Brooker, Dunn, Pegg, Phillips, Whitehorn
If you
were able to be at this show, please send photos, and souvenirs to
webmaster@procolharum.com for
sharing with the wider world
Late start to the concert ... for circumstances far too tedious to outline even briefly, the band had sound checked without a Hammond (though the Montage had provided some pretty good ersatz sounds, giving Josh quite a few patch-change headaches on the wing (if you'll pardon that anatomically preposterous wording)), and went ahead with a last-minute borrowed B3 in fine condition, the first time they've been heard thus for quite a while. Very interesting contrast in places with the habitual XK3; the B3 is by no means an overall winner, but it scores highly for the penetration of its percussion in the ensemble. The illustrious Geoff Dunn continues to experiment with phrase lengths and fill-positions, which helps make for riveting listening on the seventeenth show of the tour
Pandora's Box
Applause as soon as the first notes sounded, from an audience that clearly loved the band and its music. Double organ cadenza from the player GB then introduced as 'Josh Phyllis'
Man with a Mission
The venue decided to light this with egregiously strafing shafts of jazzy brilliance that did (to these eyes) nothing to enhance what was (to these ears) a very exciting performance.
Thomas Wylie attending to a cymbal issue with the kit (this would not normally be his remit, but the crew are one man down). GB looks at him working and says, 'No autographs'.
GB gives a plug for the merch in 'The
Procol Shop'. CDs run dry in the interval, as a result. 'Buy a lucky
badge and win a night out with me,' Gary jested. He also
mentioned 'The Soviet Souvenir Programme'. Russian is one of the
languages it doesn't contain, in fact.
Can't Say That
The bassline continues to delight, as
did the superb guitar solo from the Man in the Red Shoes: new
heights of invention and ingenuity. The way this fascinating song
falls into two rhythmic parts corresponds closely to the formula of
the original recording of Broken Barricades, in which a new
groove developed in the ostinato playout, beyond the fade-point
chosen for the final release ... and to the two-part Unquiet Zone
that we'll be hearing live on Disc 5 of the eight-disc Still
There'll be More boxed set, due out in early 2018, but
playing now as I type these notes, speeding eastward across what I
suppose must be the Piedmont in Paul Koehrer's newly-appointed T4,
with snow-clad lofty peaks to the left and bright Italian sunshine
all around. Tough work, I know, but somebody has to do it, etc usw..
Sunday Morning
Gary solicits title-translations from the crowd (about 850 people)
and pronounces 'Domenica mattina' with élan and éclat.
'I speak it like a native,' he explains. The reason ... he ate some
pasta and now has Italian inside him. In fact a lot of his Italian
turns out to be Spanish. And some, like 'Welcome backio', is what he
later explains as 'Esperanto'.
Whereas the XK3 is incisive, tonight's B3 is warm and insinuating in
tone, particularly suiting this excellent song, which goes down
extremely well with this audience.
As Strong as Samson
Fabulous drumming, and nice
counter-melodies on the guitar; after a five-song high (the more
extraordinary given the stresses and annoyances of the pre-organ
period) the band slightly took their foot of the 'gas' here; so it
was up to standard, whereas the foregoing had exceeded any
reasonable expectation.
Business Man
A bit of hassle for The Commander,
who started the song with a glass of water on the piano (not the
faux grand) and needed to stop playing to remove it. He used the
gap to play some air guitar instead.
A Salty Dog
Early applause, not for the
unmistakable chords, but for 'All hands on deck.' Hard to understand
how this song can keep getting better and better. It's so elastic in
timing and dynamics. Backstage GB was marvelling that it continues
to develop. Perhaps it's down to the growing invention of the
indispensible Mr Dunn, whose strong fills were very prominent, and
who also played with great delicacy. .
This song dedicated to the late
Tom Petty, and played also for a girl, or pearl, in the audience who'd come all
the way from 'Turku? Torquay? Ah, Turkey!' Her father is a big PH
fan, but he wasn't there. The merch team was pleased to be have been
able to use a few words of memorial Turkish while explaining the
numbers on the back of the lucky badges to this person.
Fires (Which Burnt Brightly)
Part two starts with Josh in 'Novum'
tee-shirt, garnered from the Procol stall in the foyer, not from the
knock-off merchants outside the venue, selling crudely pirated versions of
Julia-Brown's finely-wrought design, blurry and over-inked, all detail
swamped, and dates on the reverse pirated directly from 'Beyond the Pale'.
(How can we tell? We have our methods). The band appeared amusingly
delighted, in one sense, by this ludicrous piracy. 'We've finally made
it,' exclaimed the Commander. But be warned, Italian fans, these shirts are
a puny travesty of the authentic souvenir article: compare pictures on this
page
Fires ... one of several songs that were clapped from the opening
notes. Intriguing to observe Gary's fingering of the Bach figuration, how he
shifts his whole hand up and accents the high F with 2 or 3, not relying on
5 to accomplish the task. Interesting also, at the rather listless
soundcheck, to hear some Bach coming from the piano (the prelude on whose
chords Learn to Fly is based) and a fair chunk of Albinoni.
Last Chance Motel
'Italians have a reputation for
liking women, thank God ...'. GB tells how the man in the song 'loves his
wife' but falls for the charms of another. I'm not quite sure where Pete
Brown's libretto suggests that the narrator of the story is actually in a
relationship before he encounters his best friend's wife, nor, indeed, why
he hadn't encountered her before ... perhaps they're newlyweds? GB sang
'making whoopee' in lieu of the ominously mechanical 'doing truckstops'.
Homburg
When GB announced 'a song from 1967,
someone bellowed for the so-called 'Fortuna', and Gary duly
played the opening of Repent Walpurgis on a full-organ voice
from his piano. This throwback he dismissed quickly, 'We don't do
that.'
Homburg went down exceedingly well, and the camera-police in the
audience had a field day. Standing ovation. At the band intros, GW
introduced GB simply (in Shining mode) with the words ' ...
Here's Gary ...')
Shine on Brightly
The vocal mic was in its 'up'
position, from the band intros, when the hammering intro to this
song began. GB deftly whisked it down for his opening statement ...
another sign of the crew's depletion. Great drums, great organ (the
B3 percussion!) , great bass. GB sings a bit in Italian, 'il tuo
diamante' etc. Great, after all this time, to be still hearing the
plaintive payout exhortations to 'Shine on, shine on ....'
Neighbour
'Vicino' according to many hollered
suggestions from the audience. GB explains the envy gradient, for
the Italian audience, in terms of 'A Fiat 500 and a Lamborghini'.
Inexplicably but delightfully the organ squirrels two phrenzied
helpings of The Sailors' Hornpipe into the backing (maybe
thanks to the same nautical impulse that resulted in a performance
of All the Nice Girls Love a Candle at the soundcheck).
Grand Hotel
All lovely and expressive, especially
the Russian interlude. One or two harmless 'vocal remixes'. Instant
applause at the start of the song/ And of course, 'These Italian
girls always like to fight'.
Conquistador
Solid audience clapping through the
opening of this song. It seems I rarely make notes during
Conquistador ... perhaps like others I'm carried away by a sense
of inner history ... how this was the first track the confirmed that
PH albums were going to be as Procolesque as the two singles had
been ... in other words, that the gravity, mystery and poetry of the
singles were not some aberration from a band whose main body of work
would be disposable pap. The fragile smell of vinyl, the dry heat of
the valves ('tubes'), the weight of the tone-arm, the whirling of
the blue Regal Zonophone label ...
Big ovation!
The Only One
More electric piano sound in the
Yamaha mix tonight, and huge reverb on the vocal to start with. The
dawning and development of this expansive ballad parallels that of
Grand Hotel, whose London debut in 1972 felt ambitious yet
inchoate ... and whose stately grandeur shows no present
signs of peaking. Gary is experimenting with phrasing and expression
as the PB lyric gradually settles like a sediment in the melodic and
harmonic riverbed. Squealing guitar at the end, suggestive of
newborn life. Very interesting.
A Whiter Shade of Pale
Gary Brooker made a great pantomime
of checking the lateness of the hour, and feigning departure from the scene,
tactics guaranteed to swell the already effusive baying for an encore (the
Fortuna obsessive was at it again also). The B3 sounded great
on this song ... so did the vocal, and the audience. Long notes at the start
of the guitar solo, hyperfluent nimblage thereafter.
A fine end to a great concert, all the greater given the uncertainty and tension of the foregoing hours of logistic wrangling. Hurrah!
| 17 | songs altogether: | 1 | From Procol Harum | 1 | from Shine on Brightly |
| 1 | From A Salty Dog | From Home | from Broken Barricades | ||
| 2 | From Grand Hotel | 1 | From Exotic Birds and Fruit | 1 | from Procol's Ninth |
| From Something Magic | 1 | From The Prodigal Stranger | from The Well's on Fire | ||
| 7 | From Novum | 2 | non-album tracks |
So nice to spend time with good Paler friends at this gig, before and after: Paul and Marion, Axel and Juliette, Stefano and Anna, Martin and Carmen, Stefano Carbone the arch puzzle-solver, Umberto and his retinue, and of course Andrea Ciccioriccio, our excellent long-time partner-in-merchandise. Fishbag shot below |
|
GB with his new Bristol fish-bag, and Linda from BtP, its donor