Hell’s teeth! It’s that time of year again. When I make a host of rash promises for what the new year at HFoS may bring, before buggering off to imbibe the Christmas spirit for a month or so.
This year, I’ll dispense with anything that could be held against me at a later date and, instead, leave you with the latest mixtape: The HFoS Prog Rock Xmas Stocking Filler.
Granted, it’s not particularly festive, nor exclusively prog-orientated, but it’s the best you’ll get from me this side of 2012.
In 1977, ten years on from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale‘, Procol Harum delivered what was to be their last album for 14 years. Only lead vocalist, pianist and songwriter Gary Brooker remained from that original ‘AWSoP’ line-up, along with the lyricist Keith Reid (BJ Wilson joining on drums after the hit was recorded).
Something Magic is a fitting end to what began in 1967, seeing Procol Harum return to form following the vaguely disappointing Procol’s Ninth, with a triumphant decisive blast of the progressive, symphonic rock they had made their own over the course of a decade.
In 1975, the question among a great many of those circumnavigating the spheres of post-psychedelic, progressive rock fandom, might well have been: “is Procol Harum still relevant?”
Unlike other bands that had blossomed out of late-1960s psychedelic Britain, only to fall dramatically by the wayside, Procol Harum had left the paisley shirts behind and continued to produce strong albums, clocking up number eight with the previous year’s Exotic Birds and Fruit. Even if, through all this, the spectre of the perennial ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ conspired to deny them wholesale global success.
This, the aptly titled Procol’s Ninth, arrived with a new production team and a straightforward, no-frills album cover, signalling a change in – if not the direction that Procol Harum were taking – the sound they were producing.
So begins Procol Harum’s seventh studio album, Exotic Birds and Fruit. Words that give way to the 1974 opener ‘Nothing But the Truth’, a belter of a tune whose intent, and indeed top billing, is to address any concerns that seven years into the band’s lifespan, Procol Harum had become a spent force.
Firing on all cylinders, ‘Nothing But the Truth’ also kicks off Salvo’s final batch of reissues from the original Procol run, with Procol’s Ninth and Something Magic also seeing the light of day in digitally remastered, lushly packaged editions.
To bring Head Full of Snow’s Procol Harum Week to a close, we list our five favourite tunes from the erudite songsmiths of psychedelic and progressive rock grandiose.
Actually, following a ruddy great trawl through what’s on offer, this may be retitled our “five favourite Procol Harum tunes available on YouTube.” They’re all absolute stonkers, nonetheless. ‘A Salty Dog‘, ‘Grand Hotel‘ and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ are absent from this list as they were posted earlier this week.
So with no further nonsense, let’s get stuck in. Read more…
With packaging as lush as and three times more lickable than a Gary Brooker orchestral arrangement, Salvo release the Creme de Menthe of their Procol Harum 40th Anniversary reissues, the four disc compendium, All This and More.
All this and more, indeed. What we have here is three CDs spanning the lengthy career of Southend-on-Sea’s finest, a DVD brimming with live performances, and a 70-page booklet distended with photographs, song facts and the story so far regarding the perennial psychedelic/progressive/symphonic rock act.
Procol Harum were already into their fifth line-up when, in 1973, they released their sixth studio album, Grand Hotel.
With guitarist Robin Trower and his replacement for Live in Concert with the Edmonton Orchestra, Dave Ball, both gone, Mick Grabham, ex of Ladbroke Grove country rockers Cochise, joined the fold and along with Alan Cartwright on bass, Procol Harum were back to being a five-piece. Grand Hotel also saw a triumphant return to the symphonic sound they had been drifting away from on the previous studio albums, Homeand Broken Barricades.
The opener to the album Grand Hotel, and one of Procol harum’s finest.
Released in 1973, ‘Grand Hotel’ cements Procol Harum’s place as one the finest progressive/symphonic rock bands the genre had to offer. I don’t think anything else needs saying.
For their sixth album, Procol Harum departed the studio and took to the stage of the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton, Canada, with a full symphony orchestra as their backing band and a 24-voice choir providing vocal support.
Released in 1972, Procol Harum Live in Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (to give it its full, roll off the tongue title) was the result and it finds the band in their natural live habitat, their most ambitious songs up until that time heard in all their symphonic rock glory.
As reviewed yesterday as part of Procol Harum Week, here’s the barnstorming opener from 1971′s Broken Barricades album, entitled ‘Simple Sister’.
Well most of it anyway, as this video seems to be a sawn-off version, running at two minutes shy of the album original. Nevertheless, it gives a good feel for the harder rock edge that was heard on the Broken Barricades album.
‘A Salty Dog’ is widely regarded as one of Procol Harum’s finest songs, and you wouldn’t get any arguments from Head Full of Snow on that count.
Taken from the 1969 album of the same name, it marked vocalist and songwriter Gary Brooker’s first attempt at an orchestral score, and the lavish result places ‘A Salty Dog’ in the bracket of all-time great progressive rock compositions. It can also be regarded as quite a feat, considering Brooker had no classical training whatsoever.
In 1971, when Procol Harum’s Broken Barricades was first released, the band that has been through a massive 23 different line-ups was only on their third, the same quartet responsible for the previous album Home.
There was Chris Copping doubling up on bass and organ, alongside BJ Wilson and Robin Trower from the classic era, on drums and guitar respectively. Then, of course, there was the one constant factor in Procol Harum’s lifespan: Gary Brooker, singer, pianist and songwriting partner to the band’s lyricist, the ever-present Keith Reid.
Home had seen the psychedelia of A Whiter Shade of Pale, and the earlier albums, shown the door in favour of a harder rock sound that kept the progressive edge and cemented Procol Harum’s reputation as one of the most innovative acts doing the rounds.
Broken Barrricades saw them continue along this road, paring back the symphonics that had really come to the fore on A Salty Dogand Home’s ‘Whaling Stories’, to produce an album that’s still chock full of ideas, despite seeing them in their rawest form.
Head Full of Snow’s 100th post coincides with the launch of Procol Harum Week. It’s almost as though I planned it that way. And where else would one kick off a Procol Harum Week than at the moment in time where it all began? The debut single that has gone on to be named the UK’s “most played record ever”.
Whether you love or hate it, there’s no denying that if at some point over the last 42 years you’ve heard a bit of music, there’s more chance of it being ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ than anything else.
Though not their best song, it managed to capture a moment in the summer of 1967 when, if you were fortunate enough not to have to work for a living and bought into the whole flower power freedom movement, anything seemed possible. The fact it caught on with the mainstream too, quickly elevated AWSoP to the legendary stature it enjoys today.
Just a quick announcement from the editorial staff here at HFoS towers that next week is officially declared Procol Harum Week.
Kicking off tomorrow, Head Full of Snow is dedicating itself to the innovative progressive rock act that will, unfairly or otherwise, forever be associated with one song, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
Following the Salvo/Fly Records reissues of the first four ProcolHarumalbums earlier this year, the sterling work continues unabated with Salvo’s reissues of the next three albums in the Procol backcatalog, available now!
1971′s Broken Barricades carries on the tradition started on Home with a harder rock sound, Robin Trower’s guitar taking the lead in the absence of departed Matthew Fisher’s Hammond organ.
“Gary Brooker and Keith Reid of Procol Harum are the only people we could ever compare ourselves to!” – Elton John and Bernie Taupin
Procol Harum’s fourth album, Home , was released in June 1970 and was a much darker offering than what had gone before. This is depite the band perhaps being at their most optimistic and upbeat during the recording, buzzing off a new lease of life as a four-piece and the formation of their own music publishing company. Nevertheless, maybe the fact they’d never found the album success they truly deserved was playing on the minds of Gary Brooker and Keith Reid when the songs for Home were written.
“When will Salty Dog have its day?” So asked Alan White of Berwick-Upon-Tweed in the July 26th 1969 issue of Melody Maker. The letter is reproduced within the lush packaging of Fly Records and Salvo’s latest Procol Harum reissue, the masterful A Salty Dog.
When, indeed?
If ever a band were a victim of their own good fortune then Procol Harum was it. Such was the shadow cast by the phenomenal success of 1967′s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ that the band was fated to be remembered as the one-hit wonders responsible for that song. But Procol Harum were an album band, hugely influential amongst their peers and noted pioneers in progressive rock. Even so, the succession of albums released in the aftermath of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ slipped beneath the radar, largely ignored by a record buying public in the throes of Pale-induced denial.
In its original form, Procol Harum’s second album, Shine on Brightly, is – to coin a football pundit’s favourite phrase – a game of two halves.
Virtually scythed down the middle, the first side consists of five tracks of a more conventional (for the time) psychedelic/prog rock standard, which wouldn’t seem out of place on their debut, Procol Harum. The second side, however, is made up of just the two. The exceptional ‘Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone)’ and weighing in just shy of 17 minutes, the hugely influential, genre-breaking ‘In Held ‘Twas In I’.
Yes, as we’re commandeering bad phrasing without due care and attention or regards for human life, with the release of Shine on Brightly back in 1968, Procol Harum had thrown the rulebook well and truly out of the window.
The master class in how to reissue an album continues with Fly Records’ and Salvo’s Procol Harum releases. Yes, the label and distributor behind the recent Move reissues have come up trumps again, putting to shame the first round of Universal’s Rolling Stones ’71-onwards remasters.
First one out the trap, the group’s debut from 1967 (though not released in the UK until January ’68) simply titled Procol Harum, which arrived in the wake of the record breaking success of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Recently named number one in a BBC Radio 2 chart of ‘Most played songs in public places’, the “Summer of Love” favourite was left off the original album – as was often the case with singles in those days – but is restored here as one of the eleven bonus tracks in all its classical, Hammond organ-soaked psychedelic glory. The rest of the album’s not half bad either.
Further news on the the Fly Records and Salvo reissues of the first four Procol Harum albums as mentioned on Wednesday. As said, the first two, Procol Harum and Shine on Brightly are already out, but the classic A Salty Dog and Home are to be released on May 18th (2009).
As with all these superlative Fly reissues – the recent The Move ones being textbook examples of how these things should be done – they come with a host of bonus tracks to keep the connoisseur and completist happy.
Following the recent reissues of the first two Procol Harum albums, Procol Harumand Shine on Brightly, the next two are scheduled to make an appearance on May 18th.
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