Posted on 04/15/2009 3:04:51 PM PDT by JoeProBono
'A Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procol Harum is the most heard song of the last 75 years, it has been claimed.
The 1967 hit has been broadcast in public places more than any other song, found a chart compiled for BBC Radio 2.
Music licensing firm PPL say they took into account everywhere music is consumed in public, whether in the high street, on hospital radio, in pubs, clubs and supermarkets, in stadiums or on jukeboxes.
Still sounds like Bach to me.
I stopped listening to Classic Rock years ago.
But did enjoy them when I was younger.
I heard Anne Lennox version of this song and it was very good.
Too bad they make music like that anymore.
Light fandango has half the calories of regular fandango, but all the taste!
“’A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum is the most heard song of the last 75 years, it has been claimed.”
In the U.K.
My guess was pretty close to the actual meaning.
It mentions he later was mixing a symphony of Procol Harum at a studio in London with a fiddler who played in Curved Air.
Someone in The Police had been in Curved Air I think. Either Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland. I think Copeland - the American drummer who Sting does not really like but if it had not been for Stewart and the rest of Copeland clan - Sting would be a schoolteacher.
Brooker’s setting was a motley synthesis, derived from Bach (though Reid dissents: ‘It is not Air on a G-String) and Percy Sledge. When a Man Loves a Woman, a hit of the previous year, had also had a hymnal quality, an integral part for organ, and a fervent, soulful delivery. Reid’s cryptic lyrics inject some of the waywardness of the counter-culture. There’s a tension between the placid majesty of the music and the paranoia and messiness of the subject-matter. The disjunction may account for the common perception of A Whiter Shade of Pale as impenetrable and obscure.
8^)
I was fortunate to see Gary Brooker (Procol Harum) perform ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ about ten years ago with Ringo Starr’s All Star Band. The crowd went nuts.
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