'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

For Liquorice John

Some bands, recording a song with such an enigmatic title as For Liquorice John, would have included an explanatory sleeve note: not so Procol Harum, for whom at that period the work was all intended to speak for itself. Only in 1998, in the liner note to Ain't Nothing to Get Excited About, did Gary reveal more about his former school-friend Dave Mundy, 'a fanatical supporter of the fledgling Paramounts, about whom he loved everything except the name! He was always trying to get them to change it to Liquorice John Death and his All Stars.' The liner note tells how Mundy, in his early twenties, suffered mental health problems, and how occasional sorties to hear the Paramounts became great highlights in his life. In late 1969 he wrote a lyric for Procol Harum – Well I ... – which the band played live, and recorded in the 'Liquorice John' sessions, finally released in 1998; Dave Mundy had created the artwork for the album. But in 1972 he escaped from a mental institution and, unable to contact friends, 'flew from the roof of a 15-storey building and found peace. The loss is remembered in For Liquorice John from Procol's Grand Hotel.'

In the Repertoire CD re-release of Grand Hotel Gary vouchsafes to liner-writer Chris Welch that Liquorice John 'died shortly before we made the album.' [In fact the song did not exist when the Grand Hotel sessions started in Dave Ball's time, and Keith Reid told ZigZag (April 1973) 'TV Ceasar and a song called Liquorice John were written in the last period in October [1972]'. Gary told Rock (published December 1972) 'I've got music for some songs that Keith hasn't put words to yet'; yet Keith told Sounds (12 August 1972) that 'All the writing is complete' so the exact chronology is difficult to establish. Reid went on, 'I feel my writing is extremely melancholic – it’s a very strong reflection of myself and I’m an extremely melancholic man.' Unusually, in the case of this particular number we do know the cause of this melancholy – the remembrance of the passing of the only other lyricist Procol Harum had used. The words were among those he would later select for his book, My Own Choice.

According to Claes Johansen's book (p 130) Dave Mundy had nicknames for all the Paramounts: Trower was 'Humdrum Pete', Copping 'Chris "the man" C', BJ 'Shaky Jake' and Brooker 'Liquorice John Death'. We cannot know what made him choose the word 'Liquorice', but it has not been an uncommon nickname for musicians – it puns on 'liquorish', meaning partial to alcoholic drink. The word is also slang for a clarinet and for a black man's penis, neither probably relevant here. The plant liquorice (glycycrrhiza glabra) has blue pea-like flowers, and its nitrogen-fixing roots are used in making sweets (liquorice-sticks) and cough preparations: the crop is heavily concentrated in Pontefract in Yorkshire, as is commemorated in John Betjeman's The Licorice Fields at Pontefract … 'her sulky lips were shaped for sin / her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd'. Chaucer uses the word as a pun with the Middle English for 'lecherous': 'a liquorice mouth must have a lecherous tail' (Wife of Bath's Prologue). 'John' is a Hebrew name deriving from Yah (Jehovah), meaning 'having been gracious'; it's the name of three important Biblical characters as well as many Popes, saints and so forth. It's also slang for 'toilet', and for a prostitute's client, the latter probably since it is one of the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and thus has an 'everyman' connotation. Its cognates in other cultures – Hans, Sean, Ian and so on – are highly popular too.

Thus, two-thirds of the title: but Keith Reid was adamant about the word 'for': 'When I say for, I mean written for somebody called Liquorice John. It's written for a friend of ours … the song tries to say something about his situation … He's struggling in the water and the people in the harbour are watching him. The last thing he sees are the people waving at him. They don't realize he's drowning.' The emphasis on a watery death must surely emphasise to us that the title of the song is equally to be heard as Fall Icarus John; and that Reid sees in the fate of Dave Mundy some echo of the tragic legend of Icarus, his aspiration and his solitary death.

Icarus was born in Crete to Daedalus, the inventor, and a slave girl; his father made wings so that they might fly free from the cell in which they were trapped by King Minos following the construction of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Icarus ignored his father's instructions and flew near the sun, causing his wax wings to melt [cp 'my wax is almost run' in All This and More]: Reid's main use of this legend is in Nothing But the Truth, but references to flying can also be found in Rambling On, and to an extent in Learn to Fly.

Renaissance moralists used this legend to epitomise the virtues of moderation, but to later years it has also symbolised humanity's questing intellectual spirit. Brueghel (above left) depicted Icarus as a single exposed limb, close to shore; this is a tiny detail of a much larger painting in which the rest of the world goes about its business, oblivious to his fate. Michael Ayrton, who died in 1975, (whose wonderful Daedalus novel The Mazemaker is worth exploring) focused on the heroic aspects of Icarus's flight (above right). Some of Ayrton's Songs of Icarus have been set to music by Australian composer Diarmuid Pigott. Spencer Zahn's illustration in the Grand Hotel lyrics book (above centre) is much more that of Brueghel; in Zahn's case the drowning man is even closer to land: we may wonder why he does not grasp the jetty, though it is box-like and inhospitable. Brueghel's painting is the inspiration for the well-known poem by WH Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts; Keith Reid has voiced his admiration for Auden, and his own text seems to share something of the tone of Auden's lines 'the ploughman may / have heard the splash, the forsaken cry / but for him it was not an important failure …'

But are the words of the song really about drowning? It ends with a flat contradiction: 'he … hit the ground … he fell into the sea and drowned.' This cannot possibly be an authorial oversight so – unless we are to believe that Liquorice John somehow struck the ground and rebounded into the ocean – it gives us a good indication of the way Reid wants us to view his narratives: the irreconcilable elements contribute to a dream-like dislocation in which the ideas of falling and loss become experimentally embedded in different sorts of 'real' experiences. Arguably the song is not really about Dave Mundy – it lacks any obituarial detail, and seems no more directly related to its ostensible source than Dead Man's Dream is to the film Midnight Cowboy, Reid's springboard in that case. It's worth noting that Reid had a spoken track, Mr Krupp, scheduled for this album (it was performed by the Palers' Band in September 2000); the second part of it adapts an epitaph reported by Gary Brooker's mother, which runs: 'Henry Higgins / Fell from the riggings / In Yokohama harbour / he hit the deck and broke his neck …'. This could hardly be closer in theme to For Liquorice John, yet Keith told Zigzag that it was accompanied by 'the crunch of the neck and the thud of the body hitting the deck' … there is no doubt that a physical, landward death was in his mind at that time. But the double-focus of the words is mimicked in the double-focus of the title: it's both about Dave Mundy, and about Icarus: about both death on land and death at sea … about loss, in fact, with Mundy perhaps as the local focus for a global concern about dying impetus, faith, and control, and the sea as an overwhelming tide of opposition ('a sea of troubles', in Hamlet's phrase). Dying is presented as 'slither[ing] under' in The Dead Man's Dream; many English rock wordsmiths use swimming, drowning etc as metaphors for being a lost soul, such as Wire (Our Swimmer), The Cure (The Drowning Man), and Morrissey (Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning) … this is no doubt due to growing up on a small island surrounded by grey, miserable water. (Of numerous, positive songs entitled (or containing) 'Drowning in a sea of love', many were written by Americans; and some that were not are sustained by self-evidently non-marine metaphors: 'Drowning in a sea of love / Going down for the third time, Baby')

The blurriness of Reid's words here does pose quite a problem for the composer, however, as their main drama is over in the opening couplet (unlike Rambling On, Whaling Stories, A Salty Dog and so on) so the music cannot logically build up to the falling. Despite this the song establishes its rolling, nautical atmosphere and then comes to a dead stop, upon which the fall is enacted musically at its verbal reprise, 'his fall from grace was swift and sure'. The music here is somewhat like the yearning refrain for Robert's Box … and extremely like the chorus of TV Ceasar (the first four chords, and their characteristic inversions, are exactly the same: there must have been some 'crosstalk' in the composition of these two songs, both late additions to the roster for Grand Hotel). Lamentational pieces such as this, whose texts lack dramatic thrust, pose a repeated problem for Brooker, and allow producer Chris Thomas to earn his keep handsomely: he has to find a varied, fitting sound-world for songs which would otherwise all seem to merit the folk-dirge treatment heard in Nothing That I didn't Know. Such uncommerciality would presumably have alarmed the Chrysalis paymasters. Thomas evidently felt the pressure of his responsibility: by the time of Exotic Birds he said he 'wasn't coming up for any ideas for the songs' and he and the band parted company after that album.

What were his ideas here, by which the rolling, nautical swirling atmosphere is achieved? "I seem to remember having some very strange set-up with out-of-sound pianos,' said Chris Thomas in The Record Producers, 1982, by Tobler and Grundy. 'I wanted the thing to sound like it was underwater … it was something like a twelve-string guitar being played, and then it'd be picked up inside an old jangly piano with Gary playing the same riff which would produce a weird sound … you hear a song and get an idea for the atmosphere on the record.' Admirable though his work is, he did here have the benefit of strong material to build on: Gary Brooker's chords are striking, and the verse phrases, which start in F minor, descend to an A major, from which he makes a plangent return to F minor again (a similar chord change marks the mournful mood of Nothing That I Didn't Know). It's a genial paradox of the song that the lines about falling are composed entirely of rising intervals. One of the hallmarks of the song is the haunting semitone-ostinato which is given to the plaintive harmonica: this figuration is derived from the way the chords are arpeggiated in the right hand of the piano, which (albeit in F minor, rather than F major) directly harks back to the start of Wreck of the Hesperus, the band's other main 'falling from grace' song. Arguably Brooker's composition is fresher in harmonic surprises (the variant chords in the last verse in particular), but Fisher's is stronger on drama; in the case of Liquorice John the drama comes from the fluid performance, in which the interplay of piano and drums is one of the track's real revelations.

It may be wishful thinking, but BJ Wilson seems to have felt the tragic emotions of this music keenly, since it appears to have brought out his most passionate drumming, both on record and on stage. His punctuations to the verses are unexpected to the point almost of disrupting the pulse (he pushes and pokes it very effectively); the drumming that follows the middle section is many fans' favourite recorded BJ episode: he was reputed never to play the same thing twice in concert … here he scarcely seems to play the same thing twice each time we listen to the record. His stage performances of the song walk a taut tightrope of inspired irrationality, with Gary's piano as the only safety net (mp3 here). The piano's rolling motif is initially played in 7/8, then in 4/4; towards the end of the song it reverts to 7/8 while the drums (each bar marked by a rattle of the ass's jawbone) carry on in straight time. One might assume that the cross-rhythms of this final section, which rock a choppy lullaby of drowning, were playable only in the controlled conditions of the studio, but Brooker and Wilson were able to counterfeit them exactly on stage. The song was played all too rarely, but those of us who heard it live were witness to an extraordinary double-act whose irretrievability is a great sadness. Gary supposedly used an electronic device to recapture the recorded piano sound on stage, but this is not apparent on the recordings that survive. Mick Grabham's contributions were confined to the middle section, and the harmonica part from the record was taken by the piano; we do not know of any instance of harmonica having been used in a live Procol gig. Much more organ was heard on stage than on the record, where two pianos answer each other's call; the organ's chief contribution is to provide sustain on that last, booming chord of doom: very similar indeed to the ending of The Dead Man's Dream, the only other Procol Harum song to end with the word 'under'.

For Liquorice John was played for the first time during a British tour (March 1973), and featured strongly during that year's gigs. Gary seemed distressed in the US, however, when audiences showed insufficient respect during his biographical introduction (in the UK he said: "This one's for an old friend, now departed. He took a long jump from a high place and this song is about those sort of things (July 1973)); and the song did not survive the promotional round.

• 'He fell from grace and hit the ground': few Procol Harum songs are about 'he' rather than 'she', 'I', 'they' or 'it'. Just two other Procol songs to date deal with the idea of 'grace': 'I'm sore in need of saving grace' (Quite Rightly So) and 'one moment's final fall from grace' (The Wreck Of The Hesperus). 'Ye are fallen from grace' can be found in Galatians, but the commonly understood Fall from Grace occurred with mankind's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Grace is a woman's name meaning 'favoured by God', which is also the meaning of 'John' as represented in this line by the pronoun 'he'. Symbolically, then, the song may concern his loss of faith. 'Fall from grace' is not a common theme in popular songs but it does occur in Lady Writer by Dire Straits and in the Pogues' title If I should fall from grace with God, which also concerns doctors and drownings. This Procol song predates the film The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, but not the novel by Yukio Mishima that inspired it.
• 'Hit the ground': the contradiction between drowning and landing on dry land has been mentioned above. Perhaps we are to understand that he 'came down to earth' … he lost the illusions that had been buoying him up.
• 'They tried in vain to bring him round': to 'bring round' is to resuscitate, restore to consciousness; but at a more spiritual level it has the sense of 'persuade', in other words to make him revert to his lost faith / state of grace. 'In vain', that indicator of futility, is encountered more often in early Procoldom than might be expected: 'waiting all in vain' (In The Wee Small Hours Of Sixpence); 'search in vain by candlelight' (Shine on Brightly); 'And all for nothing quite in vain' (The Wreck Of The Hesperus); 'In vain I looked to find the promised turning' (Pilgrims Progress).
• 'No one saw him make the fall': the ordinary expression would be 'take the fall'; Reid's choice of 'make' is one small indication that the song is about a suicide. The 'fall' here could again be the Fall of Man, but there is also an implication of 'blame for a crime' as in 'be the fall guy'.
• 'They couldn't understand at all': as in so many songs we do not know who 'they' are; but perhaps this song defines them as 'that group of people who don't know what's going on when someone else is having a crisis'.
• 'His fall from grace was swift and straight': the implication of this line (which some would see as a makeweight) may be that his fall was direct like a stone's, not an elegant parabola, not the swoop of a bird. 'Swift' of course is a bird that does come low over water, but rises again.
• 'The doctors didn't hesitate': their lack of hesitation is commendable, though their failure to come to any useful conclusion is not.
• 'What he had they were not sure': of course if the doctors were hurrying to a drowning man there would be no need to enquire what his problem was. In the case that this 'drowning' presumably symbolises, their uncertainty suggests that there is no wound, and no contingent circumstances on which a diagnosis might be based. If the patient were a drug user, medical practitioners would be able to spot this: far harder to diagnose are mental illness and spiritual malaise.
• 'He didn't have a temperature': to assess temperature is the first test on a new patient, along with taking the pulse. It often serves to give the impression that something positive is being done, while allowing the doctor time to gather other clues. Idiomatically, to 'have a temperature' is to be hotter than normal; but in absolute terms someone who has 'no temperature' must be dead. In any event the doctors' conclusion comes feebly short of helpful or enlightening.
• 'His fall from grace was swift and sure': the changed melody may mask the fact that this line is only one word different from the line that starts the previous quatrain. This must have been Brooker's cue to insert a middle section, and Reid must have known he would: otherwise the song would have risked seeming extremely repetitive.
• 'The doctors said they knew no cure': it may be worth listing the Procol doctors so that readers can remind themselves of their record: 'The doctors say they must operate' (Song For A Dreamer); 'Got to show it to my doctor' (A Souvenir of London); 'Doctor where's your remedy?', 'Doctor where's your magic box', 'Doctor please don't lock your door' (Robert's Box); 'Famous doctors all agree' (Fresh Fruit); 'Doctors cause uncertainty' (Pandora's Box); 'If only my doctor could see that I'm ill', 'If only my doctor would give me a pill', 'But why can't my doctor just say that I'm ill?' (Typewriter Torment). However if these are doctors of theology they will conclude that there is 'no cure' if Liquorice John's sin (or malaise) has gone beyond the pale of redemption.
• 'They felt and poked and pushed his pulse': neither 'poke' nor 'push' is appropriate to pulse-taking; as has been noted, however, the unstable metre of the piano part, and the sheer arrhythmia of the drumming, certainly help to justify the doctors' feeling at sea.
• 'He couldn't understand the fuss': earlier it was the indeterminate 'they' who could not understand the fall of Liquorice John; now it is Liquorice John who cannot understand the commotion of the doctors. This would be literally true of a patient who was already comatose or near to death; equally if Liquorice John is a spiritual casualty of some sort, lapsed into a state of amorality after his fall from grace, then by definition the commotion this has caused will be of little consequence to him.
• 'He fell from grace and hit the ground / 'He fell into the sea and drowned': the contradiction, noted above, is characteristic of a Gothic world-view in which opposites are able to co-exist without disturbing an aesthetic rightness. It can be resolved, perhaps, by taking the 'sea' as humanity and its shortcomings (cp the 'sea of wheat' amidst which the narrator of Quite Rightly So is lost). Reid has other direct references to drowning – in Your Own Choice, The Devil Came From Kansas, The Wreck Of The Hesperus – as well as more oblique ones … the Pandora's Box lifeguard with no-one to save, the harrowing cry in Crucifiction Lane: 'if the sea were not so salty I could sink instead of walk'.
• 'They saw him struggling from the harbour': taken in isolation the line would be utterly ambiguous, meaning either 'they watched him struggle out of the water in the harbour' or 'from the harbour, they watched him struggle'. However it is clear enough that 'they' are in the harbour, and Liquorice John is not. The harbour is a symbol of safety and security [cp 'the harbour lights are burning bright' in All This and More) in short, of home. Those who are notionally on the harbour are still in their state of grace, and unable to enter into any understanding of the Liquorice John crisis.
• 'They saw him wave as he went under': the pun on 'wave', referring both to a gesture and to an undulation of the sea, has persuaded many commentators that this song is related to Stevie Smith's Not Waving But Drowning.