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Date Posted: 14:09:07 07/09/11 Sat
Author: Deb
Author Host/IP: adsl-108-87-76-30.dsl.akrnoh.sbcglobal.net / 108.87.76.30
Subject: Re: PJ Proby autographs???
In reply to: Sioux 's message, "Re: PJ Proby autographs???" on 13:09:35 07/09/11 Sat

According to Proby, he bought Chrissie Shrimpton a diamond ring.....and he and John Lennon stole Brian's clothes.


The Fantasy World of PJ Proby


A note pinned to the open door of PJ Proby's semi-detached home informs visitors of a broken bell and invites them, with Texan bonhomie, to come right on in. However, as PJ believes that answering his own front door is "woman's work" and we know that his last girlfriend sensibly fled through it two years ago, it is tempting to assume that this convenient electrical fault is, like so much of his life, pure, shrieking fantasy. Stumbling through his hall, shouting stupid hellos into the gloom, you wonder what kind of man can be so insecure that he feels diminished by a doorbell.

Proby is sitting in his den at the back of the house, a mug of soup and a bowl of crabsticks on the floor between his pointy, white cowboy boots. The former trouser-splitting, hard-drinking, hell-raiser is now 58, teetotal and reduced - Lord, have mercy! - to shopping and cleaning for himself in a dreary north London suburb. This is a state of affairs which obviously pains him. "I shouldn't have to think about house domestics when I am feeling creative," he complains.

After piling career calamity upon calamity, PJ is now enjoying a mild renaissance - well, he's working again, at any rate. After a good West End run, he will shortly star again as the Godfather in a European tour of Quadrophenia. A new album, Legend, which includes collaborations with Marc Almond, has just been released.

"Has it? Has it? Don't ask me what is happening with that. I've never had a goddam record company get behind me properly in my life," he says, aggrieved.

His handsome face is grizzled, although his showbiz teeth have a pearly, preternatural gleam; he looks creepy but harmless, like an old reptile with its poison ducts removed. And in a way, of course, that's exactly what he is.

He stands up to say hello, shakes some crumbs off his track suit, and settles back down again, distracted by the afternoon sit-com blaring forth from his two television sets. He is not rude, just rather solitary and unused to company. There has been no replacement girlfriend and he has no male chums because he cannot see the point.

"Any drink I have ever had with a man is because he's got a wife or a girlfriend with him, something I can look at that is beautiful. I have never looked in the eyes of a man and found any beauty. Lord, have mercy! And where there is no beauty, there is no Proby. No poetry, no Proby," he shouts.

Are you still taking Prozac?

"Certainly. And I'll be taking it for the rest of my life. At the moment, I'm being as normal as I can. Without Prozac, I'd be on edge with you. I wouldn't be sure of what I was saying. I'd get anxious." He turns once more to the screens, an enormous one about two feet in front of him, while another bizarrely transmits from behind the shed window in his garden.

He explains that he likes to lie on his hammock outside and watch television through the night. His neighbours, I say, shouting above the din, must love that.

"I don't know who the hell they are. Did you notice that they are all coloured people in this street? Anyway, I've never been a borrow-a-cup-of-sugar kinda guy," he growls. After three tempestuous decades in Britain, his southern fried accent and redneck insouciance have not been tempered by hometown distance or breadth of mind.

You can, if you wish, chop up those decades into neat bundles and label them the Good, the Bad and the impossibly Ugly. After a time spent recording demos for Elvis Presley in Hollywood, Proby arrived in swinging London in 1963 and, for the next few years, he was a tremendous success: an Elvis-lite for a country for ever to be denied a glimpse of the real thing. His gulping tenor ripped through torchy renditions of ballads such as Somewhere and Maria, resulting in a handful of top 10 hits and a teeny-screamy fan club.

That was before his infamous nemesis, when his baby blue velvet trousers split along the seam on a Croydon stage in January 1965. He was deemed disgusting and depraved, although the audience had seen nothing more titillating than one of his hairy knees. Today, with a pop culture imbued with vulgarities like Michael Jackson's groin clutches and Iggy Pop's cellophane underpants, it is difficult to imagine the furore this overwrought piece of stage business caused. Typically, PJ thinks there was a woman to blame.

"Y'all was excited about Christine Keeler and that whole sex thing. Hell, if my pants split today, they would have to give me more money. You don't git paid if you don't show flesh," he says, and laughs without rancour.

Banned from television and major concert halls, he was relegated to appearing in the occasional rock theatre show and scratching away at the northern variety circuit. He was charged with shooting one of his three wives with an airgun, and later fined for threatening his live-in secretary with an axe and a block of wood because she "spent too much on groceries". In 1969, he was declared bankrupt, with debts of £84,000 against assets of 59p, and told the judge that he had squandered his fortune by "entertaining the press".

That was a picnic compared with life in the Eighties, when alcoholism finally claimed him and he somehow earned a living as a janitor, a shepherd, mucking out stables in Yorkshire and occasionally staging pathetic comebacks to earn more beer money. Once, in Blackpool, he was too drunk to stand and performed the entire show slumped against a drum kit.

It seems a desperate kind of life, but PJ sees it as rather a glamorous, rollicking adventure and he regrets nothing. "Well, maybe I regret wasting my youth fulfilling a fantasy and not concentrating on business. But everybody dreams of being a pop star or a movie star. The difference with me is that I made my dreams come true."

He loves to talk about the wild times, swinging from the flagpoles outside the London Hilton or stealing horses from Hyde Park stables and riding naked along Rotten Row at 4am. He tells me about dating Chrissie Shrimpton and buying her a big diamond ring, only to be upstaged by Mick Jagger, who presented her with a gift-wrapped Mini.

"And d'you know, the next time I saw that ring, it was on Mick's finger," he says. "Still, me and John Lennon used to have all the fun, before he started smoking that peaceweed. We would go to Brian Jones's house and steal all his clothes."

Proby namedrops constantly, with the fervour of a primitive invoking the gods to keep the bad spirits at bay. Can any of this be true? Does it matter? What counts is that one day in 1992, long after those dusty names had given him up for dead, PJ Proby began foaming at the mouth. After years of serious abuse, his nervous system was collapsing and he was rushed to hospital, where his heart stopped three times on the operating table. During a six-month recovery period, he had to learn how to walk and talk again. Unsurprisingly, he has not touched a drop of alcohol since.

"And instead of going to a consultant like Eric Clapton and Elton John did," he says, triumphantly, "I went to work in a stage play for eight months and used that as my therapy."

The West End impresario Bill Kenwright cast Proby as a younger version of himself in Only The Lonely, a Roy Orbison nostalgia show. "I was 54 years old playing myself at 23. That's like asking Roger Moore today to play himself in his very first 007 film." Pleased with this carefully calculated observation, he goes off to the kitchen to make some tea, a big man lumbering along on his cowboy high heels. Until he stopped boozing, he didn't know how to boil a kettle and had never had a hot drink in his life, apart from "those Irish coffee things". Now he likes to mix Horlicks with his tea to make it taste of something.

He is gone for a long time - enough to take in the den, from the cowskin rug to the ledges and shelves packed with figurines and carvings; there is Buddha, Laurel and Hardy, John Wayne, many more obscure faces moulded from plaster and china. There is a wooden witch on a broomstick ("doesn't she look like my friend Richard Harris?"), etchings of Keats and Longfellow ("because I'm a poetry guy") and a three-foot tall Red Indian. It is not the chosen decor of a relaxed psyche. Unable to relate to proper human beings, PJ has filled his surroundings with shiny, happy people, inanimate and incapable of leaving him.

"I have to be surrounded by beauty at all times," he says on his return. "This may look like a bunch of junk to you, but to me it is beautiful and symbolises all I have gained."

Any pangs of sympathy this might engender quickly dissipate when he gives vent to his unreconstructed views on women. "Nowadays girls are filthy. They sleep with all kinds, earn their own income and don't need to rely on a man. I don't want a woman if she don't want to rely on me."

He raises his wrecked face and smiles. "No romance, no Proby."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4708277/The-fantasy-world-of-PJ-Proby.html

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