Brian Protheroe: Still Walking, Still Writing

By Jason Barnard

When we last spoke, Brian Protheroe outlined his routine most mornings. Before anything else, he sits at the piano and works through a handful of Mozart pieces, some Scott Joplin, a bit of boogie. It sits alongside a parallel acting career that has taken in Hamlet, Macbeth and much of the Shakespeare canon on the British stage. He has put now out his fourth release in as manay years and discussed it with me.

‘Still Walking’ follows ‘A Salisbury Boy’ in 2023, the ‘Last Serenade’ EP in 2024 and ‘Coming Up Midnight’ in 2025. Protheroe puts the pace down to circumstance. “I’m a bit less busy as an actor these days, so I’m feeling a bit more like a singer songwriter,” he says. “Also, I need to keep writing to keep the creative juices flowing in my old age.”

The press notes around the album point to ageing as its theme, and on the surface that tracks: ‘Still Walking’, ‘Belong’ and ‘I Am The Night’ all sit in that territory. Put the question to Protheroe directly, though, and he pushes back on the framing. “No,” he says, before explaining what has actually shaped the writing. He has had prostate cancer for nearly twenty years. “It comes and goes, so yes, health also has an effect on my writing.”

That same directness runs into the record’s more pointed songs. ‘Mad Dog’ began during Donald Trump’s first term as what Protheroe calls “a kind of Mad rap,” shelved and then reworked this year with a harder rock arrangement built from the original lyrics. “It went some of the way to help stop me shouting [at] the television,” he says [transcription unclear, see note above]. ‘Soldier Soldier’ takes the opposite approach, a gentler song written specifically about soldiers on both sides of the war in Ukraine, a subject Protheroe touched on previously with ‘Songwriter’ from ‘A Salisbury Boy’, which imagined an anti-war songwriter confronting an actual war zone, a fantasy he traced directly back to the invasion.

Alongside the new writing, ‘Still Walking’ digs into unfinished business. ‘My Lady’s Lament’, a BBC recording from 1976 with lyrics by his old writing partner Martin Duncan, has been remixed after AI processing turned up an upright bass and some percussion buried too low to hear on the original tape. ‘Moon Over Malibu’, also written with Duncan, has had its vocals and arrangement quietly refined from the original 16-track sessions. “I love both these songs from early on in my career,” Protheroe says. “I thought both of them could be improved by a gentle remix.” Then there is ‘Sail’, recorded around the same time as ‘Pinball’ and never released at all, its only prior life a rough demo tucked onto his ‘Desert Road’ collection. This version uses the original audio, with two of its verses rewritten. “Just because the original version had never been heard,” he says.

‘Dorothy and William’ is Protheroe’s tribute to Flanders and Swann, whom he saw live as a teenager and has loved ever since. “I just wanted to write something old fashioned, quaint, a gentle story song about an older couple,” he says [see note on exact wording above]. ‘Music Makes Me’ traces his roots further back, to Lonnie Donegan and the Everly Brothers, to years spent going round London’s folk clubs in 1965, and to the Beatles two years after that. He credits his love of bossa nova, also present on the track, to Antonio Jobim.

None of it has drawn quite the attention of a song Protheroe wrote more than fifty years ago. ‘Pinball’ grew out of a demo he recorded for a touring play called Death On Demand, in which he played a character who sang a song set to another man’s lyrics. The author liked what Protheroe had done with it enough to shop the recording to record companies, and two, including Chrysalis, came calling. The single reached number 22, just outside the top twenty, and has stayed in circulation ever since, turning up on one compilation after another.

Noel Gallagher, who discovered the song through Morrissey, has said hearing ‘Pinball’ led him to rework ‘Riverman’, the opening track on his High Flying Birds album ‘Chasing Yesterday’. “I love the fact that Pinball still has some influence these days,” Protheroe says. “Naturally, I was flattered. I like Noel.” Paul Weller has since recorded his own version for ‘Find El Dorado’. Protheroe’s reaction to hearing someone else inhabit a song he wrote in his twenties was not instant enthusiasm. “A bit of resistance at first,” he says, “but I grew to like it.”

Ask him why ‘Pinball’ has lasted while so much else from that period has faded and he does not reach for an answer. “Beats me,” he says.

The songs still get made the same way they always have, in short bursts rather than long sessions, albeit these days worked up on Logic. Protheroe then takes them to his friend and long-time collaborator Julian Littman, and finally off to Richard Dodd, the Grammy-winning engineer who has mastered his records since he was barely out of his teens, back when he was cutting Protheroe’s albums in the seventies. Live performance is a different matter. “I don’t think I’ll do any more live shows,” Protheroe says. “But never say never, eh.”