‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’: Stunning, cryptic poetry, or just shoddy lyrics?
As a debut single, Procol Harum were certainly making a statement when it came to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
The song is obviously famously unusual in every sense of the word, between the nods to Bach in its melody and the baffling lyrics, to put it mildly. It is indeed this latter point that many people have found as a sticking point over the years: what does it even mean, and why the hell do they keep talking about the sea?
The lyricist behind the iconic Summer of Love hit, Keith Reid, could have been within his rights to be annoyingly cryptic about this. He could have made up any kind of extravagant tale behind the meaning, but the reality was that he quite candidly admitted to not having a clue what he was talking about in the slightest.
As the writer himself told Uncut 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… I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative, I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing.”
Even still, that description sounds quite exorbitant for what he confessed to the truth actually being. “But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then,” Reid explained. “I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs.”
Basically, it was the epitome of a young, naive dreamer letting his wildest imaginations run free. The whole idea of “we skipped the light fandango/ Turned some cartwheels across the floor,” was perhaps not as profound as people were led to believe. But even through the veneer of it all being a sham, could there still be room for a stroke of hidden genius underneath?
After all, the speculative analyses of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, not, in fact, being about a man with a bout of sea sickness, have always been rife. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there may be some kind of deeper allegorical meaning lurking beneath the surface, but the lyricist’s outright denial of any sort of intelligence on this front may just be an act of saving face.
The notion of turning seduction into the metaphor of a nautical journey is certainly a unique one and has a deep literary heart running through its veins. Yet even despite that, on top of the reference to “Miller told this tale,” Reid once again downright denied any connection to Geoffrey Chaucer, saying he had never read the author’s The Miller’s Tale a day in his life.
The jury is still out on that one, it has to be said. ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is plainly one of the greatest songs to have ever been exported from British shores, but it’s the mark of these kinds of people that they will always feign indifference or indignation when it comes to receiving their flowers. Reid, you liar, the time is up: everyone knows you were just too humble to admit the true genius of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
