Australian singles charts:
A Whiter Shade of Pale first entered the Kent charts on 17 June 1967 and was a #1 hit . A re-release of the song entered the Kent charts on 10 July 1972 and peaked at #18. The song was #9 on the Top 100 of 1967.
Songwriters:
Gary Brooker, Keith Reid, Matthew Fisher
Producer:
Denny Cordell
Record labels of Australian releases:
1967: Deram
1972: Cube
BONUS CLIP BELOW – the story of A Whiter Shade of Pale
Wikipedia:
Keith Reid got the title and starting point for A Whiter Shade of Pale at a party. He overheard someone at the party saying to a woman, “You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale”, and the phrase stuck in his mind.
Gary Brooker said of his composition in Uncut magazine (2014):
“If you trace the chordal element, it does a bar or two of Bach’s Air on a G String before it veers off. That spark was all it took. I wasn’t consciously combining rock with classical, it’s just that Bach’s music was in me.”
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whiter_Shade_of_Pale
Songfacts:
Procol Harum’s lyricist Keith Reid explained: “It’s sort of a film, really, trying to conjure up mood and tell a story. It’s about a relationship. There’s characters and there’s a location, and there’s a journey. You get the sound of the room and the feel of the room and the smell of the room. But certainly there’s a journey going on, it’s not a collection of lines just stuck together. It’s got a thread running through it.”
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/procol-harum/a-whiter-shade-of-pale
This song is also on our Spotify playlist Bang a Gong – the 60s
Find more songs to enjoy: Bang a Gong song finder
BONUS CLIP
If you’d like to dig deeper into the story behind A Whiter Shade of Pale, check out this short video featuring Procol Harum singer, keyboardist and composer Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid.
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