Controversial pop star PJ Proby is perhaps best remembered for the trouser splitting gyrations that saw him banned from all theatres in Britain.
But many Huddersfield folk also remember him for his antics around Linthwaite where he lived for a time in the mid-1970s.
The flamboyant American moved to the Colne Valley from Haworth after he developed a love for the peace and quiet of the Pennines.
The 74-year-old still lives in the UK and ahead of his return to the stage later this year, he has revealed the truth about his famous Opportunity Knocks scandal, the circumstances that led to him leaving town and never coming back, and his own hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
He said: “I moved to Linthwaite after I met a guy in a bar who was renting a house.
“My wife and I were living in an apartment and this was a detached beautiful house way up on the tops of the Pennines.
“We did a deal at the bar and I moved in.
“I loved it, it was really great.
“I didn’t do any music work in Huddersfield, I hired myself out as a mucker-outer on a horse farm.
“I helped out farmers with bringing in the hay and cutting pasture, which I had done in my teens as my family all had ranches and farms, it was going back to my roots.”
PJ told of the time in 1977 when he was approached by TV show host Hughie Green.
Green told him: ‘I want to be thrown out of ITV, would you help me?
“He said, ‘I wanna take Opportunity Knocks to Australia. I have to break the law to do that, to get thrown out of ITV.
‘If I had you on Opportunity Knocks as a professional I’m breaking the ITV rules and they’ll discontinue my contract.’
“They bundled me in the back of a limousine about three in the morning and hid me in the laundry room and then when the show started and it came round to my time, they put a mask on me and put me out there and had me sing a song that everybody would know who it is so that he would lose his contract.
“I sang American Trilogy and then they bundled me straight back in the car and rushed me back to Huddersfield and Hughie made me swear not to say anything.
“He said the press are going to be there in the morning but let them hang out there for a couple of days.
“He said the bigger ones will hang out in hotels but the smaller ones will camp out in your front garden.
“So I did. I had my secretary tell them I was at Conway in Wales at my fishing lodge and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.
“They hung around there and after a couple of days I told my secretary to call up the weather department and see when trout fishing season was over in Wales.
“She got off the phone and said, ‘It’s over today’.
“I said good Lord, call the fishmonger and tell him to bring me about 12 trout up and to skirt around the press and come to the back door and leave them in a bucket.
“They did that and I went put on some dirty overalls and some muddy boots.
“I hadn’t shaved for two days and I said, now let the Mirror and The Sun in.
“They came in and they said ‘You’re the masked singer’.
“I said, ‘No I’m not, I don’t know who that masked singer is.’
“This went on for about an hour and finally they were convinced it was the truth.
“I gave them some trout for their lovely wives and told them I caught ’em.”
PJ said the next era of his life, that would see him leave Huddersfield and never return, unfolded literally minutes after the tabloid press had left his home.
It would see him sign a deal to play Elvis Presley in a West End musical, who he had worked with as a young musician in the 1950s.
He said: “The minute they walked out the door the phone rang. It was (musical director) Jack Good.
“He said: ‘Dear boy are you going to do it or aren’t you?
“I said ‘Elvis isn’t even cold in his grave and you’re doing a musical?’
“He said the part was mine but I said I wanted to go down and audition.
“I went down to the theatre in London in just blue jeans and a blue jeans shirt and all these guys were there dressed up like Vegas.
“I did a couple of Elvis songs that Elvis and I used to do in 1953; stuff that probably never came out in this country that we did in beer bars.
“I don’t think any of the boys there felt I was threat. “But when I walked out I just went across the road to the theatre next door and signed a contract.
“I really felt sorry signing the contract knowing all those thousands of boys hoped they’d get the part and none of them had a chance.”
PJ never returned to Linthwaite and moved his family down to the capital shortly after.
More than 35 years on he is coming back to Yorkshire this November to play dates at Doncaster and Leeds as part of the ‘Sixties Gold – 50th Anniversary Tour’ with Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Despite his pensionable age, PJ said he was looking forward to the two month UK tour.
And he said he’d love to come back to Huddersfield, where one of his last memories was hunting down the Yorkshire Ripper.
He said: “I've always done music full time and I’ll keep on going ’til I drop dead.
“I’m in better shape now than I was when I was 21-years-old, perhaps because I haven't had a drink in 20 years.
“When I lived in Huddersfield I was looking for the Yorkshire Ripper.
“I was going to every bar and pub convinced that I could find the Yorkshire Ripper.
“I thought I’d met him at the time and was going to kill him.
“Some of the things this guy said while we were in each other’s company and the way he was talking had me thinking it was him.
“I was convinced I had found him and I was going to blow him away.
“But in those days I was listening to conversations from two people; me and Jack Daniels.
“I think maybe Jack was more convinced than I was.”
PJ Proby biography at a glance
Proby was born James Marcus Smith in Houston, Texas, in November 1938
He first sang in the local Baptist Gospel church
He moved to Hollywood in 1957 to take singing lessons and was signed up by an agent
In 1961 Liberty released his first record “Try To Forget Her”
Proby’s breakthrough came after he moved to the UK and became infamous for his raunchy stage routine
