It was the Summer of 1967 and there was a surge of radical activity on both sides of the pond. You had the free spirited hippies in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and the fashionable, swinging it-crowd populating London’s Carnaby Street. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took a trip down a river with Lucy, while Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow chased rabbits with Alice. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” exposed the inner wrappings of west coast living, and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” pretty much left everyone in a daze, aching for more.
For Gary Brooker, the man who wrote the music and sang the quirky, psychedelic-laced lyrics of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the song was the culmination of everything he had hoped to achieve with Procol Harum. And this was at the very beginning of the band’s 50-year history. Fortunately, Brooker, lyricist Keith Reid and the rest of Procol Harum carried on for the next 10 years, leaving behind a treasure trove of classically influenced, highly melodic and instrumentally vibrant tomes to feast on.
Flash forward to 2019, and Gary Brooker is still at the helm of Procol Harum. After a 14-year lapse, the group released their 12th studio album, Novum, in 2017, and followed it up with a spectacular eight-disc retrospective boxset from Esoteric Recordings called Still There’ll Be More. And more there is with a U.S. 2019 winter run in the United States, and spring and summer dates in Europe. Just before the U.S. trek, we caught up with Brooker to talk about the shows, Novum, Still There’ll Be More, the Beatles, “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” and what lies ahead for the singer and the seminal British band.
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