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