The most-played 20th-century song in British broadcasting
We often talk about our artists’ favourite artists when discovering new music.
We trust the tastes of musicians who have given us so much to find musicians who might give us a little bit more, and so through that lens, we ask, what band has given us more than any other? The answer is, of course, The Beatles.
They are the ultimate music tastemakers, inventing genres with almost every new album and storming the charts as they did it. The love for the band was ubiquitous, and so culture hung on every musical and non-musical note they uttered. The latter, perhaps, is responsible for making’ Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ the cult hit it is today.
Despite their own stardom and the interest in protecting their place at the very top of the music industry, the Fab Four were never shy of letting the world know about great music that wasn’t theirs. For example, it was public knowledge that The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds formed the blueprint for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club and that ‘God Only Knows’ was Paul McCartney’s favourite song.
But that was McCartney, the man who famously led the band into places they didn’t want to go. But amidst that fracturing creative relationship, Procol Harum’s track was the only one that they all unanimously agreed on. John Lennon said it was “the best song I’ve heard for a while. You play it when you take some acid and…whoooooooo”.
While Ringo Starr loved the song so much that he diverted fans to the band, insisting they captured the sonic essence of the decade better than they did. He said, “I always think of Procol Harum. Everyone else thinks of me and the Fabs, but I think of Procol Harum, because to me ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is the ultimate ‘60s record.”
But did ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ become the ultimate 20th-century record?
Well, with that sort of endorsement, it is no surprise that ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ became such a significant 20th-century track. Pop culture jumped on the back of The Beatles’ bulletproof music taste and spread the Procol Harum word by playing whenever and wherever they possibly could.
As a result, in 2004, the performing rights group Phonographic Performance Limited recognised it as the most-played record by British broadcasting of the past 70 years and thus the most-played song in British broadcasting in the 20th century. What’s more is that five years later, in 2009, it was announced that this song is still Britain’s most played record. To give you context into how seismic that is, the runner-up was the ever-present Queen hit ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
Of course, the honour of the most broadcasted song in a century is certainly nice, but not the sort that Procol Harum were after when they wrote songs. Rather, the cultural reverence their psychedelic masterpiece created was what fuelled bands like these, which is why it was so successful in the first place.
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