The Story Behind The Song: How Procol Harum created ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’
It’s hard to imagine ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum being a hit today. Daring, baroque and quietly experimental, it’s the very antithesis of the melodically staid contemporary pop song. And yet, in the summer of 1967, it was absolutely everywhere and has since come to encapsulate the patchouli-scented free-for-all that was the Summer of Love. Even John Lennon – a tough critic by anyone’s standard – was a fan.
Released just a few months after lyricist Keith Reid formed Procol Harum with Gary Brooker, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was one of 15 songs the duo wrote for their first album. “We were really excited about it and liked it a lot,” Reid told Songfacts. “And when we were rehearsing and routine-ing our first dozen songs or so, it was one that sounded really good.”
“At our first session,” he continued, “We cut four tracks, and ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ was the one that recorded best. In those days, it wasn’t just a question of how good is your song? It was how good of a recording can you make? Because it was essentially live recording, and if you didn’t have a great sound engineer or the studio wasn’t so good, you might not get a very good-sounding record. And for some reason everything at our first studio session came out sounding really good.”
According to Claus Johansen, author of Beyond The Pale, Reid heard the phrase “you’ve turned a whiter shade of pale” at a party. When he sat down to write the lyrics, the saying came back to him. Speaking to Uncut, the lyricist recalled “trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he said. “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. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs.”
That decadence is highlighted by Gary Brooker’s organ arrangement: at once highly original and immediately evocative of something you’re certain you’ve heard before. In that same Uncut interview in 2008, Brooker recalled “listening to a lot of classical music, and jazz” while writing the music. “Having played rock and R&B for years, my vistas had opened up. When I met Keith, seeing his words, I thought, ‘I’d like to write something to that.” people often assume Brooker plucked his arrangement from Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. In truth, his music doesn’t borrow from Bach at all, it’s just highly reminiscent of the composer’s style.
The track was recorded at London’s Olympic Sound Studios, where it was completed in just two takes, with Denny Cordell serving as producer. Following its release on May 12th, 1967, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – despite worries that the prominence of the organ and drums might prove problematic on the radio – rose steadily to number one over two weeks, where it stayed for six more, marking the start of the Summer of Love.
You can revisit the classic single below.
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