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“A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum’s first music and its biggest standard success by far, was issued in Could 1967, at first of what would later be remembered because the “Summer time of Love.” It went instantly to the highest of the charts in a lot of the world and stays one of many songs most carefully related to the hippie motion.
For his half, Mr. Reid disclaimed any psychedelic affect and stated that his summary, melancholy phrases got here from “books, not medicine.”
“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale’,” he stated in a 2008 interview with the web site procolharum.com. “That was a begin, and I knew it was a music.”
“It’s like a jigsaw the place you’ve acquired one piece, then you definitely make up all of the others to suit it,” he continued. “I used to be attempting to conjure a temper as a lot as inform a simple, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room buzzing more durable, I needed to color a picture of a scene. I wasn’t attempting to be mysterious with these pictures, I used to be attempting to be evocative.”
The music was derived by pianist and vocalist Gary Brooker from J.S. Bach and performed on what appeared like a pipe organ. It was a flash hit: As Mr. Reid remembered, the group went from rehearsing in a neighborhood church corridor to the British TV music present “Prime of the Pops.”
“We have been continuously attempting to meet up with the tempo,” he stated. “I don’t assume we ever did. The royalties we acquired then could be thought-about laughable now. However we have been simply so blissful to make a report. We have been only a bunch of youngsters, actually.”
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” offered greater than 10 million copies in its first 5 years — it was reissued and have become a success once more in 1972 — and was later rerecorded in preparations for string quartet and full orchestra, for mariachi band and sitar ensemble. Artists as disparate as Mantovani, Percy Sledge, Annie Lennox and Sarah Brightman recorded the music, and tens of 1000’s have sung it to karaoke accompaniment.
Procol Harum was not a “one-hit marvel” band. “Homburg” was standard in Europe in 1968 and one other early music, “Conquistador,” rerecorded by the group with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in Canada, was a middling hit in the summertime of 1972.
The group’s albums have been a lot admired for his or her combination of classical and blues components, together with screaming dissonances from Robin Trower’s guitar, a searing backdrop from Matthew Fisher’s organ and the terse precision of B.J. Wilson’s drumming.
The self-titled first album was adopted by “Shine on Brightly” (1968), “A Salty Canine” (1969), “Dwelling” (1970) and “Damaged Barricades” (1971), amongst others. The group broke up initially in 1977 however re-formed on a number of events.
Though the title Procol Harum was stated to be Latin for “past this stuff” — maybe befitting the elevated, otherworldly qualities of the band’s songs — it was truly the title of a good friend’s cat.
“We truly misspelled the title; we must always have spelled it ‘Prucul Harum,’” he advised the Toronto Star in 1991. “By the point we discovered we’d spelled it mistaken, they’d already pressed the data and ‘Procol’ was within the charts, so we needed to keep it up.”
Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born in Welwyn Backyard Metropolis, north of London, on Oct. 19, 1946. He was raised in an observant Jewish family.
His father was a lawyer in Vienna till he was arrested through the antisemitic assaults on Kristallnacht in November 1938. He was taken to the Dachau focus camp for months till he was ultimately permitted to to migrate to England along with his youthful brother; his dad and mom disappeared within the Holocaust.
“The tone of my work may be very darkish,” Keith Reid stated in a 2003 interview with Scott R. Benarde, the writer of a research of Judaism and rock. “I believe it’s in all probability from my background in some unconscious means.”
A mutual good friend launched Mr. Reid to Brooker at a live performance the singer was taking part in in 1966 with one other band, the Paramounts. Mr. Reid gave Brooker the phrases, and a celebrated workforce was born when the 2 males determined to construct a band round their songs. (As time went on, Mr. Reid additionally wrote music for Procol Harum songs by Trower and Fisher.)
The lyrics all the time got here first, with Mr. Reid’s phrases setting the temper for Brooker’s creativeness. “I’ve not discovered it attainable to write down phrases to go well with a chunk of Gary’s music,” Mr. Reid advised Melody Maker journal in 1973. Certainly, like their legendary predecessors Gilbert and Sullivan, the lads have been by no means shut buddies.
“I don’t know Keith from Adam,” Brooker advised the Washington Occasions in 2003. “He’s a really deep particular person and a really personal particular person. Though we work collectively, and we generally talk in a really intimate means. Typically baring our souls. However on the finish of the day, I don’t know who he’s.”
When the group broke up for the primary time, Mr. Reid was at sea. “I hadn’t written with anyone else, and so the whole lot I did was Procol Harum music,” he later stated. But within the Eighties, he teamed up with fellow songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson to create a music known as “You’re the Voice” that was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham. It was a success in a lot of the world however barely charted in the USA.
Survivors embody his spouse, the previous Pinkie Sidhu, his companion of 38 years whom he married in 2004.
In 1986, Mr. Reid moved to New York and commenced writing with many different musicians. In 2008, he began the Keith Reid Undertaking, by which different songwriters recorded songs to Mr. Reid’s lyrics; two albums have been issued thus far, “The Widespread Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018).
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