Procul Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale

 It's about time we sneaked another one of these in,

The royalties from A Whiter Shade of Pale were the subject of a protracted court case and very much worth fighting for, it having been the soundtrack to the summer of 67, spending six weeks at number 1 and played regularly ever since. The law suit would have been made exponentially more complicated, though, if J.S. Bach had still been around because Gary Brooker couldn't have done it without his Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068. 

A Whiter Shade of Pale doesn't sound like pop music and its venerableness is augmented by words that, although quite possibly meaningless, sound most profound. It's perhaps mostly due to, 

As the miller told his tale,

which suggests Chaucer and that Keith Reid had done The Canterbury Tales at school, but also the 'light fandango', the 'vestal virgins' and something affecting about 'wandering through my playing cards' with the formality of 'playing cards' and 'leaving for the coast'.

Even the band name, Procul Harum, looks as if it is Latin and means something. It has been taken to mean 'beyond these things' but it might not. Like the song, it suggests things without standing up to too much rigorous scrutiny.

Of course, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Puff the Magic Dragon and much of what was recorded in later 1960's pop music, the use of drugs has been implicated as its inspiration but intoxication can serve to blur as well as enhance creativity and what we have been left with is a masterpiece of psychedelia, evocative and redolent of much more than hazy weekends spent in fields. It's a piece that stands alone not only in a period of hectic creativity that puts some much later chapters in the history of pop music to shame but even within the work of Procul Harum because, as any number of acts have demonstrated, trying to go back and work the same miracle again is a short cut to the law of diminishing returns.