Gary Brooker
Writer and frontman in Procol Harum, who enjoyed a global smash hit with A Whiter Shade of Pale
GARY BROOKER, who has died aged 76, rose to fame in 1967 as the frontman of the rock group Procol Harum and wrote the music for their magical, chart-topping smash hit
A Whiter Shade of Pale, which fastened itself at No1 for six consecutive weeks during the “Summer of Love”.
Brooker’s melodic line was original, but the song owed much to JS Bach’s Air from Suite No 3 in D (Air on a G String) and the same composer’s choral cantata, Wachet Auf! (Sleepers Wake, 1731 – based on a Lutheran hymn thought to date from 1599) – not to mention Percy Sledge’s 1966 soul ballad When a Man Loves a Woman.
The song became an anthem for a generation, not only on account of Brooker’s melancholy vocals, but also the lyrics, with their weird references to Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale and “16 vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast”.
These enigmatic lines were written by Keith Reid, who had been struck by overhearing Guy Stevens, a nightclub disc jockey, telling a woman at an all-night drug-fuelled party: “You’ve just turned a whiter shade of pale.”
Stevens also came up with the group’s name Procol Harum, a mis-spelling of the cod Latin phrase
Procul Harum (roughly meaning “far beyond these things”), which was also the pedigree name of his friend’s cat. (Another explanation is that it was a corruption of Procellarum, a vast ocean on the Moon.)
While Brooker provided the immediately recognisable, tremulous tenor vocals, the other distinctive sound of A Whiter Shade of Pale came from the classically trained Matthew Fisher, whose baroque countermelody on the Hammond organ over a descending bass-line, all at a sombre pace, lent a church-like feel to what proved to be the group’s only No 1.
The follow-up, Homburg, written by Brooker and Reid and released in the late summer of 1967, made it to No 6 in the British charts. Reid’s typically cryptic lyrics are delivered deadpan from the opening lines: “Your multilingual business friend / Has packed her bags and fled...”
Among Brooker’s personal favourites was A Salty Dog: his music surges and falls away like the ocean swell, again accompanied by haunting lyrics from Reid: “Across the straits, around the horn, / How far can sailors fly? / A twisted path, our tortured course, / And no one left alive…”.
A Salty Dog was the title track of the group’s nautically themed third studio album, and the DJ John Peel assured his listeners that the sprawling four-and-a-half minute single would have made more of a mark had it conformed to the standard two and a half minutes preferred by mainstream radio. The song also married well in live performance with orchestral backing from the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
Brooker remained at the helm during a series of subsequent personnel changes, during which Procol Harum released three albums blending classical elements with rhythm and blues before adopting a harder rocking style.
In 1972 the group’s live reworking of
Conquistador, from their self-titled 1967 debut LP, reached No 22 in the UK. A run of studio albums – Shine On Brightly (1968), A Salty Dog (1969) and
Home (1970) – made less of an immediate impression, despite acclaim greeting the single A Salty Dog, and
Home reaching the Top 10 in Denmark.
Procol Harum broke up in 1977, but re-formed in 1991, when they added a third, equally impenetrable verse to A Whiter Shade of Pale. A fourth verse has since appeared in print, and the song has become the subject of numerous university theses.
After recording and touring with the band, Brooker launched a solo career in 1979, but his debut album No More Fear of Flying was a commercial and critical failure.
The son of a professional musician who played the Hawaiian guitar, Gary
Brooker was born in Hackney on May 29 1945 and brought up in Enfield. When his father, Harry Brooker, was offered a residency at Southend-onsea, the family moved to coastal Essex, and Gary was educated at Westcliff High School for Boys.
At 17, with his friend Robin Trower on guitar, he formed a rhythm and blues group called the Paramounts, and on turning professional had a minor hit in 1964 with their cover version of Poison Ivy, which got to No 35.
After he disbanded the group in 1966, Brooker met Keith Reid, a lyricist who although not a playing musician was listed as a fully fledged member of Brooker’s new band Procol Harum. In January 1967, Brooker was picking out a Bach-like melody at the piano when he glanced at some lines that Reid had scribbled for him that started: “We skipped the light fandango.” As Brooker recalled, “they sort of went together.”
Following the huge success of A Whiter Shade of Pale, the original line-up was altered to admit Robin Trower and drummer B J Wilson, both former members of the Paramounts, and it was this configuration that recorded the first three Procol Harum albums.
After the disintegration of the group in the late 1970s, and his initial failure to forge a successful solo career, Brooker joined the band headed by his neighbour Eric Clapton. Although Clapton sacked the entire group in 1981, Brooker remained on good terms with Clapton and performed with him at numerous one-off benefit concerts.
He also toured with Ringo Starr’s All-starr Band in the late 1990s, and with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, and he took a small singing part in the 1996 film Evita, starring Madonna.
In 1996 he organised a charity concert to raise funds for his local church, St Mary and All Saints at
Dunsfold in Surrey. With guest artists including Andy Fairweather-low and Paul Jones, Brooker also played a sell-out concert at Guildford Cathedral in 2005 in aid of the Tsunami appeal. He was appointed MBE in 2003 for his services to charity.
In 2006 he was taken to court by Matthew Fisher, the organist on A Whiter Shade of Pale, who eventually won a Law Lords ruling entitling him to 40 per cent of Brooker’s royalties from the song and a co-writing credit. Fisher, paid £75 for his contribution to the recording in 1967, had asked for the earnings to be backdated, but the Lords ruled that he should receive only future royalties.
The case was also notable for the fact that the judge asked Brooker – at a keyboard brought into the High Court for the purpose – “to play the song as you would have done on your mother’s piano in her living room in Southend in 1967”. He played the entire piece, at the correct stately pace. Sitting near him that day was the Daily Express columnist David Robson, who wrote: “It was electric and awe-inspiring. When he finished there was silence in court – a silenter shade of silence.”
On his 67th birthday in May 2012, during a Procol Harum tour of South Africa, Brooker fractured his skull in a fall in his hotel room. Although he cancelled the rest of the group’s appearances, he later undertook extensive US and European tours.
A lifelong pipe smoker and keen fly-fisherman, Brooker was a past winner of the European Open Fly Fishing Championships.
Gary Brooker married, in 1968, Swiss-born Françoise (Franky) Riedo, who survives him.