Australian singles chart:
Conquistador entered the Kent chart on 10 July 1972 and peaked at #4. The song was #48 on the Top 100 of 1972.
Album:
The song is on Procol Harum Live: In Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra which entered the Kent album chart on 28 August 1972 and peaked at #12.
Songwriters:
Gary Brooker, Keith Reid
Producer:
Chris Thomas
Record label of Australian release:
A&M
Wikipedia:
The narrator of Conquistador addresses the body of a dead conquistador lying on a beach, no doubt partially embedded in the sand and obviously not long after death or the corpse would not attract a vulture, nor would the “stallion” still be nearby. He at first jeers at the irony of the failure of the Conquistador’s imagined mission, and the desolation of the scene and his corpse, but on reflection regrets his mockery and offers pity for the lonely and futile fate of the conquistador, “You did not conquer, only die.”
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquistador_(Procol_Harum_song)
Songfacts:
Procol Harum’s lyricist Keith Reid told Songfacts the story behind this song: “Gary Brooker and I, before we formed Procol Harum, when we were just working together as songwriters and getting into it, we had this regular deal where he lived about 40 miles from London near the ocean, and I’d jump on a train once a week and go visit him. He’d have a bunch of my lyrics and he’d play me whatever he had been working on. This particular time, though, I’d got down there and he’d been working on a tune. He said, ‘What does this sound like to you?’ And I said, ‘Oh, conquistador.’ It had a little bit of a Spanish flavor to it. I went into another room and started writing the words there and then.”
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/procol-harum/conquistador
Lyrics:
Conquistador your stallion stands in need of company
And like some angel’s haloed brow
You reek of purity
I see your armor plated breast
Has long since lost its sheen
And in your death masked face
There are no signs which can be seen
Click for full lyrics
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