A Whiter Shade of Pale will now remain a mystery for all time

Bookish songwriter wrote the lyrics for Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale and kept people guessing on the meaning.

Keith Reid of Procol Harum in 1970. Picture: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns

The meaning of Keith Reid’s lyrics to A Whiter Shade of Pale remains one of the big mysteries in music. From its opening line: “We skipped the light fandango/Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor,” Reid’s words have fascinated and confounded.

Was he describing a sexual seduction or an acid trip gone wrong (“The room was humming harder/As the ceiling flew away”)? Or was it a modern take on Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (“As the miller told his tale”)? An elegiac description of a romantic break-up or a vision of his father as an inmate in Dachau concentration camp? A philosophical polemic? All these theories have been explored in depth in university theses.

Procol Harum’s single, with its Hammond organ melody based on Bach’s Suite No 3 in D Major (Air on a G String), was released in May 1967 as the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reached No. 1 on album charts across the world.

A Whiter Shade of Pale topped British charts for six weeks, and just as hippies were frolicking in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco the song became one of the soundtracks to the Summer of Love. It was No. 1 in Australia for three weeks. It has sold six million copies and in 2009 was named the most requested song on British radio stations of the past 75 years.

Reid, a cerebral, softly spoken, self-confessed bookworm who also collected ideas from art house French films and the surrealist works of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, kept people guessing as to the song’s meaning, but did admit his starting point was overhearing the band manager tell a woman, “You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale”. He also suggested the lyrics’ dark tone was influenced “in some unconscious way” by his family’s experiences in the Holocaust.

He had met singer Gary Brooker – he died in February last year – in 1966 and thereafter never performed with Procol Harum but went on tour with them as a sort of poet in residence. To him his words were poetry first and foremost. “My things are written pieces to be read,” said Reid, who in those days sported a curly moptop in the manner of his idol Bob Dylan and owlish specs before John Lennon made the look his own. The Brooker-Reid partnership continued to delight with a remarkable series of hits: Conquistador, A Salty Dog, Shine on Brightly and Grand Hotel. Ten albums fused blues with classical elements before the emergence of punk rock made such beard-stroking prog rock deeply unfashionable and they disbanded in 1977.

Reid was brought up in the East End of London. His father, Irwin, had been a Viennese lawyer who was transported to Dachau after Kristallnacht in 1938 and fled to Britain after his release, leaving his parents whom he never saw again. Keith’s mother was descended from Polish Jews and he was raised in an observant household.

The child was a natural autodidact who struggled at school, where he was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse, but read avidly. He left at 15 to pursue his dream of becoming a songwriter and in 1966 Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, introduced him to Brooker, whose band the Paramounts soon changed their name to Procol Harum. The name was based on a Latin phrase loosely meaning “beyond these things”, but rather than take credit for cleverly signposting the band’s mysticism, Reid admitted they had named the band after their manager’s cat.

After Procol Harum’s split, Reid retired, but re-emerged in 1986 when Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band asked him to write lyrics for a rock anthem he had co-written.

Reid drew inspiration from anti-war protests to write an empowering protest song: “You’re the voice, try and understand it/Make a noise and make it clear/We’re not gonna sit in silence/We’re not gonna live with fear”. You’re the Voice became John Farnham’s comeback hit and put Reid’s words back on radio and television across the world. It is still the biggest-selling single in Australia.

The reinvigorated Reid moved to New York with his partner Pinkie Sidhu, whom he married in 2004 and who survives him, and founded a management, publishing and production company. He teamed up with the re-formed Procol Harum on the album The Prodigal Stranger (1991).

On release of another Procol Harum comeback album, The Well’s on Fire (2003), Brooker confessed that he did not know Reid after 35 years. “I don’t know Keith from Adam. He’s a very deep person and a very private person. We sometimes communicate in a very intimate way and bare our souls, but at the end of the day, I don’t know who he is.”

Brooker’s own account of writing A Whiter Shade of Pale was based on opening Reid’s lyrics in the post just as he was watching a TV ad for cigars set to Air on a G String and starting to riff on the melody.

In 2005 Procol Harum became embroiled in a legal battle when keyboardist Matthew Fisher, who was paid $150 for his contribution, sued for a writing credit and a percentage of royalties. The case was eventually settled in Fisher’s favour but there was no doubting the authorship of the lyrics, which continue to fascinate.

In 1994 music historian Mike Butler claimed to have discovered a “missing verse” that proved the song was simply describing a drunken seduction: “My mouth by then like cardboard/Seemed to slip straight through my head/So we crash-dived straightway quickly/And attacked the ocean bed”.

Reid turned a whiter shade of pale, dismissing the theory as “utter rubbish”.

“It’s impressionistic, so people never really get to the bottom of it,” he said in 2009. “It’s like a painting, you can always find new levels of meaning.”

Keith Stuart Brian Reid. Songwriter. Born Hertfordshire, England, October 19, 1946; died London, March 23, aged 76.

The Times