'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Toujours l 'Amour

In typical style for this side of the Grand Hotel album, Gary Brooker's piano sets the tempo for this elaborate rocker: within a few seconds the whole five-piece is steaming away, and it remains that way for the whole song. The production almost seems light after Grand Hotel itself, but we are still evidently not listening to the 'raw' five-piece: two guitars play in the solo breaks (despite claims to the contrary, Dave Ball remains – graciously – convinced that the slow-moving one that picks out the chord changes is his own playing, left from the abandoned first sessions for the album) and there is overdubbed tambourine almost throughout and handclaps at the end; furthermore the harmony vocals, which come in at verse two, sound sharper than the band was able to achieve live. Organ is busy and effective throughout, greeting verse three with an attractive registration change; BJ's tom-toms get some nice stereo panning but are not as clear in the mix as the playing deserves to be. But the guitar playing here – our first recorded glimpse of Mick Grabham outside the arranged constraints of Grand Hotel – is tremendous, specially the expressive second half of the second, extended solo, which is constructed with an earthy panache that reassured the fans who still hankered for the days of Trower. The vigorous ending, with its surprise repeats and virtuoso co-ordination, seems to be an invitation to applaud. Toujours l'Amour came out as the 'B' side to the (banned!) novelty single, A Souvenir Of London. It is perhaps a little too samey to have made a convincing 'A' side, and its title would have baffled many a DJ.

'The title roughly means "long live love". And it is an obvious quip about the song itself,' said Keith Reid to Circus (May 1973). It's interesting that no comment was made about why the title is in French. There are French girls in Grand Hotel and in this song, and Souvenir is in principle a French word, but that's not reason enough. Reid may well have been looking to the 1945 title No More Toujours L'Amour by Hoagy Carmichael. To the English-speaking lyric writer, the French word for love seems to conjure up some added sophistication: for instance Kate Bush writes L'Amour Looks Something Like You, and Bryan Ferry croons ''L'amour, l'amour, l'amour" over the chorus of an early Roxy Music song; American cabaret vocal quartet Manhattan Transfer took Chanson D'Amour to the top of the UK chart in 1977: could this have happened using an English translation? The actress Mary Slaton captured movie-goers' imagination under the pseudonym 'Dorothy Lamour'. Gary Brooker introduces Toujours l'Amour as 'a song about a cocktail' at one gig; «Toujours l'amour» is sometimes uttered as a drinkers' toast (the French wine Schorlemorle takes its name from German attempts to pronounce this). Literally 'toujours' is 'always' but it can mean 'still'. The rhymes 'toujours' and 'l'amour' are as convenient to French lyricists as 'moon' and June' are to English ones; and since there are several sound-punning titles on Grand Hotel it may be worth mentioning that with an indifferent accent the title might resolve to 'tu jures l'amour', which might mean 'you swear love'.

Musically the song is a close relation of Power Failure, with which it shares its pianistic key of B flat and its heavy rocking feel; both are built on a piano riff that is then repeated at a lower pitch, both extend the 'collapsing cell' motif that is common in Brooker's writing, picking this out with 'aah' backing-vocals. The chords of Toujours are much more sophisticated: they open in B flat with an exotically-juxtaposed set of bluesily-related majors, and the 'cell' (highlighted by the backing vocals) uses a pedal A flat under a cycle of falling fourths, G flat, D flat, A flat [compare this with the opening of Power Failure, where the falling fourths are E flat, B flat and F over a pedal B flat: here the bass misrelates to the final chord, in Toujours it misrelates with the first]. Toujours then repeats all this material a minor third lower, contributing a fresh, exciting feel at the same time as brilliantly leading us back to an F from which the B flat sequence can start afresh. It has a middle section, based on a relative G minor with its fifth note rising to make E flat and C (the same chords, in reverse, supply the central section of Simple Sister, a more distant cousin to this song) before reverting to B flat and related chords. This G minor section, which supports only soloing and no words, is prepared by a D7 at the ends of the verses; but verse one dives from that D7 straight back into B flat, which is exactly what happens at the end of verses in Power Failure too. Brooker's characteristic bluesy suppression of the dominant in his rocking songs evidently extends to an actual subversion of the chord, allowing it to 'point' to new beginnings that would puzzle teachers of conventional harmony: this contributes some of his most dramatic effects.

The song is one of a group written in the first half of 1972 and first recorded in the Dave Ball Grand Hotel sessions. It was probably played as early as January 1972 when Procol briefly toured Britain with Amazing Blondel supporting. It featured solidly in setlists during the promotional round of 1973 and 1974, including orchestral gigs at the Rainbow (September 1972), on the German tour (October 1972) and at the Hollywood Bowl (September 1973): the choir's huge 'aahs' made more of an impact there than the orchestra did, bolstering the weighty sounds behind Grabham's' fine guitar solos: the fly in the ointment was an orchestral percussionist whose whiplash sound maybe corresponded to some notional pulse, but was completely out of kilter with what BJ was dictating to the band.. After 1974 Toujours l'Amour was heard occasionally, but lost prominence, perhaps because its compact, intense arrangement offers the players less variety and excitement than the likes of its main rival, Bringing Home the Bacon.

• 'She took all the pleasure and none of the pain': few Procol songs begin with the pronoun 'she', yet here we have two in a row. Pleasure and Pain is a song title by Fairport Convention, and the words belong together in our thoughts perhaps thanks to the influence of 18th century European psychology, and Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian postulate that humans were driven by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Freud also contributed 'The Pleasure Principle' to our language (and to the song catalogue of Janet Jackson). 'Pleasure and pain' is rhyming slang for rain, and 'pleasure', as a verb, means 'to offer sexual caresses'. Idiomatically a 'pain' can be an irritating person (probably short for 'pain in the neck' or some other region). Pleasure may be the topic of many songs, but the word occurs rarely in lyrics: a notable exception is Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, and Swans Way had a small hit in 1984 with Illuminations, in which the singer repeatedly croons the word.
• 'All of the credit and none of the blame': we might surmise that 'she' and the narrator have jointly been involved in a venture that has been partly successful, and she will take responsibility only for what has been applauded. This venture could of course be matrimonial, but the second verse will suggests a mother / child relationship. It may be that 'she' here assumes a variety of symbolic meanings rather as Lucy does in Wordsworth's so-called 'Lucy Poems'. 'Credit' can be a positive money-balance and it is rare to see this in Reid, rather then debit-words such as 'price' and 'cost'. One might have expected 'praise' to be offered as the contrast to 'blame'; and 'blame' is a somewhat suspect rhyme for 'pain'. The lyric-booklet in the album is fastidiously punctuated, and displays the words in three eight-line stanzas rhyming abcb; the ear, however, is more likely to interpret the sung words as rhyming couplets, which is how they are presented in Keith Reid's book, My Own Choice. Despite a guilt-ridden atmosphere in many songs, Reid uses 'blame' only in 'Is it your tongue that is to blame?' (She Wandered Through The Garden Fence).
• 'I came home to an empty flat':  as well as referring to an apartment with nobody left in it, the line contains two mood signifiers in 'empty ' and 'flat'. The idea of 'emptiness' recurs in Procol Harum songs: 'got the only empty seat' (Something Following Me); 'The houses were open, and the streets mpty' (Dead Man's Dream); 'The presses are empty' (Broken Barricades); 'The cellar is empty' (Drunk Again); 'So sad to see such emptiness' (Nothing But the Truth); 'broken promise empty lie' (Fool's Gold); 'I was feeling kind of empty' (Last Train to Niagara) 'Home' is a significant word in Procol songs: as well as having an album named Home and two song-titles featuring the word, they use 'home' in no fewer than 14% of their published songs. 'Flat' is a word than can be taken in a musical sense, 'a flattened note'. We are left to imagine whether the flat has been stripped of all content, or is merely empty of persons and pets. Phonograph Magazine (April 1973) noted that the song was '… a sort of Sunny Afternoon saga, only more continental': this is apt, though in Ray Davies's song his 'girlfriend's run off with [his] car' rather than with his cat.
• 'She'd left me a note and taken the cat': the feline afterthought is comical, with its suggestion that the pet is better company than the partner. Again there are musical overtones ('note') and – since Procol Harum is allegedly named after a cat – we might fancifully assume that 'she' is a coded name for someone who has wrested control of this ensemble from the narrator.
• 'The cord that they knotted to keep us apart': the line is superficially paradoxical; Reid complained in the NME (13 September 1975) about 'people not bothering to examine what we do': 'There's a line – the cord they knotted to keep us apart. Now what do you think that means?' he asked. Pete Erskine, interviewing, replied, 'The umbilical cord?' to which Reid retorted 'Exactly!' However cords are knotted in pagan / magick ceremonies, including weddings, and could just as well be used in a spell to keep people asunder. 'Cord' could be another homophonic pun, on 'chord'. The 'umbilical' interpretation, with which Reid apparently concurs above, implies incest if the 'she' in this verse is the same person as mentioned in the first stanza. In any event it's an utterly dispassionate view of childbirth, perhaps according with other images of the very young, as found in Broken Barricades, Bringing Home the Bacon, and Something Magic.
• 'Could never be broken: it was tied to my heart': the word 'heart', a staple of popular song, is here used in a specially anatomical way. Even if an umbilicus has been severed, it seems that a metaphorical cord is tied to the protagonist's heart to connote a strength of feeling that can never abate: this is hard to square with the proposed actions in the final stanza. Reid's other 'heart' references include 'Let him who fears his heart alone' and 'Endless heartache until she died' (Nothing that I Didn't Know); 'fills our hearts with tears' (Nothing But the Truth); 'Because of fruit my heart is strong' (Fresh Fruit); 'Fool's gold broke my heart' (Fool's Gold); 'by the beating of a heart' (Something Magic); 'Wizard man's got an angel's heart' (Wizard Man) and 'I played the King of Hearts' (The King of Hearts).

• 'But she grew thin and I grew fat': we are reminded of the nursery-rhyme in which, conversely, 'Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean', although that couple put their differences to good effect, together licking the platter clean. Two persons are shown in the illustration by Spencer Zahn in the Grand Hotel lyric booklet, possibly relating to 'thin' and 'fat' in this song: one is of much larger scale than the other: a tear wells up in a presumably male eye (though it has a plucked or pencilled eyebrow), while the other figure is shown without eyes or ears. The Worm and the Tree also features one 'character' who waxes (the worm) as the other wanes (the tree); in the next song, A Rum Tale, the narrator is 'giving up food' which will presumably make him thin. Fatness is lambasted in Bringing Home the Bacon, and equated with sin in Barnyard Story. Here the word 'but' does not seem to reverse or qualify any previous statement, though we may perhaps infer that this change of body-image outweighs the importance of previous links, whether of blood or erotic love. Equally the fact that 'she' didn't grow fat may relate to infertility, or conceivably impotence, in a couple, a frequent cause of break-up.
• 'She left me and that was that': the apparently redundant 'that was that' is used in everyday English to sum up a hopeless situation that has come to an absolute end. There's an echo here of John Lennon's Mother: 'you left me, but I never left you'. The bluntness here might lead us to suppose that Keith Reid himself is speaking through the voice of the narrator, but he was comically evasive when ZigZag (April 1973) asked him if the song presented a personal experience: 'No, not yet – I've still got the cat.'
• 'I'm thinking of renting a villa in France': here is another parallel with the Kinks' Sunny Afternoon: 'Help me, help me, help me sail away …' France, as already noted, tallies with the French title of the song. Being the nearest mainland country to England, it is the easiest port of call when 'getting away from it all'; the English also use 'French' as an euphemism for bad language ('pardon my French') and talk about 'French leave' (absence without permission). The escapist theme here is repeated in A Rum Tale, where 'renting' also occurs. A faint overtone of 'rent', past tense of 'rend' (rip or tear) may also be detected.
• 'A French girl has offered to give me a chance': does the word 'renting' above generate the idea of this French girl and her offer? The French 'bride' in Grand Hotel seems to be one of many that the narrator has sampled ('These French girls always like to fight') and she may in fact prove to be a paid escort. Brooker, much given to US vowel-sounds, nevertheless sings 'chance' with an exaggeratedly long a sound, facilitating the rhyme with 'France'. A variant heard in concert ('A French girl has offered to teach me to dance' (mp3 here)) is possibly a more interesting line – it may add weight to the notion that the girl hires out physical services – and is presumably an authorial afterthought, as it appears in My Own Choice. At one time 'girl' would have been a regrettably 'cheap ' substitute for 'lady'; it is also used to mean 'prostitute' and 'sweetheart', and is now unacceptable to feminists, who insist on 'woman' ('woman' is a nonce-word in Procoldom (The King of Hearts) and 'girl' is rare: 'I'm gonna find a girl' (Whisky Train); 'Burn me up sweet oyster girl' (Luskus Delph); 'French girls always like to fight' (Grand Hotel). The hippies' favourite, 'lady', is not found at all.) 'To give me a chance' brings to mind 'there'll be no second chance this time' in The Piper's Tune and 'perhaps there was a chance of coming through' in The Idol: it implies that the narrator has some personal failing which the French girl is tolerating in the hope that it will ameliorate (in All Our Dreams Are Sold it seems that 'every day's a game of chance').
• 'Or maybe I'll take an excursion to Spain': an 'excursion' is literally a trip (the word seemingly not annexed by drug-culture) but it is an exceptionally lightweight and inappropriate term for a one-way, suicidal journey. The ancient Celtic races, who are believed to have originated in Spain, used the phrase 'go to Spain' to allude to dying, so this 'excursion' may in that sense be genuinely setting us up for the pay-off of the last couplet, which corresponds closely to the 'one-way / not coming home' ticket bought in A Rum Tale. Spain is the location of idiomatic castles in the air, fantasies, as well as of Conquistadors and of the King of Hearts sound-world (other Hispanic thoughts here). The 'Spanish cure' is the treatment of drug addiction by forced withdrawal. 'Spain' is used in rhyming slang for 'rain' – we may note that Reid uses the word 'rain' only in Juicy John Pink, whereas it is a staple of his fellow-songwriters (including the lyricist Brooker) who also use it symbolically – for tears, even bombs (cp Who'll Stop The Rain by CCR). The casual 'Or maybe' prefacing the idea of the Spanish excursion surely suggests that a liaison with the French girl is by no means a primary aim … escape is paramount, a departure from flat, cat, and partner / mother / band, perhaps intended to outdo and abnegate any desertion that the narrator himself has suffered at their hands.
• 'Buy a revolver and blow out my brains': firearms are of course not easily available for purchase in the UK, but the participation of many 20th century literary figures in the Spanish Civil War has left us readily able to associate that country with mortal, existential acts. It has been pointed out that Revolver is a Beatles album allegedly admired by Keith Reid (and possibly alluded to in this album's Robert's Box): some choose to imagine that the brilliance of Revolver might have contributed to despair in other songwriters … as Sergeant Pepper may have done to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. It is notable, however, that Brooker's musical setting chooses not to emphasise the potential drama of this last line (he chooses not to change elements of the composition, as he does to heighten the ending of For Liquorice John): the very horizontal melody on record leaves the despairing words hanging, as if they were simply a boast, but performances often saw an alarming extra half-shout of 'my brain', off-mic, which had quite the opposite effect (mp3 here).

  Thanks to Frans Steensma for additional information about this song