Gary Brooker: artist in profile

John Tolanski
Well, you can see the enormous amount of trouble Gary took to do that. Here to introduce him for you is Douglas Adams.

DOUGLAS ADAMS
[Clears throat]. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Well, I’m absolutely delighted to be here this evening. I remember when I first heard A Whiter Shade of Pale all the way back in 1967, it was very, very mysterious. Where had this record come from? I mean, literally, literally where did it come from? It sounded, I mean everybody thought it, maybe it had come out of Detroit. What was a sort of English church organ doing on it, just a  ...  [sound breaks up : there's a problem with Adams's radio mike, of which he's unaware. In the wings, Brooker is not unaware] And  ... this band came from Southend. It was completely inexplicable. But that song, as you may remember (and you all look as if you do [tittering]) kind of dominated the summer of 1967. And in what was obviously the first of a ... um ... . astonishing number of sort of brilliant marketing moves, they brought out an album five months later. Was it four months? And left the song off it. And this has always kind of characterised the  ... I  ... would be ...  see this sort of came its way, to be as big a band as we all sort of thought it ought to be. But Procol Harum has been under the tutelage of its leader, Gary Brooker, I think one of the most original and interesting and most musically literate, if you like band of all the bands we  ...  I’d like to introduce now one of my great heroes to come and talk about his life’s work with Procol Harum and everything else: Mr. Gary Brooker.

GARY BROOKER
Yes, that’s it.

Right.

Can I check your little things, here? Is he sort of going on and off?

Just in case.

This is just the starter here. You want to see him later. [Laughs]

How’s that? Can you hear me now?

I’m waiting.

…because I’ve been, I’ve been such an admirer of Gary for so many years and I kept on telling people this. And one day somebody said to me, "Well, look, he’s a very nice man. Why don’t you just 'phone him up?" So I did. And he came around for dinner and we had dinner together and it was great evening. There’s another friend of mine who’s a great Procol Harum fan who actually flew from Tokyo to London to Japan [sic] in order to be there that evening. And we filled Gary with an enormous amount of drink and…

I remember that now. I remember that.

Yeah. I think just about then, with my father. I think Douglas knew that my father was…

…well, we like to call him a famous musician in that he was in Felix Mendelson and his Hawaiian Serenaders. He played Hawaiian guitar, piano before that, but eventually Hawaiian guitar. And they were very popular and I used to sit on the side of the stage and watch them and got to play when he had his own band going some evenings. We did a duet or two on the piano.

Well, when did you…

And I remember the smell of my godmother.

She was Polynesian, a hula-dancer in a grass skirt.

And I used to sit on her knee whilst watching Dad play.

[GB Laughs]

Well, I don’t think up till that point, I’d been a particular wild man. In fact, in Procol Harum – I am now. I’ve learnt how to be a wild man. But up till then I hadn’t been. And, and I’d been listening, you know, to music for many years, since, you know, I was five, radio, not Radio 4, it would have been some other ... Home Service or Light Programme where you got a bit of classical music and then I think with skiffle and that starting. It was the only thing you heard in those days so you just grew up listening to all that stuff. And then I, I started listening to American soul music, you know, starting off with Ray Charles and things and copied that for years, tried to sing like those, totally unsuccessfully. And one day it all ran out because people like Otis Redding or that were actually playing in London and you couldn’t, you know, go out and play a soul song that nobody had ever heard because they were in Hammersmith Odeon or Finsbury Park the next night. So I gave it up. I retired. I was 19. I seriously retired and thought I shall – I was going to work for IBM as a computer expert. Now that was one of the biggest mistakes in my life because I would have been in at the start. This was like in 1966. I would have been …

…Gary Gates!

[Audience laughs]

I think that, yes, of course, I did make the right choice. I did make the right choice. Email is still a mystery to me. It’s like a real ...

So was it a, so how deliberate a decision was it to sort of change the style in that way? Or was it just something that came about because these lyrics suddenly landed in your, in your hand and you decided to, that that was…

I think that I probably would have gone off somewhere else. I mean there was, in fact, Dusty Springfield at the time wanted me to play in a band and she’d offered me Cherry Wayner’s organ which a lot of people might not know what that is but, believe me, Cherry Wayners’s organ was something that you really would have liked to have played around with.

No, to explain, she was the…

[Laughs] If there’s anybody that old here, which I can’t see anybody that old, but there was Lord Rockingham’s Eleven on the Oh Boy Show and the organist on that was a girl who bopped around on something, maybe a Hammond or something but it was covered in pearl, mother of pearl. Now I could have played this. But I made a decision instead to look at this packet of lyrics that had come to me from this strange young man via Guy Stevens, a good friend at the time.

Odd-job Reid, yes.

Yeah. Well, we didn’t have desks in those days. [Laughs]

Sort of a mantelpiece, I think. No, Guy said …

I thought, well, these look like lyrics to songs. And they haven’t got any music. But they were also fitted into place and read well. And I was no great, I did actually pass O Level English literature. That’s one of my small little stars. So I did appreciate language and, and I looked at the words and although they were, you know, in some ways Americanised, some of the lyrics, I was Americanised as well. And I immediately sat down – after I found them again in the bottom of a bag, you know, six months later – and wrote a song. And Keith, for some reason, wrote a postal letter and it arrived the next day that I had written this particular song and he, the way he signed it was that he put one line out of this song I thought, you know: Kali has spoken.

Kali has spoken. Kali, 'the death of a snake bodes evil'. It’s an old sort of an Indian goddess that guides some of our ways now and again.

[Audience laughs]

Well, I went down to the 'phone box and did my fiddle with the button A and button B thing so you didn’t have to pay anything, tap the top as many times as the number is.

And 'phoned him up because he had a 'phone because they were rich and said, "Well, that’s funny, Keith. Well, I’ve just written, come down and listen to them." He listened to them and he, I think he liked them. So we carried on as songwriters. We wrote songs for the Beach Boys, Dusty Springfield, and many others.

Whiter Shade of Pale ... no this was just a little bit before that.

It was songs like Conquistador and (clears throat) some other things – excuse me.

Bit of a Dorchester there.

Bit of a Dorchester.

Oh, no, he had to build up to that. [laughter]

Short little vignettes before that. [ ... ]

Yeah, I mean, that’s, you know, Kali again, getting in the way. You didn’t think of things so much. Albums weren’t, I mean, Whiter Shade of Pale came out before Sgt Pepper. The Beatles were the only people that made albums in Britain. And I think although perhaps Beatles For Sale or something but really Revolver, that’s when I, [??] thought, I think I like the Beatles. I just finally found out I did in fact like them. And Sgt. Pepper was, of course, a very good album. But that was out after A Whiter Shade of Pale. And…

Um, uh, I think about May the 12^th.

Good question, good question. It was a Friday. I know that, but, so, you didn’t think of, although, in fact, we had quite a lot of material that we’d been working on and rehearsing, we probably could have made an album and indeed did, you know, as soon as that one was out, we went, we went and we made that. I think it was probably, you know, management and record company at the time that were, we were always with independent people. They didn’t look very far. They thought, "Oop – this is a hit, therefore put it out". Not, you know, this is going to be, "this is going to be a hit and we should think about it carefully."

Get those guys some clothes, which is what I think ...

Oh, yes, the, yes. Well, we’ll come to the clothes later.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I mean, least of all us.

Yeah.

I mean it was a bit of a surprise to us that we were, you know, we, we liked our own music. That was the only thing, reason for doing something is that you enjoy it and you’re confident in it. And we believed, you know, Keith and I believed we were writing good songs. Nobody else had backed us up until then. Of course, Dusty didn’t do one of our songs, nor did the Beach Boys. But, well, there actually, you know, that’s why, I suppose that’s when I came out of retirement because nobody would play our songs.

So I was out of retirement.

No, no, no. We had a, we had a vision of being a band, not "Let’s go and play this song." Oh, no, no. We, I mean, we changed one or two people immediately after A Whiter Shade of Pale because we went in the studio and it wasn’t quite jelling. The chemistry wasn’t quite right so a couple of people had to go.

On the Saturday morning, I think it was.

[Laughs]

It was a wonder there were any left by then, Douglas. I mean, this was in May. You still got one at Christmas?

Oh, well, of course I’d moved to America by then.

Yeah.

Unfortunately.

Well, I was in charge. That’s the main reason.

Yes.

Well I was the lead…

Well, I was the lead singer.

But I, you know, always recognised that, you know, I’d never run to the front of the stage and, you know, left the piano at all. I’d religiously always stuck at playing it and not run out to do …

... even a chorus whilst…

Yeah. I think we, I mean, Procol never had a front man in the sense of standing up there, you know, as some sort of idol. And, I mean, I think that we probably, that people liked that about, yeah, a lot of people that liked the band liked that, that they weren’t distracted by something rather, you know, a bit of acting at the front.

Hmmm.

Well, I, I’d played all of those things and heard all of those things when I was a little bit younger. That’s the thing. I mean I used to play piano in pubs when I was about twelve, thirteen. I’d seen Palm Court orchestras in some of the nicest hotels in, in the country when travelling around with my father, knew that sound. And I mean the first few songs that I wrote were actually a bit more contemporary in that I was thinking well, trying to do it like a Mose Allison song, and trying to do a Ray Charles song and keeping it up in sort of what was then the current vein. But then I started to go out a bit further and started to draw in anything that came into my head and many of the things, you know, would have been, I mean, Palm Courts came a bit later I think. But I heard good, I always liked Mars, one of the Planets suites.

I thought that was a, that was like a, I didn’t think it was a rock song because that type of rock came a bit after. But it was powerful. You know, it was terrifying stuff. So I stuck that in a song, and a few of those chords then.

That’s in Kaleidoscope, I think.

You make them up.

You make them up. One of the great …

Well, one of the great thing, I think one of the great things about song- ... I mean, I’m not bad at songwriting because I, I find a chord that I think that nobody’s ever played before. That’s the start. And that’s getting more and more difficult to do.

But one time, I mean, I’ll probably be corrected but, like with Homburg, where you change the chord, you go from F to G major, to B flat, but you don’t change the bass note. And that hasn't actually….

You just keep it on F.

But you change the chords even if they don’t quite seem to go with it and…

Yeah, well, that’s just like a quirk of mine. I like bass. I always thought a lot about bass and bass in pop music was usually following the tonic, you know, sticking with the chords. And I liked to introduce thirds and you know B flats against C chords and all the rest of it. It’s all common knowledge now but at the time I thought I was, why I’d never heard any thing, so I was thinking, this is a new chord. It’s just nice. And all you’ve got to do then is sing over the top.

I found some certificates from Trinity College…

…the other day.

The first and second grades there, which I think was when I was six and seven.

Yeah, basically.

I think it’s in F but I never knew what key it was in. But…

No, it is, no, it is, you’re absolutely right. It starts in F.

That’s in your version, Douglas, I presume.

Sure it goes ...

Oh, I know where you are now. Yes.

Oh, you’re only halfway through the first verse ... Oh, sorry.

I thought you meant the solo. [Laughs]

Well, that, in fact, was a very, very fast, I didn’t even know those chords were there.

They just sprung out as quite a few songs do.

I remember spending weeks just trying to figure it out, how you’d done it. Because then you go to D in the middle eight. And then you get up to, you get up to F again at the end.

D? How do I get to F then from the D?

[Laughter]

Aw, come on.

Tailor-made to completely go wrong, I should think.

Well, I haven’t played this song very often because I’ve been Bill Wyman-ing. So I haven’t got the chords here.

I’ve just got a note from my mum which I was going to read while I was playing it ...

(thanks, Jill, for the transcript)