RIP Gary Brooker, founder, piano player and lead singer with Procol Harum (29 May 1945 – 19 February 2022). If he had stopped at the band's first hit, the Summer of Love anthem "A Whiter Shade Of Pale", he would still be remembered today for his remarkable singing on that song. But he continued with the band through a great streak of albums in the late 1960s and early 1970. Classic singles included Homburg, A Salty Dog, Conquistador and Pandora's Box, all of them co-written by Brooker and Keith Reid.
Brooker talked about writing "A Whiter Shade Of Pale":
"About that time, the Jacques Louissier Trio made an album called Play Bach. They were a jazz trio, and they’d start off with a piece of Bach, and they would improvise around it. Louissier had done a fabulous version of what was called “Air On A G String” which was also used in a set of good adverts in Britain. And all those things came together one morning…a bit of Bach and “Air On A G String” going through my head as I was starting to write “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.
It was a very circular piece that started in C and just descended all the time, and going through lots of chords, I ended up at C again. So I just carried on down, and I went around in circles with that chord sequence and playing bits of Bach-like things over the top. And when the postman came, and there was some new lyrics from Keith Reid. So I opened it up and looked at the first one…it was the longest set of words I’d seen from him. I think it was four long verses, and it had these choruses at the end of each lyrical verse. And so I sang them over my idea, and that became the tune, along with the instrumental passages I played in-between."