By Jason Barnard
With a career spanning music and acting, Brian Protheroe has left an indelible mark on both stages. Renowned for his classic hit ‘Pinball’ and a run of acclaimed albums in the mid-70s, Brian now invites us to delve into the heart of his latest musical creation, ‘A Salisbury Boy.’
I really enjoyed listening to your new album, ‘A Salisbury Boy’. How far back do the songs written on it date, what was the span?
It’s about nine months altogether. I haven’t been doing as much acting work for the last for the last year, apart from a few voiceovers. So I’ve been keeping busy with music. For those nine months I’d always have a song on the go. I didn’t initially intend to write an album, but it turned out that I discovered that I had eight songs and why not put them out!
Quite a few of those songs could quite easily fit on your classic albums of the mid 70s.
Well, there’s one particular song, the second album track ‘Over Your Love’. That did start at the end of the 70s. I had this chorus but I couldn’t actually finish the song at the time and I left it and left it. I thought recently I might as well go back to it. It’s such a nice chorus. So I reimagined the song and imagined myself back in my 20 something days in order to write the lyrics. So that’s more like the stuff that I would have been doing then.
And the lyrics of the song ‘Salisbury Boys’, hark back to your folk days in the 60s. Is that right?
Yeah. In 1965, I had my 21st birthday in London and I was in a group called Folk Blues Incorporated – FBI. We were going around the folk clubs. It was quite a learning experience – we barely earned enough to survive! It was the time that Paul Simon was over here and we were actually with the same agent. We did a few gigs together when he was on the bill. So that’s what the song is about. We were all missing home and it was quite tough. Luckily we were able to stay with a friend – a Blues singer called Gerry Lockran down in Cheam. During the day we would go and find work in the folk clubs around London.
‘Songwriter’ has an interesting dynamic where you have different meanings in one song.
Well, the biggest influence on my songwriting was the Beatles, of course. I’m two years younger than Paul McCartney, so it’s hardly surprising.The thing about the Beatles, as we all know, was that they were very eclectic. You never knew what was coming next. I never knew what that song was going to turn into. I didn’t mean to write a song about war at all. The first line that I thought of was, “If I was a songwriter”, which I thought was quite a nice paradoxical start to a song. But it then turned into this imaginary story of a songwriter writing an anti-war song and this fantasy of him playing it to people who happen to be living in a war zone, and their inevitable reaction. The songwriter wakes from his dream and realises that he has to change the tone of the song to mean if you’re being attacked, there’s no reason to just sit there and take it. You have to fight to defend yourself and your country. An obvious reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Talking of great composers, you’ve got ‘Wolfgang’ on the album as well. So that’s inspired by Mozart, I assume.
It is, yes. I should think about two years ago I was play the piano and going through some of my old music books, which I had when I was a teenager. And there’s some early Mozart there. I got gradually hooked and began to try his more difficult pieces. I now have a repertoire of about 8 of his piano pieces that I play every morning along with Scott Joplin and a bit of boogie”. So that was the inspiration for that.
A few years ago, you released ‘Desert Road’ that captured quite a number of your demos. Was that an influence listening back, how was that experience?
That album was an accumulation of songs that I’d written, over the last 20, 25 years and worked on with my friend, Julian Littman, a multi instrumentalist/producer who plays with Steeleye Span. We’ve been friends for ages. So it was a collection of those songs, some of which I’d put out as singles – but they’d never been in a collection.
It’s quite remarkable how you’ve had sort of two parallel careers, in acting as well as music. I’ve read that it was a play that led you ultimately to get signed by Chrysalis Records, is that right?
I was playing a character in a play called Death On Demand in about 1971/2. We were touring around the country and the character that I was playing, called Johnny Tomorrow, sang this song. So the author had this lyric and he asked me to, or maybe I offered to write music to it. I did a little demo recording of it. He loved it and he took this demo recording around, to various people and record companies. Two companies were interested – Chrysalis was one of them. They heard some other songs I’d written and Pinball was one of them.
‘Pinball’ was quite a big hit and has endured over the years.
Yes, it’s extraordinary because it almost reached the top 20, but not quite. It was just outside at 22. But it’s hung around and appeared on various compilations over the years, which is extraordinary. And it’s still going. It’s by far the most plays of all my stuff on Spotify.
Part of the enduring nature was that ‘Pinball’ was featured on the ‘Guilty Pleasures’ compilation. I don’t know why anyone would feel guilty listening to it, because it’s a fine track.
Oh, thank you. I think the ‘Guilty Pleasures’ was one of the first compilations that I was on. But there have been several over the years, it’s been lovely.
What inspired you to write it?
I was living in Covent Garden at the time. I had one room in a friend’s house, and it was literally like a diary entry of what was happening to me then. We had a cat – the cat that finished off the bread. There was a Norman Mailer book about Marilyn Monroe that I saw when I was walking through Soho one morning. So that got included. Hey Jude you were alright, was a reference to the Beatles breaking up. So it was a stream of consciousness diary about what was happening to me at that time.
One of your next singles was ‘Fly Now’. That has a Paul McCartney feel, was that something that you aimed for?
Funnily enough, on one of the early McCartney albums after the Beatles, there was a song called ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’, which had that jink, jink, jink, jink, jink piano sound. So I experimented with putting drawing pins in the hammers to get that metallic sound. But it was, yes, McCartney influenced definitely.
There’s a song off your following album ‘Pick-Up’, ‘Gertrude’s Garden Hospital’, which has got a bit of that feel as well.
Yeah. That was from a musical that I wrote with a friend of mine. It was about a Hollywood movie star and the rise and fall of. That was one of the songs in it. I really liked it, so I put it on the album.
There’s other songs like ‘Enjoy It’ that should have been a hit.
I agree with you, that’s on ‘Pick-Up’. The label wanted to find another single after ‘Pinball’. I suggested ‘Enjoy It’ because I was sure that it would have been a hit. But for some reason, they decided to go with ‘Fly Now’. I only discovered it because I went into the Chrysalis offices and in front of the reception desk was a pile of singles. I looked down and it was me and it was ‘Fly Now’. I didn’t know they’d done that. So that was what happened. I had no power. They could put out what they like. But then I did a remix about four/five years ago and put some extra percussion and brass on it. And it worked really well. It got a huge amount of plays on Spotify – half a million, which is great. So it proved my point too late, really, to be a single at the time.
You were collaborating at the time with Martin Duncan.
Yes, I was. We’re still friends now although we haven’t written together for ages. But Martin was an influence that I’d not had as a songwriter before. He would write lyrics that were very surreal and theatrical in a way and not necessarily in a particular form. I used to write in a fairly conventional two verse, chorus bridge, middle eight or whatever and Martin would write lyrics that didn’t fall into any particular songwriting format. So that stretched me a bit as a songwriter.
Is ‘Scobo Queen’ one of those?
Yeah, it is ‘Scobo Queen’. I think that was also from the musical.
From that period as well, is ‘Running Through The City’, that seems to have a bit of a world weariness. Was that something that was happening to you at the time?
It was. In 75, I toured America doing radio interviews, promoting ‘Pinball’, and I got quite homesick. I think we initially went to LA first, and then San Francisco, Chicago, and ended up in Rochester and then somewhere else in New York. It’s about that. “Running through the city from nowhere to nowhere”. I’ve got a feeling that line might have been nicked from Dylan!
One of the great things in terms of your career is that given the vagaries of the music industry is that you’ve been able to be artistic in different mediums. I guess that means that you’ve been able to have a really nice balance where you’ve been able to dip into your music when you’ve wanted to and not have to rely on it.
Yes. I played Hamlet in 1970 when I was 26. That really solidified my career as an actor. I think most actors who played that part would realise that it is quite an extraordinary experience. But music never left. It was always just behind or maybe in parallel to my acting career. But my acting career took off in the mid to late 70s, and particularly in the late 80s as well. And I’ve been lucky enough to play some great parts in the theatre, not so much on television. But in the theatre, I’ve played quite a few big classic roles. I’ve played Macbeth twice. I’ve played Hamlet. I’ve played a lot of Shakespeare. And a couple of the great American parts as well in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a couple of other things. So I’ve done really well and enjoyed my career as an actor, but I always come back at some point to music. It’s just there all the time.
You’ve only ever done a few live shows with your music. Is that something that you’d think about doing in the future, or is that just something that will only happen very rarely?
I did a lovely gig at some of which is on YouTube at the Troubadour in West London. That was great. I did another gig, which was in 2013, maybe later than that, in a church in North London, which wasn’t so successful. It was too cold. The acoustics weren’t great. If I did do another one, it would be a small gig. So we’ll see. I haven’t ruled it out, but I’ve got no plans at the moment.
Given you’re about to release a new album, you seem to be in a creative patch writing songs. Is that something you’ll continue doing as the music strikes you?
Yeah, I will. I have got a song on the go at the moment. I always seem to have one kind of buzzing around. You never know when, when it’s going to happen. I’m very lazy about songwriting. I don’t sit down and work at it for hours. I do it in sort of 10 minute bursts. Then when I’ve got a decent arrangement and I’ve finished it to the best of my ability in Logic, then I take it round to my friend Julian and we work on it together. Then do a final mix and send it off to an engineer called Richard Dodd, who’s a Grammy winning engineer that I’ve worked with. He was about 19 or 20, when he did all my 70s albums. He masters all the stuff that I do so they always sound great afterwards. He does something with my voice, which always makes it sound better.
Fantastic. Well, I’ve really enjoyed listening to ‘A Salisbury Boy’ and I’ve got my copy of the Cherry Red collection of your mid-70s albums. So I’ve loved listening back to that as well. So thank you very much, Brian.
It’s been a pleasure talking to you too.
Further information
Brian Protheroe – A Salisbury Boy – to be released on 1 September 2023
