JuIyao
To finish, a couple more pics from the Longfield ‘carrier bag’. I’m sure that this is how PJ wishes to be remembered. As Elvis AND as PJ Proby (perhaps).
Meanwhile, down in Worcestershire, PJ has recently moved home again. And celebrated his 86th birthday.
Note: I have only had the carrier bag briefly in my possession in the role as a researcher. The owner of the house with the loft in Longfield, Todmorden passed on the bag to a friend. They have relayed a message to me that they are happy for PJ Proby to reclaim his deserted carrier bag of PJ Proby memorabilia, but absolutely do not want any money changing hands or financial gain to be made from the contents.
