Procol Harum's European Tours, 2002

A summary survey of the songs the band played

In the darkness of the Vega auditorium a Danish fan asked me, 'Why do you write down the set? Does it vary from night to night?' Well yes, it does, and this table shows exactly how often – and where in the set schedule – particular songs cropped up on the Summer and Winter European Tours, 2002, at the gigs scheduled for Newcastle (cancelled), Croydon, Silkeborg, Copenhagen, Zoetermeer, Katowice, Bramhall, Florence, Milan, Modena, Ancona, and Trento (the mooted gig in Indonesia, incidentally, never took place). It would be fair to say that there are some surprises in what follows.

Procol Harum played 189 songs over eleven nights, averaging just over 17 songs per gig (the Italian shows were shorter in general than the summer ones): every album they've ever released was represented, and of course among the 'non-album' numbers listed below we now know that An Old English Dream will be heard on the 2003 album, The Well's on Fire.

33 different numbers were played: three occurred once only [A Christmas Camel and the non-originals, Imagine, and No Woman No Cry]; seven songs were played twice only [Seem to Have the Blues, (Most All of the Time), Conquistador, Still There'll Be More, A Rum Tale, Fires (Which Burnt Brightly) , Holding On, Harlequin]; five received three airings [Whaling Stories, Bringing Home the Bacon, TV Ceasar, Typewriter Torment, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle]. Three songs came out of the closet four times [Memorial Drive, Wizard Man, The King of Hearts], while Monsieur R Monde was heard five times, Piggy Pig Pig six times, and Shine on Brightly seven times.

Three songs were played nine times [Repent Walpurgis, Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone), As Strong as Samson], and four ten times [She Wandered Through the Garden Fence, A Salty Dog, Grand Hotel, Beyond the Pale]; of the six songs that featured in every show, being played eleven times [Pandora's Box, Ten Thousand Souls aka An (Old) English Dream, Separation, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Homburg] some are clearly surprises and some clearly are not!

The table below lists the two tours' Procol songs (principally in order of release) specifying their sources. The column of green figures shows how often the song was played, and the red figures show not the frequency but the position of the song in the setlist of the gig named at the head of each column.