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
Lyrics:
We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ′cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray
Click for full lyrics
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.
New to Bang a Gong? Click HERE to learn more about us.