The 'Salty Dog' single

John Peel on why it didn't chart in the UK

The BBC's longest-serving and certainly most authoritative radio DJ John Peel used to host an hour-long concert programme on Radio One entitled The Sunday Show, which Procol Harum played in 1970: with Trower on bass and Copping on organ they performed A Salty Dog, which Peel back-announced, in his trademark drawl, as follows:

'... and, er, that was A Salty Dog, which was once released as a single, and should have done, er, a lot better in fact as a single than it did; unfortunately, um, seeing as it was longer than two-and-a-half minutes long and isn't exactly a bright tempo, a lot of my colleagues won't play it because they feel that, er, more than two-and-a-half minutes without some, er, feeble quip from them, er, is going to make the world a sadder place ... '

Post Script
On Peel's BBC Radio 4 Home Truths programme one Saturday morning in February 2002 (not music, but a "wry look at the foibles of family life") there was a feature on a couple who are excessively picky about the colour and décor of their sitting-room and had re-painted it four times to get the correct shade. This unfolded over a background of A Whiter Shade of Pale, at the end of which Peel declared "Ah, I was always more of a Homburg man myself..." (thank you, Martin) 

Pirate Radio-related oddity

Furthermore ...

Jeremy Mahahevan commented on A Salty Dog in The New Straits Times (January 2006): There's much more to this mouthful of a band than A Whiter Shade of Pale. It was a bit of an oddity on the late-sixties, early-seventies prog-rock landscape, being predisposed towards four-minute songs rather than 17-minute ones ... . The article was online here .