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Gary Brooker’s Whiter Shade of Pale broke every pop rule – and it was perfect

Procol Harum (Gary Brooker, second from left) in 1967 - Redferns
Procol Harum (Gary Brooker, second from left) in 1967 - Redferns

Gary Brooker has skipped the light fandango. Gone from cancer aged 76, the pianist, singer and songwriter with Procol Harum was responsible for one of the most spookily beautiful pieces of pop music ever heard, with a little help from Johann Sebastian Bach.

The song is Whiter Shade of Pale, and from its cryptic title to its melancholy melody, lustrously baroque Hammond organ motifs, beguilingly mysterious lyrics, woozily discombobulating arrangement and stately yet soulful singing it is a work of pop art.

Brooker wrote the chord progression, inspired by his love of classical music. At the time, there was an advertisement on British television for Hamlet cigars that used a modern interpolation of Bach’s Air on a G String recorded by French jazz group The Jack Louissier Trio. Brooker started messing around with that, playing in C Major with a descending bass pattern, but while his song mimics Bach, it veers off in its own distinct melody and chordal sequence. “That spark was all it took,” according to Brooker. “I wasn't consciously combining rock with classical, it's just that Bach's music was in me."

Brooker’s songwriting partner Keith Reid wrote the elegantly opaque lyrics that added so much to the song’s strange allure. The title was a phrase overheard at a London party (“You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale”), to which Reid added an inscrutable jumble of intriguing references, including allusions to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (“the Miller told his tale”) and ancient Roman priestesses (“16 vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast”) alongside picaresque imagery of what might have been a mystical encounter or a drunken night on the tiles (“The room was humming harder / As the ceiling flew away / When we called out for another drink / The waiter brought a tray.”)

What does it all mean? Well, that is anyone’s guess, which is certainly part of the appeal of a lyric that implies layers of poetic depth but resists literal interpretation. “It’s kind of impressionistic, so people never really get to the bottom of it,” according to Keith, who does, nevertheless, claim it has a narrative. “It's about a relationship. There's characters and there's a location, and there's a journey. You get the sound of the room and the feel of the room and the smell of the room. It’s not a collection of lines just stuck together. It's got a thread running through it.”

Some of that thread may have become unstitched during the recording at Olympic studio in London in April 1967, when the song was found to be ten minutes long, and so producer Denny Cordell summarily chopped out two verses. In the original draft, the object of the singer’s ardour reveals herself to be on “shore leave,” he accuses her of being a mermaid to his Neptune, and the two wind up on the ocean bed in a fairly plain allusion to sexual congress. It reveals itself essentially as a song about a drunken one night stand with a sailor woman.

Yet truncated for practical reasons, the surviving verses float free of such mundane associations, and lend themselves to whatever the listener cares to impute. And in 1967, the summer of love, the hazily sensuous imagery helped turn it into a hippy anthem, an evocation of stoned bliss filled with a kind of archaic medievalism and formal romantic language very much in vogue at the time. With its narrative unresolved, there is a haunting sense of loss in there too, like a dream slipping away in the dawn’s light.

The lyric’s magical, mystic qualities are emphasised by the gently mournful melody and quite extraordinary, stately arrangement where a gorgeous Hammond organ fills up all available space with sad baroque frills and sudden surges of passion. Anchored by an almost provocatively slow pace, the organ playing practically sways from side to side, evoking the singer’s declaration of “feelin’ kind of seasick.”

Procol Harem's Gary Brooker in 1976 - Redferns
Procol Harem's Gary Brooker in 1976 - Redferns

Indeed, the Hammond plays such a huge role that keyboard player Matthew Fisher was retrospectively able to convince a court he deserved a songwriting credit, and had his name added as a composer (along with a share of the royalties) in 2005. Brooker, it must be said, was not impressed. “Today may prove to be a Darker Shade of Black for creativity in the music industry,” was his own verdict. But listeners can forget about such petty squabbles. As a recording, A White Shade of Pale is too sublime to be tainted by the in-fighting of musicians.

A Whiter Shade of Pale was recorded in just two takes. To put that into context, it emerged in the wake of The Beatles creating multi-facetted state-of-the-art productions with cut ups, sound effects and orchestras to concoct a mood of psychedelic revelation on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The newly formed Procol Harum banged their masterpiece down in an afternoon. Released as their debut single, its deeply strange beauty cut through all the rock clatter of the Swinging Sixties and went to number one all over the world. It went on to sell over 10 million copies and is still one of the most commercially successful singles in history.

Procol Harum in 1967: (L-R) Ray Royer, Gary Brooker, Matthew Fisher, Bobby Harrison, and Dave Knights - Redferns
Procol Harum in 1967: (L-R) Ray Royer, Gary Brooker, Matthew Fisher, Bobby Harrison, and Dave Knights - Redferns

When I say they don't make hits like this anymore, I'm not indulging in false nostalgia. It really is an otherworldly record that defies pop rules. It has two cryptic verses followed by two even more cryptic choruses and bookended by long instrumental passages which take up at least half the four-minute running time. It seems barely arranged at all, just a five-piece band playing completely live, overloaded with thick, furry, swirling organ, loose splashy drums, tinkling piano, an almost invisible guitar and Brooker’s quizzical, resigned and yet soulfully emotional vocals.

Indeed, rather than being considered the birth of classical rock this is a dose of classical soul, like Bach accompanying Percy Sledge down the dark end of the street. Nothing this weirdly assembled and almost haphazardly recorded would get through the song machine today, when such a beautiful oddity would have absolutely zero chance of getting played on the radio, or playlisted on Spotify.

Nevertheless, the song has been recorded over 1000 times by artists as varied as The Everly Brothers, James Last, Joe Cocker, Hugh Masakela, Annie Lennox and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. But nothing can touch the weird translucence of Procol Harum’s original. Brooker and Reid did write other fine songs. Conquistador is a fantastically intense rocker, Salty Dog a beguiling narrative of life at sea. They never had another major hit, but the Harum maintained a substantial cult audience throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and then got back together in the 1992 to continue touring, releasing 12 albums, all with their moments.

Brooker also made three solo albums, and worked as a pianist and vocalist with George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr amongst others. He was a much-liked man, known to be devoted to his wife Franky, who he met in 1965 and married in 1968. And while he never ascended to the front ranks of rock stardom, it hardly matters. He wrote one of the greatest songs ever, and made one perfect record that will live on as long as there are discerning ears to listen.