PIP PROUD 12" LP RARE Siltbreeze Jandek Mountain Goats

$

47

PIP PROUD Matilda You Fiend one-sided 12" EP   VERY RARE and OUT OF PRINT for years. I'm not sure of the exact amount of these records pressed, but 500 copies or less is a pretty fair estimate. This is a one-sided 12" that was recorded and released in 1996 on the Blackbean and Placenta Tape Label. It has five songs, plus one bonus track that was overlooked when the vinyl was pressed!   Nataly Total Pleasure That Spider Matilda Long Way + Bonus Track   Pip Proud - guitar, Vocal Laura MacFarlane -  violin Michael Nichols - bass David Nichols - drums   In case you need some background, here is a bio written by the great music critic David Nichols, who tracked down Pip in his native Australia and got him back into music:   The greatest Australian singer-songwriter of the 1960's. While all around him artists fell over each other trying to imitate overseas trends - beat groups, psychedelia, or whatever they were listening to in London and LA that month - Pip Proud was starting from scratch, and making his own music. The Adelaide-born Proud learnt guitar and developed his own idiosyncratic style as a teenager; moving to Sydney in his late teens, he began writing poetry, novels and songs at an impressive rate.

Artist Gary Shead made a documentary about him. He recorded and pressed a few copies of an album, De Da De Dum; Polygram records snapped him up and re-recorded the LP as Adreneline and Richard. The one thing the critics all agreed on was that Pip Proud was an original, although some thought they heard traces of Dylan (well, Dylan had made records playing a guitar and singing). He also might have had a bit of the skewed observations of Syd Barrett about him, or maybe the lilting beauty of Nick Drake. Richard Thompson. Melanie. Donovan. Sandy Denny. All these comparisons make sense. But the Australian media was too self-conscious, gawky and suspicious to cope with a record you had to listen to more than once to "get". By the time the second Pip Proud album emerged - A Bird In The Engine - he was firmly wedged into the too-hard basket.

He was, of course, twenty-five years ahead of his time. Listen to Lou Barlow's Sentridoh, or the Folk Implosion's Kids soundtrack. Listen to other cutting-edge U.S. artists like The Mountain Goats, Beck, Guided By Voices or The Spinanes. Or listen to New Zealand's Alistair Galbraith, such a Proud fan he led off his 1994 Cluster EP with a song called "Pip Proud". Then listen to Pip Proud and tell us he doesn't fit so snugly with those sounds it's almost uncanny.

And Pip Proud? He hasn't stopped producing work, although a disappointing time in London in the early seventies (starving on unfulfilled promises from Apple Records and John Peel) ended his first phase in music. Now, he lives in northern New South Wales - in a house he built himself - and continues to write songs, poetry and stories. A new 5-track EP, "Matilda You Fiend", will be released in the U.S. in two months. He has five children, a dog, a horse, and a hectic release schedule of new and old recordings for 1996-97.

-David Nichols May 1996
  Please contact me if you have any questions. There are also a number of other records and books that I am currently selling or will be in the next month, so please check it out.