Procal Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale

A Whiter Shade Of Pale (now referred to as AWSOP for lazyness reasons) is one of those songs where, it's hard to appreciate how important it was. It's widely regarded as changing almost everything during the sixties because of it's unique sound and musicality. Kick starting prog rock, and becomming a main inspiration for the UK's style of psychedelic music. It's questionable authorship and claims of plagiarism has been in the news the past few years, (but then, the track's always known to be based on Bach anyways) have kinda sullied it's reputation a bit lately, but it's a cracking tune. Let's check it out!

Side A is quite obviously AWSOP, the sublime organ riff takes us into a dreamlike state, and Brooker's voice comes in with the defining opening line "We skip the lights fandango" and carries on singing throughout. The first verse jumps in with a more sweeping Organ playing, and we get the intro melody as well. There are also guitars and stuff as well in the background, but (rare for a rock group) they let the organ take centre stage and get mixed down a bit. An RnB style Bach track is such a weird thing, especially one about a very poe-faced relationship. The track fades out before letting the instrumentalists get carried away. It is a very enjoyable song, and obviously a very important one, but however, it has not aged as well as some sixties tracks have. It's a problem with being ahead of the crowd, it's so easy to become dated unless you're a genius like Frank Zappa or Dave Brock.

For our second side, Side B if you will, we have Lime Street Blues, a more straightforward sixties rocking track. Bouncy beat and melody, trivial lyrics. It's a great fun track to counterbalance the sombre mood of AWSOP, but it does lack the former track's individualistic spark. The neat instrumental bridges show off the band members' fine musical abilities, and show them as solid players, a nice blues boogie. The organ playing during the chorus is neat in the Strawberry Alarm Clock kinda way. Typical sixties.

So, we get two tracks here, one of pop music's all time classics, and a fun little Rock'n'roll number. I'd say that it's a great 7" single and the two tracks play off each other excellently with their contrasting moods. Opposite faces of a coin indeed. This kinda thing really shows what my generation is missing out on when it comes to what a single is, and can be. They're damn fools. It's a great single!