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…And The Crowd Called Out For More

A Personal Recollection by John Moffitt
I will begin this nostalgic trip, if I may, back in 1965. I was working as a student trainee in an electronics factory in Sydney, having ‘escaped’ the isolation of a small country town in the Australian outback. Pop music had been a pretty limited experience up until then and only included the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Tom Jones and Elvis … and of course the local talent such as Frank Ifield, The Easybeats, three youngsters called the Brothers Gibb and Slim Dusty.

However, the big city was about to provide me with a musical education I could never have dreamed of. One of my fellow trainees was a ginger haired, freckled faced lad whose family had just emigrated for a tenner from Liverpool, England. He was full of the Liverpool scene and had the accent to go with it. This resourceful lad had brought with him a box full of 45s of beat artists we had never heard of in Australia (the Merseybeats, The Mindbenders, The Mojos…). He fancied himself as a singer and was hell-bent on becoming a pop star.

Now in those days in Australia all the local groups were guitar only, but he wanted a group with keyboards to get that Dave Clark Five sound. I had been force fed piano lessons as a child and happened to let this fact slip over lunch one day. Suddenly I was the centre of his attentions and was immediately invited to come and listen to his group practising in the drummer's parents' garage. There was only one item on the agenda that day for the 5 members of the group - to persuade me to buy a keyboard and have a go at it. I was easily flattered into buying my first keyboard – a Hohner Organ with 3½ octaves (pretty impressive eh!). I took it back to my flat, plugged it in, found a piece of sheet music, and sat down to become a pop star. But not a sound ensued – the bloody thing needed an amplifier! Well I wasn’t going to shell out any more money on the off chance that I might become the next Alan Price, so the band lent me a 25 watt amp and a couple of 45s to learn the organ part.

Two weeks later I was ready to have a go and turned up for rehearsals with my new found skills and equipment. I plugged it in ready to go, the drummer counted us in and I was off. Trouble was, my 25 watt amp was competing with three 150 watt guitar amps and a PA system, not to mention the loudest drummer I’d ever heard in my life. So no one could hear what I was playing, which was just as well as it was complete crap.

So that’s how I got started. But what, you ask, has this to do with my Procol Harum experience? Well, by 1967 I had got my act together and moved on to a much better group that actually played gigs for money. I had by that time bought a Leslie speaker and was really starting to enjoy being an important part of the group's sound.

Only then did it all start to happen. The beat era was running out of steam and pop-pickers were demanding a new, more interesting style of music. Little did we all realize that what lay install for us in the 70s was glam rock, and this would degenerate even further when the ‘music’ element was completely removed to make way for punk. But in that short ‘golden era’ between 1967 and 1972 we were in for some real musical treats. In the vanguard of this new movement was Procol Harum, who started their set with a composition of symphonic proportions squeezed into the 3-minute pop format. A Whiter Shade of Pale had thrown down the challenge to quality popular music, and is still doing so today.

I was pretty excited that my cheap keyboard and the Leslie speaker could approximate Procol’s Hammond organ sound and very quickly our repertoire was focused on the big organ sounds of Procol Harum. There wasn’t any sheet music about at the time, so we had to interpret everything from records (or more usually from reel-to-reel taped copies of radio programmes – with the DJ talking over each end of the record). So some of our interpretations of the words to Procol Harum songs would have made Keith Reid cringe (or more likely fall about laughing as we usually did).

By 1968 I was finally able to afford a Hammond Organ. It wasn’t the big B3 as used by the pros, but it was able to produce a wonderful mystical sound through the Leslie and, apart from weighing a ton which made it totally impractical for all those one night stands we did (without roadies), it gave us the complete sound we were looking for.

Our repertoire settled around about half a dozen artists; Aretha Franklin and the Fifth Dimension because we had a girl singer with a real belter of a voice, plus The Animals, Spencer Davis, Traffic, Chicago, and of course the early Procol Harum songs. She Wandered Through the Garden Fence, Homburg and Quite Rightly So were amongst our favourites, and we would always finish our sets with Repent Walpurgis. If there were free drinks for the band in the break, the punters would get about 15 seconds of RW and we were off, but if not, we would jam on with RW for about 10–15 minutes. Then in the break people would come up to us with requests and we would always say OK, we’d do that number next. If it wasn’t a song we knew then we would launch into a PH number instead, and seldom had any complaints. The drunks would usually request Danny Boy, we’d play AWSoP, and they would sing along to it with the words of Danny Boy and come up to us afterwards and shake our hands and buy us drinks. What innocent fun it all was!

But when you don’t have any real talent and all you can do is copy the works of those with the gift, then you eventually realize that you are going to have to move on. By 1972 I knew in my heart that this most enjoyable phase in my life had almost run its course.

So I bit the bullet and quit the group, sold my cherished Hammond organ and my only other worldly possession, my car, packed all my clothes into a large suitcase and emigrated to England (for good). Since then I haven’t played a note and until recently avoided even keeping up with the progress of the contemporary music scene (it was my version of cold turkey I suppose). The only tangible mementos of my musical past are a few photos and an acetate we made of the greatest undiscovered rock number ever recorded (and it's not for sale!).

It was what I call ‘the 30 year nostalgia bug’ that rekindled my interest in music, but only as a face in the crowd this time. This ‘bug’ has the uncanny knack of revisiting on you, the enjoyable things you left behind about 30 years ago.

Firstly, I received a letter in 1993 inviting me to the ‘class of 63’ old school reunion. Then in 1995, completely out of the blue, the bass player from my old group contacted me from Australia and I was persuaded last year to go back to Sydney to visit him. 1996 also proved memorable when I noticed an advert for Procol Harum’s concert with the LSO at the Barbican. That event started my long trip back to rediscovering my love of music and the realization of what I have been missing these past 30 years (the whole progressive rock scene for starters). The climax of the Barbican concert had to be the best arrangement of AWSoP I have ever had the pleasure of hearing, scored for a full orchestra and punctuated by that moment which only a live performance can provide, as the orchestra paused, and those electrifying notes rang out unchallenged from the mighty Hammond organ (and we all lit up a Hamlet – just joking Matthew). You don’t get many of those moments to a lifetime.

To round of my 30 year nostalgia trips, I also attended the most enjoyable anniversary concert for A Whiter Shade of Pale, the song for which my enduring memory is of being on stage as we finished yet another gig by playing that very piece as ‘the crowd called out for more’ … unforgettable.

Back to 'Shine On-line' November 1998