A Whiter Shade Of Pale was the main theme of the soundtrack to 1967’s Summer Of Love: The Single when The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper was The Album. At a time when the increasingly experimental British pop music of the mid to late Sixties was on the cusp, Procol Harum’s debut single did more than any other individual song to push it over the edge into what we now know as rock.
A mournful lament with a teasing – even disturbing – lyric masquerading as a feel-good summer love song, AWSOP (as it is known by its devotees) was a conundrum from day one. Clearly inspired by other works, it clearly inspired other works. It was both classical and pop. It was soul without funk. It helped invent rock that didn’t rock. It was a worldwide hit single by ‘serious artists’ that ushered in the era of the album as the true medium for ‘serious artists’. It was the most successful record ever broken by pirate radio… just as pirate radio was about to sink below the waves and be replaced by something more official and terrestrial.
