There was a time when John Lennon became obsessed with Procol Harum’s song A Whiter Shade of Pale to the point that he told author and music journalist, the late Ray Coleman, that it was a “dope song”, “the best song I’ve heard for a while”. These were magical, mystical times and the Beatles were at the centre of it. So was Procol Harum and the death of its group member Keith Reid last week has brought back the conversation to the song’s place in music history.
It is a song that film-makers have turned to again and again to anchor storylines to the 1960s or portray an era of liberation or simply showcase psychedelia. In Withnail and I there is the King Curtis version. Martin Scorsese brilliantly used it in the Life Lessons segment of New York Stories in 1989. It can be found on the soundtrack of Lars Von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves. A version of the song by Annie Lennox was used in the movie The Net. Or when, in Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s character Jack shares a kiss with Olga Kurylenko’s Julia while we hear “…and so it was that later as the miller told his tale…” play in the background.
The song was composed by the late Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher and the former has talked about having a musical idea: “I do remember having this musical idea which I worked out on the piano. Air on the G String, which was a Bach composition.” He then wrote a sequence which had a bit of a “Bach-like melody on the top”. And that very morning an envelope arrived with new lyrics from Keith Reid. “The first one I opened was A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
Keith was at a party and there was “a bunch of people, having a good time and they were talking about a friend of theirs. They were saying: ‘You look a bit strange, or you look a little pale.’ I overheard this little conversation and I turned that phrase into A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The song came at a time when “everyone had started becoming more experimental” and “art was kind of creeping in”.
But is there an explanation for the rest of the lyrics? Some have said it is about “challenging the conventions of meaning”. It has been referred to as a reading of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. And even to that of a man and a woman, stranded at sea, hallucinating and close to death.
Perhaps the explanation one should refer to is the one Reid offered Uncut magazine in 2008: “I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”