A Whiter Shade of Pale

Keith Reid
Everybody had started to become more experimental. You know, the 'art' was kind of creeping in.

Gary Brooker
I do remember having this musical idea which I worked out on the piano. Air on a G String – which was a Bach composition – and it came out ... when I think when got  after the first two bars, I think I got it wrong kind of thing, or didn’t remember where it went and I just carried it on in my own way. And I wrote this sequence which had a bit of Bach-like melody over the top, a bit Air on a G String-y, just in that style.

Well, I think it was about then that an envelope had either arrived that morning or something. And I opened it and it was some new lyrics from Keith. And the first one that I opened was A Whiter Shade of Pale.

I’ve always been very interested in visual … you know, in pictures, in painting and cinema. I’ve always been interested in visual stuff. And so you try and come up with that in words. These are very abstract things but it’s kind of what you’re trying to express. That’s the way I work: basically. with an idea, building, going from a little p… If you were a painter: a few brushstrokes and you look it and you go, 'Hmm, what is that, what could that be?' Kind of like a Toulouse Lautrec-like picture.

I used to like – I still do – I used to like the Surrealist painters very much. So like a Dali painting ... you might think, 'I'd like the song to feel like a Dali painting looks. Clocks dissolving, just fantastical things. You know, the colours that somebody would use in a picture. You try and come up with that in words.