![]() ![]() In their guide to How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, situationist chart-toppers The KLF put this down to a Western musical tradition which privileges words and melody, arguing that if the lawyers were "of African descent, at least 80% would have gone to the creators of the groove". Music royalties take many forms (sales, airplay, use in films and games etc), but the names in brackets after a pop song's title are usually whoever wrote the words, and the tune to which they're sung. Who came up with that corker might now be a legal matter, but one that may not matter. Moi Non Plus and months earlier in Percy Sledge's When A Man Loves A Woman - which might be what the Commitments were thinking of. Indeed, similar trills were used months later by Serge Gainsbourg in the more explicit Je T'Aime. ![]() To stop it descending forever, you need a flourish to get back up to the top, and A Whiter Shade Of Pale has a corker. The song is built around a descending sequence, but so are many, from Pachelbel's Canon to The Farm's footie anthem All Together Now. The keyboard player, Matthew Fisher, is claiming royalties for the keyboard breaks which link the verses. It's not the lyric, though, that's in legal dispute. A maritime metaphor climaxes in a bawdy pun, the relationship is consummated, and the song seems. They begin "She said 'I'm home on shore leave', though in truth we were at sea" and end "So we crashed dived straight way quickly and attacked the ocean bed". Uncovering the song's missing words, which are performed at gigs but which would have made the single over-long. In the book Lives Of The Great Songs, Mike Butler puts a compelling case, Matthew Fisher the band's former organist ![]() Could it be that A Whiter Shade Of Pale is about a boozy one night stand? If you stop decoding the references, a clear if woozy tale emerges: there's dancing, a waiter brings drinks, their effects are felt, and a woman is approached. But is the song as incomprehensible as they say? While A Whiter Shade Of Pale was the number one single, Sgt Pepper was the number one album - a psychedelic commercial victory for hearts and minds.īy some accounts, this is the point where pomposity set in to pop, legitimising classical motifs and impenetrable lyrics until the Year Zero of punk. The combination of dense allusion and Hammond organ had already been patented by Bob Dylan, but he was no chart-topper. The result in Procol Harum's case was a pair of verbose verses which nod to various archaisms unfamiliar to the pop charts, including The Miller (as in Chaucer's vulgar tale told by a drunkard) vestal virgins (handmaidens to a Roman goddess) and the light fandango (John Milton coined "the light fantastick" to describe dancing in 1632 the phrase became common coinage before being mangled, via the Spanish courtship waltz the fandango, into Procol Harum's "the light fandango").įor the record, and bewilderingly, Reid pooh-poohs any link between "the Miller told his tale" and The Miller's Tale he prefers Willie Nelson's rendition, which is mangled again into "the mirror told its tale". ![]()
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