Death of Gary Brooker, Procol Harum Singer and Pianist

In 1967, the tube “A Whiter Shade of Pale” launched the British band career. Founding member, Gary Brooker, died at the age of 76.

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He will remain as the plaintive voice of the “Summer of Love” of 1967 with this song that every earth will have heard – and rather a hundred times one. Impossible then, and since, from escaping a Whiter Shade of Pale, Immortal Slow that would impose the British group of the British Procol Harum as a tenor of a baroque pop, in the continuity of Americans Beach Boys and Left Banke or their beatles and zombies compatriots. The singer and pianist Gary Brooker died of cancer on February 19th in London at the age of 76. If his career can not be summed up at this “white shade”, it is by this stunning tube that must begin.

Premier Single of Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale is published on May 12, 1967 to reach the first place of British rankings a month later. He was recorded at the London Olympic Studio, but the solemnity and majesty who emerge seems to come from the Westminster Abbey. Because of course, of this descending theme of Organ Hammond which is the signature, reminiscent of the air of the Orchestral Suite No. 3 of Bach. And from the heated voice to the Rhythm’n’Blues de Brooker, again one of those whites of Albion who would like to sing like Ray Charles. To add to charm, there is the mystery: no one, not even the KEITH REID parole, has never understood the meaning of these two couples beginner by a couple Fandango and citing in the refrain the second of the CANTERBURY tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, that of the miller. Many will hear a sexual subtext (the “sixteen virgin verse”), others a liturgical delusion and lysergical.

With such a will have, one gets one of the songs that the radios have the most broadcast and an inexhaustible manna for the musical edition. Any evocation to the Swinging London screen or the Spirit of the Sixties must make the decadent organ heard. For the group, it will end in the House of Lords when the holder of the instrument, Matthew Fisher, will eventually obtain the recognition of his contribution to this tube, originally signed by the only REID (words) and Brooker (music).

Born May 29, 1945 in London, Gary Brooker was the son of a Steel guitarist, a member of an orchestra that popularized Hawaiian music after the Second World War. The Fiston goes to the piano and founded in 1962 with Robin Trower, Procol Harum’s future guitarist, The Paramounts, a group representative of the British Rhythm’n’Blues boom. Their proofreading of Ivy poison, Leiber and Stoller, is lost in the mass of times of the time. With the reinforcement of the KEITH REID parole and organist Matthew Fisher, Procol Harum emerges in the spring of 1967. This curious name is that of a Siamese cat belonging to an acquaintance and does not come from a Latin phrase, as claimed by a TENESSENT LEGEND.

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