A Whiter Shade of Pale

Reid in between the lions

"The phrase 'a whiter shade of pale' has been ripped off so much … I feel that I should get some credit for introducing something into the English language …"

Keith Reid, interviewed by Paul Carter in Shine On, August, 1997

Marcel Möller writes to BtP (September 2000)

Keith Reid enters pantheon of famous writers

Guess who figures amongst the great of mankind like Goethe, Shakespeare and Proust in the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of Quotations ?

Indeed, Keith Reid! Not quite correctly presented as ‘English pop singer and song writer’, he figures between the American jurist Charles A. Reich and the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque.

PH’s poet is represented with a single quotation that consists of the third and fourth lines of the refrain of AWSoP:

Strange dots between ‘first’ and ‘just ghostly’, but anyhow: Keith has entered the pantheon, the hall of fame, of famous writers!

Martin Clare writes from the Oxford University Press:

Incidentally the phrase features in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991), as follows:

In the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (revised 4th edition, 1996), the entry reads:

and the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, and Quotation (1997) has the same (including the bizarre punctuation "at first ... just ghostly") but omitting the "English pop singer and songwriter".