CHAPTER 64

 

#37: PROCOL HARUM

“Homburg – 50^th Anniversary Full Length Stereo Mix”

from the E.P. Hits’n’Flips

Released: May 2019

 

 

Thursday, 30 September 1982 – I’ll shortly be starting my second year at university but have come down with a bit of a cold so am taking it easy and conserving my energies at home. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of Radio 1, and to commemorate this the station is devoting its entire daytime output to the hits of 1967. No non-hits, B-sides or album tracks – otherwise a 1967 schedule might still be in operation, over four decades later – just the music that got into the pop charts, and that encompassed anything, from distressed psychedelia through heavy rock, soul/R&B and teen bubblegum to housewife-friendly easy listening ballads.

 

In the early autumn of 1982 that era was only a decade and a half away – the same distance, at the time of writing, that “American Boy” and “That’s Not My Name” are from now – yet the music, on that greyly overcast Thursday sounded as though it were emanating from another millennium, another civilisation, another planet even.

 

This was on the background of a not really called-for sixties revival, as New Pop’s first wave was sputtering out. “Love Me Do” was about to get a twentieth-anniversary reboot into the top five, thus conveniently rewriting history. “House Of The Rising Sun” inexplicably reappeared in the chart and only narrowly missed the top ten. There were also plenty of sixties pop pastiches some more aesthetically successful – “Heartache Avenue” by the Maisonettes, “Parade” by White and Torch – than others – “Thank You” by the Pale Fountains, “Danger Games” by the Pinkees.

 

In this context – with New Pop progressively darkening (“House OF Fun” turns to “Our House”) – the hits of 1967 sounded…etiolated, as though dug up entrained in entrails of aspic. “Nothing is real,” Lennon sang on “Strawberry Fields”; well, neither did anything else, not “Seven Rooms Of Gloom” or “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” or “We Love You” or “Randy Scouse Git” or even the Dave Clark Five’s weepie comeback smash “Everybody Knows” with the same unsettling, undulating Clavioline as “Theme From A Teenage Opera.” You listened anew to something ostensibly cheerful like “Flowers In The Rain” and realised it was actually about a drugged-up fuck-up whose existence was disintegrating into pieces (“with my commitments in a mess…in a world of fantasy, you’ll find me”).

 

I tried to regroup my memories from 1967; these were scattered and not conjoined. Visiting the High Speed Gas showroom with my mother one weekday morning to pay the gas bill. The showroom was situated in front of a giant (and now long-demolished) gasometer, on the border between Uddingston and Bothwell, which one could see from Glasgow and, we used to joke, sometimes from southern Italy. There was a queue of anxious housewives.

 

A visit with my parents to the greenhouse at Tollcross Park, me dressed in a navy blue sailor’s suit. Photographs were taken which I didn’t really enjoy.

 

A new kitchen dresser being installed in the hallway of our narrow flat in Uddingston Main Street and filled with items of food and cutlery. I kept having to move out of its way.

 

The small conical dome presiding over the grocery – for a spell in the 1970s it was a branch of the Centra chain – at the junction of Uddingston Main Street and the extremely steep Gardenside Street. If you climbed up the steps heading towards Spindlehowe Road, behind what was then a church, you could still see it.

 

Riding on the dodgems at the local fair – if it were local; I cannot precisely recall – with my mother, wearing a rather fetching raincoat.

 

Mrs Marley and her version of expatriate Italian culture. The huge Bush radiogram with its teak-redolent, dark blue-labelled Decca singles deep within (so to this day I cannot think of Sir Tom or Engelbert without visualising that charming chasm).

 

The visits from several newspapers because word had got out about my being something of a child prodigy. Reading and writing at two. A lengthy, detailed and finally apologetic letter from the National Association of Gifted Children was sent to our house. The photograph of me, reading that letter, made the front pages of the Scottish Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Express. The glum conclusion was that nothing special could be done for me in terms of formal education, which I almost certainly should not have come anywhere near. Not enough money, you see. We were living in a first-floor flat on Main Street in Uddingston, above what was then the Bay Horse Inn pub. Saturday nights were noisy. In my childhood that situation was deemed unique.

 

Music drifted unevenly throughout my head that year. The first record I remember hearing and remembering was “I Feel Free” by Cream right at year's beginning. My father liked Cream; they were really a jazz group masquerading as a pop one ("rock" didn't yet exist). I saw the promotional film for “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Top of the Pops, and indeed that broadcast was recorded, in audio, by sellotaping a microphone to the television speaker. All other elements were random; San Francisco, Grocer Jack (the Clavioline tag to the latter immediately conjured up the abovementioned conical dome for me; it twirled as balletically as the dome seemed to do), light entertainment in general.

 

Even in 1982, however, just how unlike anything else was Procol Harum?

 

 

 

A colourised Top Of The Pops performance of “Whiter Shade Of Pale,” from the spring of ’67, on YouTube; the band are introduced by Pete Murray, who always bore the air of a middle-aged golf club secretary amused but bored by the comings and goings of the young (indeed all four main presenters of TOTP, including the one we can’t mention any more, were born in the twenties, like concerned parents who come back home at eight-thirty to prevent anything naughty happening with their kids’ birthday party). He said something about, well it’s proper standards like “A Man And A Woman” and “Somewhere My Love” that make the real money and sell the most in the end, not the transitory in-and-out-the-top-20-in-seven-weeks-then-forgotten-forever attractions. However, he added, a few new songs did carry the potential to become automatic standards, and this was one of them, as he introduced “The Procol Harum.”

 

Unlike practically all beat groups, they looked like they were doing nothing. Three of them were sitting down. There was an earnest-looking guitarist but I could hear no guitar. They took their time. There were, uniquely for the period, two keyboard players. One was a shrouded phantom with the suggestion of the beginnings of a beard playing the organ. The other played the piano and sang while staring, slightly bemused, at the screen.

 

The song obeyed no rules of what a pop song should constitute. Even “Strawberry Fields Forever” would still have worked if smoothed over; I can imagine the Seekers doing a de-weirded cover (although their valedictory number fifty hit from later that year, “Emerald City,” was, if anything, weirder). But this? The “chorus” was an instrumental hook. The actual chorus sounded like part of the verse. And it seemed to be about…whatever anyone wanted it to be about.

 

But I can understand the slowly-gaping shock of how this must have come across to people at the time; this stately ship of pop abruptly sailing into view, having seemingly materialised from nowhere – and the analogy stands, for it was among the last spectres of glimpsed, vanishing art drawn into (ex)plain(ed) sight by the pirate radio stations.

 

There is a tremendously moving moment, after (or during?) the song’s first chorus, when the studio camera pans back and we see the besuited audience solemnly but happily dancing slowly with each other, cheek to cheek, like their parents had probably done in the thirties. I watched this clip repeatedly during the first lockdown and thought; how euphorically cathartic this would have been if it were happening now, the hope that one day, some way, we can dance again, be in close contact with another human being again.

 

And then, while reading various obituaries of Keith Reid, the band’s non-performing lyricist who died in March 2023, I discovered that he was the son of a Holocaust survivor and that his family’s direct experience of that horror accounted in great part for the near-apocalyptic nature of many of his lyrics. The notion of “Whiter Shade Of Pale” representing some final retreat from a near-unspeakable terror cemented itself in my mind.

 

The song itself, when it’s not freely nodding to Percy Sledge and Bach (but Bob Marley subsequently nodded to it – where do you think “No Woman, No Cry” came from?), doesn’t seem, on examination, to be about much more than some guy getting drunk at a party and unsuccessfully attempting to chat up a woman. It wasn’t even “some guy,” actually; it was THAT Guy – Guy Stevens, the man who gave Procol Harum their name, who would go on to direct London Calling for The Clash.

 

And yet, it is the song’s static patience which made it so radical, even in that peculiarly radical year. Almost alone it was saying, don’t rush, don’t try to be “now” or indeed anywhere else – as a subsequent generation experienced with Oasis, it doesn’t matter what, if anything, the song is saying, because those who listen to the song feel it. Many continue to feel “Whiter Shade Of Pale” to this day.

 

(A total of four verses were originally written for the song but producer Denny Cordell recommended keeping it down to two – otherwise it would be too long for a single, and also it will keep people guessing. The third verse was sung by accident on one TOTP performance, and made the occasional appearance in concert, but the fourth verse was never recorded or performed publicly. I’ve seen those verses – and the late Mr Cordell was right to want to keep the record relatively brief and mysterious.

 

So “Whiter Shade Of Pale”? Great! Momentous!

 

What happens next?

 

For a few months, nothing happened. There was a degree of evanescence around the band. Was this their one statement, their single shot? Actually they were touring or promoting the song abroad or busy writing new songs for a follow-up as well as for an album.

 

When “Homburg” appeared that autumn, there was enough residual public expectation to send the song cascading into the top ten. But it didn’t stick around nearly as long as its predecessor had done, and there were mutterings about soundalike follow-ups. Yet I think it is the better and less readily explicable song.

 

There are tangible differences between “Homburg” and “Pale.” Here, the piano, rather than the organ, is the song’s main musical focus. Also, there was a bit more for Robin Trower’s guitar to do; he had been present on “Pale” mostly for textural thickening purposes, but if you hadn’t noticed his being on it, you certainly would have noticed it if he hadn’t. On “Homburg,” however, he audibly comes up with some astute little countermelodies.

 

On the Continent, however, “Homburg” was welcomed with unquestioning enthusiasm and in some territories actually outperformed “Pale.” An Italian-language cover version ("L'ora dell'amore" by I Camaleonti) was that year’s Christmas number one in Italy and stayed top for ten weeks. An Italian television appearance during that period intersperses onstage performance (or miming) and footage of the band standing around and larking about in a snowbound forest.

 

Nevertheless, despite occasional subsequent hit parade appearances, Procol Harum soon settled for being a cult, albums-based band and despite its many personnel changes seemed happy with that. “Homburg” didn’t and still doesn’t get revived much, if at all, on the radio. But to my teenaged ears it sounded far more alluring, and disturbing.

 

I didn’t know whose multilingual business friend Gary Brooker was talking about or why clocks would eat themselves and everyone else if their hands ever met. Perhaps it was the fact that the song was so underexposed compared to “Pale” – Annie Lennox could never have covered that one – that rendered it fresher to me.

 

But the song continued to disturb me, and I couldn’t figure out why – until the summer of 2018, when I was lying in hospital, sweaty and drugged, when I kept trying to fall asleep and woke up seemingly two hours later to see that the clock on the wall of the corridor in the ward had gone back by two hours. In truth I wanted it to stay midnight, or two a.m. – and any long-term hospital inpatient will know exactly what happens when six in the morning comes around – but what was happening with me was the same as what was happening to the subject of “Homburg” (I don’t think Reid had Tony Hancock in mind).

 

In other words, we were both out of our heads on drugs – the song’s subject voluntarily, me under medical compulsion – and the disorientation of time is EXACTLY as Reid and Brooker articulate it. The world we inhabit is, for the moment, not the same world that we recognise. My brain continues to struggle trying to coalesce both worlds.

 

One year after my hospital residency, an E.P. of Harum’s early work appeared, and included a seven minute plus mix of “Homburg” – everything that was actually recorded at the session. And the most disorientating factor of this extended mix is that, after the song is essentially done…nothing happens for three-and-a-quarter minutes. The song’s main motifs continue to cycle around, sometimes accompanied by an exhausted, wordless vocal yelp or the occasional pianistic arpeggio. Then it draws down to a natural close. But nothing actually happens; there are no extra lyrics, no studio effects, no freaking out, no unanticipated orchestral crescendos. The song just circles around, emphasising its point (if not its purpose, which is unavoidably subjective) – but it is up to us to fill in its blanks before the song refills the aspic.