'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Skating on Thin Ice

'The album's piece de resistance is Skating On Thin Ice,' said the NME here. The song's immediate appeal undoubtedly lies in its consummate orchestration, and in the way the simple, melodious answering-phrases that make up its verse contrast with the contrasting saw-tooth leaps of its chorus (reminiscent of the piano introduction of Fires Which Burnt Brightly, and the chorus-end of As Strong as Samson). This song, however, is in three-four time, and we know from Gary Brooker's song-introductions in concert that he is fond of the occasional waltz (his Blue Danube adaptation confirms this; work even began on a track for The Symphonic Music that was reported to be a compilation of various Procol Waltzes).

The song is structurally unconventional, in that it consists of just two verse-plus-chorus units book-ending a middle section; the verses have thirty-one (10+10+11) and the chorus twenty. the introductory two-bar piano motif, attractively reminiscent of a musical box, proves to be a unifying element when it re-appears as a countermelody in the middle section. Its reiteration in the verses after only one couplet has been sung is also unusual, and the resulting phrase-lengths are unsettling: perhaps some spacing was needed to allow the singer to draw breath after a long, slow phrase. It may, however, be an indication that this song came about through the meeting of ready-made words and a ready-made tune that do not quite match: why else would we find that unwanted emphasis in the chorus ('playing on the wrong side', an infelicity not heard in a Procol song since 'and hurriedly be ... gin to quote' in A Christmas Camel)?

The verses start in D major and turn to D minor half way through, mimicking the stand-out chord-change in the harmonically adventurous chorus, where a D chord collapses to D minor between 'dice' and 'swimming': this change, and the subsequent slump to an A minor, signals the defeated tone of the song, in tandem with the unfulfilled feeling we get when the bright B major conclusion to the first half of the chorus leads – not into an expected E minor – but illogically back into the melancholy D minor of the second half. Gary Brooker's unconventional harmonies – they migrate home to the key of the verse with Rum Talesque ingenuity – underpin a tune that demands very careful pitching from the singer.

A further distinction lies in the fact that the orchestral arrangement is Chris Copping's only credited contribution to any Procol Harum track, except conceivably Well I : 'Gary got me off my slothful derrière,' Chris told BtP, 'and said something about a woodwind ensemble with a euphonium ... Professor Solley pointed me in the right direction {Pete is a string player} ... I feel guilty that I hadn't lent a hand previously as the hapless Commander had to do it all on his Jack Jones.' The brass and woodwind arrangements are sweetly appropriate, and the strings, initially unobtrusive, make a glorious entry with their verse two counter-melody. 'Such a capable musician, Chris Copping,' Gary told BtP, going on to reveal that Chris had come back with the instrumental parts the very next day after being invited to 'get off his f*cking butt and do something for the damn band'! The acoustic guitar is a very unusual feature in late Harum, and the female voices occur hitherto only on Grand Finale, Grand Hotel, and Fires (Which Burnt Brightly). BJ's snare rolls take us back to the waltzing glories of Magdalene: the tempo rises and falls in pleasingly organic fashion, no doubt to the frustration of the Albert Brothers, who had wanted Barrie Wilson, like KC and the Sunshine Band, to play to a click-track! A minute hiatus in the rhythmic pulse just before the second verse remains unexplained.

The idea of a skaters' waltz is a musical commonplace: Johann Strauss and Waldteufel contributed pieces of this title to the popular repertoire. The synthesiser is used here counterfeit the literal swoosh of a skate cleaving ice, though Reid's lyric has nothing literally to do with winter games. This is a trait of the album, however: on Something Magic, for instance, the drums imitate a ticking clock, the guitar a flexing dam, and so forth: The Mark of the Claw uses taped effects to the same end: this album is also the heaviest user of imitative sounds since the days of In Held 'Twas in I. Some have heard traces of similarity in the Skating melody to the opening of the well-known waltz, Some Day my Prince Will Come, from Walt Disney's Snow White, but this tune is in fact somewhat more chromatically-coloured than Brooker's melody.

The song was heard quite frequently on album-promotion tours, with the synthesiser recreating its skating noises and parts of the Copping orchestration. We cannot find any sign that it featured on the US leg of the Something Magic tour, once Dee Murray had replaced bassist (and backing-vocalist …) Copping. It has not surfaced since.

• 'You were the player and you played it cool': the meaning of 'player' in this abrupt start to the song is poised ambiguously among the various expectations Reid's previous use of the 'play' has set up: is it a matter of cards, a rhinestone flugelhorn, the trumpet voluntary, the piano-grand, or a Handelian melody? Are we to exit the play, to write a play, to play with toys, or to play with you? 'Play it cool' is metaphorical, though 'cool' tallies with the temperature of a skating rink; later we will hear various non-specific references to ball-games; no cut-and-dried interpretation will come to the fore. 'The Player' nonetheless sounds like the description of a capable exponent … of something. Robert Altman's The Player didn't come out until 1992.
• 'I was the stranger and I played the fool': Reid's multiple use of 'strange' and 'stranger' has been mentioned in the notes on Man with a Mission: the promotion of the Something Magic album also involved a curious notion about the self as a stranger: illustration here. 'To play the fool' is to clown around on purpose, or to make a fool of oneself, or to assume the privileged role of 'fool' – one licensed to speak openly, on condition that he remains outside the promotional pecking-order – to a wise man or king. Both 'fool' and the later 'teacher' are key ideas in Look to Your Soul: but there are numerous fools throughout the songs, including 'both themselves and also any fool' (Homburg); 'like a fool I believed myself ' (She Wandered Through The Garden Fence); 'Stop calling me Monsieur R Monde you fool!' (Monsieur R Monde ); 'Fool's gold (Fool's Gold); 'not fooling anyone' (Taking The Time); 'We were fools to believe' ((You can't) turn back the page)
• 'You were the teacher': images relating to instruction in Procol Harum songs include 'by teaching I'll be taught' (Look to Your Soul); 'Though I teach I'm not a preacher' (The Devil Came From Kansas); 'When they don't know what they're teaching' (As Strong as Samson); 'Taking out the dog for walks, teaching him how to bow' (Taking The Time); 'you were the teacher' (Skating on Thin Ice); 'Religious leaders teaching hate' (Holding on). Not one of them seems to relate to the classroom activities of a conventional, non-spiritual pedagogue.  
• 'I was the seeker and I failed the test': 'seeker' is a word with strong pop connotations, from the band The Seekers to Pete Townshend's 1970 The Seeker who 'won't get to get what I'm after till the day I die' despite having ' … asked Bobby Dylan … The Beatles … Timothy Leary'. But it carries a strong Sixties flavour, and by 1977 the influence of Hermann Hesse and so forth were wearing thin: the seeker in this song, who saw the quest as 'a test', declares that he has not met with success. The actual goal remains uncertain, but from the tenor of the next line it was presumably something that had to be approached with caution.
• 'We were always skating on thin ice': 'Skating on thin ice' is used when one is diplomatically broaching a contentious subject, or when alluding to the risk taken by someone advancing an argument with insufficient support; it is rarely linked to the frosty recreation of skating, and Reid employs the metaphor as part of series of images of failure and confusion that pervade the track. There is a parallel here with Wizard Man, another song about failing to thwart destiny. 'Skating' was also 1950s slang for being under the influence of drugs or drunk, and the significance of 'ice' in that context is well-known. A very similar title had been used in 1974 by fellow Chrysalists Jethro Tull: Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)
• 'Shaking the wrong dice': a transferred epithet here, since 'dice' cannot conventionally be 'wrong', though they can be thrown incorrectly: but ceremonial dice, used for divination rather than gaming, may be judged inappropriate to a particular occasion. 'Wrong dice' ought to mean dice that are somehow 'evil' rather than 'good' for the purpose: for instance, loaded dice which, being biased toward a particular outcome, don't really allow one to take one's chance with Fate. Reid also has 'the die is cast' in Learn to Fly.
• 'Yes you were the player and you were so cool': Album reviewers, basing their comments on the Something Magic Press Kit, suggested that this lyric was based on Tarot cards, citing references to the fool, the player and so forth. The 'Cool' idea returns from the first line of the song, and may have lain behind the press-kit description of this 'chill, moonlit ballet of a song'.
• 'I was the greenhorn': 'Greenhorn', a US usage, is suggestive of inexperience, through association with the horns of a young animal before they mature.
• 'King of the fools': another apparent reference to the Tarot. 'The king of the fools' could simply be the greatest fool of all, or something more like a monarch of fools … there's a 'King of the Dunces' in Alexander Pope (1688–1744)'s satirical poem, The Dunciad: such an idea probably had more vivid currency in former times of strict social hierarchies, and the occasional institutional up-ending of the same in Days of Misrule such as Twelfth Night or, long before that, the Saturnalia. Other Kings in Procol Harum songs are relatively sparse, but include 'gifts for me the three kings bring' (Shine on Brightly); 'King Jimi, he was there' ('Twas Tea-time at the Circus); 'save the world and be the king' (Fool's Gold); 'I'll be king of the stage' (Without A Doubt); 'I played the King of Hearts' and 'King of the Broken-hearted' (The King of Hearts) and 'In the king's apartment' (All Our Dreams Are Sold).
• 'Playing on the wrong side': to be on the wrong side is to number yourself among the losers, if the context is team games as the present lyric somewhat laboriously establishes. But in The Thin End of the Wedge we hear of 'the wrong side of the spread', where there's a more obvious suggestion of moral wrongness. In magic there is a wrong/black/sinister left-hand path and a right/white/right-hand path: and in the context of cartomancy, which the Tarot references here imply, then this 'wrong side' may also refer to the different interpretations that arise when a card is positionally reversed. An odd typo in the Castle CD reissue liner gives the final letter of the word 'sidE' a capital E.
• 'Swimming against the tide': the implication of struggling against overwhelming odds is clear (in Butterfly Boys we hear 'swimming in the sand' which must be even more exhausting and disheartening. However the 'swimming' image doesn't tally neatly with the idea of 'skating', since the water for one cannot be used for the other. The idea of swimming or drowning is found in other Procol Harum songs such as 'Went to the river, but I could not swim' (Your Own Choice); 'He knew that he would neither sink nor swim' (The Idol); 'we're swimming in the sand' (Butterfly Boys); 'Star-crossed lovers they spoon and swim' (Perpetual Motion); 'in whose waters I shall drown' (The Devil Came From Kansas); 'or drown amidst this stormy sea' (The Wreck Of The Hesperus); 'Knew I'd drown if I went in' (Your Own Choice); 'He fell into the sea and drowned' (For Liquorice John); 'Like drowning men' (The Idol).
• 'Painting the picture to fit with the frame': whereas this would seem a very neat new way of expressing the ill-advised practice of 'letting the tail wag the dog', its corollary, 'changing the players to fit with the game', would seem a perfectly sensible tactic for a team manager. The song has several more non-specific game-references, such as 'you gave the call / I was the faker / and I dropped the ball': the overall sense of falling short, in the presence of a 'master', is clear: 'you were the best / I was the seeker / and I failed the test'. Those who choose to read this as a reference to the vicissitudes of Procol Harum's inner life try to relate it to the tactical substitution of one bass-player for another to try and stay ahead of the 'game' as the music industry shifted ever-further in the direction of disco. In this context, Brooker is seen as to be 'the player' (of the piano) and Reid the 'greenhorn', or 'king of the fools' ... he having earlier admitted 'I'll be a wise man's fool'. It seems far-fetched, but we might note that Reid at this period does show a tendency to reflect on the band's history in his songs: 'We'll raise our glass to absent friends / ... To those we wronged we'll make amends / We're know we're out of favour' [from the unpublished One Eye on the Future] to say nothing of the whole theme of The Worm and the Tree.
• 'You were the searcher out for the sky': out for the sky ... not a phrase in common use [though one hears 'out of the sky']; here the meaning of 'out' is 'out to get', with the sky carrying symbolic meaning of heaven, spiritual perfection. A lowering, stormy sky is quite a prominent feature of the Something Magic sleeve art. Reid's use of 'sky' in Rambling On, Juicy John Pink, Still There'll Be More, Piggy Pig Pig, Memorial Drive, and A Rum Tale seems all to point literally to the firmament. Other artists have used it less literally in songs such as Purple Haze and John Lennon's Woman; Late for the Sky was a Jackson Browne album title in the early 70s; Genesis's influential 1973 Watcher of the Skies takes its title from a line in On First Looking into Chapman's 'Homer' by John Keats.
• 'I was the traveller just passing by': this image is more fully explored in the song Strangers in Space. There is quite a shift in perspective between travelling / skating / swimming / and dropping the ball.
• 'You were the taker and you gave the call': the image is from baseball, perhaps
• 'I was the faker': a faker (not a fakir) is one who is merely playing, faking the part.
• 'I dropped the ball': to 'drop the ball' is not a common saying in Reid's native UK, but in the US it is widely understood, and signifies a lapse in managerial or technical care, a case of negligence; some have chosen to construe this phrase as a much-delayed reference to 'dropping the (Dave) Ball' but this seems far too literal for a writer capable of concealing references to band-members so very much more interestingly (see here!). If Skating on Thin Ice has an 'argument' it appears to be a personal matter: the narrator came into the sphere of an exemplary individual and failed, by his own admission, to live up to the expected standard: the enterprise had been a risky one, the odds against success great. 

Thanks to Frans Steensma for additional information about this song