'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Grand Hotel

Gary Brooker gives a brief introduction to this song, to camera, from his home studio, as part of the Cherry Red Records 'Artist of the Month' promotion in July 2020.

Whereas the Broken Barricades album seemed to break new ground with the length of its opening track, Grand Hotel begins with a song seventeen seconds longer, clocking in at over six minutes, and structurally their most ambitious piece since Whaling Stories. Moving from a slow four into a stately waltz, and encompassing a burst of hysterical silent-film or circus music, a gypsy lament, and a mighty electric guitar solo, and laden with soupy orchestration and celestial choir, this is as far from the format of 'pop' music as the band had so far ventured.

Despite the orchestra (and evening-dress!) that adorned the Grand Hotel album, its title-tune owes little to European classical music. We may treat the first eight bars as one long elaboration of a characteristic Brooker motif, a root-position C alternating with a last-inversion G, over a pedal G note: effectively a long C chord. By the same token the next chord is a long G, then a long F, and we have reached the end of the verse using only the simplest pop-song resources. The song's grandeur and majesty partly derive from this harmonic restraint which Gary, evidently fascinated by the whole business of chord-changes, did not often choose to exploit. The verse ends with an instrumental passage repeating three notes, another 'cell' that we hear at the end of A Rum Tale, and doing link-work in TV Ceasar. This passage, however, is far more integral to the whole piece than its cousin in Ceasar is: here it provisionally establishes a G minor tonal centre that will be important in the long instrumental passage, and uses an augmented fifth or 'plus' chord that ushers in a world of vaudeville which is also an important contributor to the song's effect.

Before this G minor section, however, the music breaks into waltz time, and slips up a luscious semitone: now hear the I, IV and V chords that sustained the verse re-used in D flat, before the advent of the second verse. The music having modulated, we return to the original key of C with a sense of real freshness, and this harmonic double-take is a trick we see Brooker returning to many times in later songs. At the end of the second verse the music comes to a dead halt and the piano begins a very eccentric accelerating passage, pounding its way up the keyboard, shifting up the cycle of fourths with banal inevitability, in an increasingly hysterical retake of the 'serenade and sarabande' melody. It's as if the diners are whisking each other on to the floor for some dancing until dawn ... which the band and orchestra then proceeds to deliver in truly sumptuous fashion. Barrie Wilson's twenty-two mandolins may seem like overkill here... but there's a frisson about this section suggesting that whatever efforts went into it were well spent.

This subtle melody - again floating on very few chords - is said to quote closely from Otchi chyornije (one of the few well-known Russian gypsy songs) though Brooker does not know the tune by this name. 'Never heard of it,' Gary told BtP. 'I always owned up when something was purposely lifted, but of course when you're trying to characterise something one's ears are unconsciously open to everything, and your imagination also.' His ears may have caught it as a genre piece played by a hotel orchestra, or by an ensemble sharing a bill with his father's Hawaiian Serenaders: in fact a jazz version of it was recorded in January 1958 by the Wynton Kelly Quartet, and released as Dark eyes (Trad). Whatever it is 'trying to characterise', the melody allows him to show off some fine piano-playing and delightful orchestration - and either showcases or stretches a solo violinist - and it provides a musical watershed between the two verses devoted to eating / gambling / dancing, and the final copulatory stanza. The great explosion of music generated by this narrative dichotomy was deemed an inexplicable detour by novelist and Procol fan Douglas Adams, who invented The Restaurant at the End of the Universe as a suitable setting for its apocalyptic eruption. However some have seen the middle sections as a foreshadowing of events in the final verse, the rising accelerandi as acts of penetration, the violin theme as a female element, first tentative then lushly at ease, and the orgasmic guitar as the male eruption.

The eccentric accelerating music returns, a semitone lower than before and orchestrated in a more circus-like way (this is the edit-point in the single version of the song, incidentally: the present accelerando in D occurs where we expected the first in E flat (so that all the instrumental middle is omitted) and the shock of the 'wrong' key always grates on the aficionado's ear (mp3 here)). A simmering guitar now boils up into a great, short solo, and the song makes two successive full-tone upward transpositions, to emerge glittering in E, and to conclude, waltzing, in a gentle, post-coital F. The enduring live success of this song may be partly attributable to the way both music and words tell stories and - as with Whaling Stories - these elements are uncommonly well-integrated.

It has been pointed out that the lyric booklet, which opens with 'Welcome to the Grand Hotel', presents the possibility that the songs it contains are linked by some concept. The thoroughly-integrated album artwork continues this feel, as did the invitation to the album-release party at the Plaza Hotel, NYC, which effectively invited guests to become part of the show: 'The grandeur of your grace is expected at the place / The essence of your presence can never be replaced / so come in style, stay a while and get properly spaced'.

Keith Reid has denied this: '... it isn't a concept album, it was just for the first time we echoed the particular song in the artwork and everything and I guess in the promotion of the album in relation to the song'. The song was probably written in the first half of 1972 and first recorded with Dave Ball on lead. 'I just originally thought Grand Hotel would be a great title for an album, and it immediately gave me an idea for a song, ' said Reid. 'Actually, I had the title before I wrote the song.' The title may have come from Edmund Goulding's 1932 film Grand Hotel (see right), co-written by novelist Vicki Baum, in which 'people come, people go. Nothing ever happens' and in which Greta Garbo famously declares 'I want to be alone'. (This was remade as Weekend at the Waldorf in 1945, with the same four threaded stories revamped: other 'Hotel' films include Hotel du Nord (1938), Hotel Berlin (1945), and Hotel (1967), all using the concept of the hotel as a 'container' for the unfolding lives and crises of guests in transit). The Procol Hotel might have buskers outside (Souvenir of London), people eating in their rooms with the television on (TV Ceasar), and mothers angrily feeding their offspring (Bringing Home the Bacon), while Toujours l'Amour, A Rum Tale, and Fires reflect the sad lives and broken dreams of other, more Garboesque guests ... it's a strained analogy, but it's probably where the Brooker/Reid equivalent of the Abba West-End hit musical would have to start.

Despite many jocular introductions from Gary Brooker, claiming that 'The Grand' in question is just round the corner from the venue of the evening's concert, the hotel of the title remains a generic one. (The cover art does not show a hotel at all: it was famously shot at a Malibu mansion in the days before Dave Ball left the band, and the head of Mick Grabham was superimposed on the Ball physique because a return trip would have broken the budget. Gary has said that '... you could say Grand Hotel is one end of the touring and Bringing Home The Bacon is the opposite end' (Rock, December 1972) but Reid asserts that it is '... a bit of a fantasy, a bit of wishful thinking. I'm all for staying in grand hotels and sleeping in silken sheets - none of this 'out in the country' for me, I'm afraid, it's the Ritz.' (ZigZag, April 1973). The Ritz Hotel in London is real, of course, and was established in 1906 by Swiss hotelier César Ritz. This, or another Ritz, is the setting of the middle verse of the song, but the rest takes place at an 'Hotel Grande' which could be anywhere in the world.

The single received suitably wide promotion: Grand Hotel / Fires (Which Burnt Brightly) (Chrysalis CHS 2013) was released in the USA in July 1973. Promotional copies contained only Grand Hotel (one side the edited version 4:18, the other side the album version). Grand Hotel was also released as a single in France (CHA 113), Netherlands (5C 006-94 347), Germany (6155 010) - this has the 4:18 edited version and a cover featuring Dave Ball - and Portugal (6155 023). The song can also be found in a 7:50 version on the Over The Rainbow album (recorded 16 March 1975) and a 6:43 version on The Long Goodbye album (July 1995) sung, not to every fan's taste, by Jerry Hadley. Two excellent versions were broadcast in TV specials: Welcome To Grand Hotel (Belgian TV, July 1973) and Musikladen Live (1974), which is available on video and DVD (Pioneer Artists) and is thought by many fans to be the best Procol footage ever!

Grand Hotel was probably played on stage for the first time during a short British tour in May/June 1972. Gary announced in Plymouth (4 June 1972) that the band was playing it 'for the second time'. It was played with an orchestra at the Rainbow (September 1972), on the German tour (October 1972) and Hollywood Bowl (September 1973). It has been a virtual constant in set-lists since May 1972, and must rank among the most-played of all Procol Harum songs. It has not always been played straight ...

'It's got a kind of middle section to it, an instrumental section where we roam quite madly,' Keith Reid told Circus (May 1973). But in May 1973 the only real roaming was into the territory of the borrowed gypsy violin theme. Copping's synthesiser had started inserting the violin line in April 1973; as time went by, and the song became more familiar to audiences, the band started taking it further from the magical seriousness of its recorded form. First, BJ and Alan Cartwright began to imbue it with a light tango feel, still suitably hotel-like in its decorum. By the autumn BJ was playing his mandolin on stage, and the accelerando was attracting vigorous clapping-participation from the audience; by the following May, Gary could be heard inserting The Lambeth Walk at the piano; later in the year a stridently pubby Bye Bye Blackbird (mp3 here) was part of the routine, as well as the Dark Eyes theme played as a tango. At the closing of the Rainbow Theatre, this tradition of 'stowaway' tunes was put to good use with a bluesily-sung version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, before the comic tango resumed (mp3 here). By the summer, faced with a restless crowd at the Orange Festival, Gary inserted Sur (or Sous) le Pont d'Avignon (mp3 here ... Avignon is not far from Orange), which led into a wordless Hernando's Hideaway (mp3 here). This song, written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross for the Broadway Musical The Pajama Game (a 1957 film hit with Doris Day), is lyrically apposite: it concerns a hotel where 'all you see are silhouettes, and all you hear are castanets': you can even sing the words of its opening to Brooker's Grand Hotel tune: 'I know a dark secluded place, a place where no-one knows your face; a glass of wine, a fast embrace ...'

Strangely the critics liked these inserts: 'the mid-section of Grand Hotel was considerably lightened by the inclusion of some tinkly seaside carnival music and a lurching refrain from Hernando's Hideaway. Olé.' wrote Rolling Stone about the Santa Monica gig in September 1975. The 'tinkly seaside' music was Gary, catching his fellow musicians out with a bit of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside (obviously unplanned, as none of them knew it properly: mp3 here); later that autumn Hernando began to mutate into La Cumparsita, the quintessential Uruguayan tango, with which it shares most of its harmonies. This was written by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez in Montevideo in 1916, and may be - like Dark Eyes - one of the tunes Gary would have heard on the UK hotel-restaurant-music scene in the fifties; the Ray Conniff orchestra, and others as well perhaps, have recorded combined La Cumparsita / Hernando's Hideaway as medleys. Though the best-known versions of La Cumparsita are instrumental, it does have Spanish lyrics, but - as the 'stowaway' episodes became more and more like in-jokes to amuse the band - Gary began to sing words (presumably of his own, rather than Keith Reid's) about Humphrey Bogart, which some fans feel relate to the movie, Casablanca. By the time of the RockPalast show a few words of Bogart patter had been worked up into a full verse of tongue-in-cheek homage ['Humphrey Bogart we love you madly / Humphrey Bogart, you and your long white mac, Oh Bogey, woh-oh we love you so / The way you sound your s's / the way you straighten your hat / I said Humphrey Bogart we love you madly] (mp3 here). The 'we love you madly' tag is part of a jazz piece recorded in August 1968 by Stan Tracey, now irrevocably associated with the remembrance concerts following Duke Ellington's death; the phrase is also used in Was it all Worth it on Queen's 1989 The Miracle album.

The RockPalast gig also saw a parody of a joke lifted from Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein, and a burst of the film's theme tune, which is closely-related to Dark Eyes (mp3 here): this was played at various 1976 German gigs. The Bogart words developed surreally ['the way you tip your hat / the way your scratch your back'] and the gypsy melody increasingly became a send-up of cheap restaurant music, with the melody in the tenor area of the piano (mp3 here); ensemble playing also got rather sloppy (mp3 here); Gary's elaborations of the gypsy tune became ever more curious (mp3 here). The influx of Pete Solley on keyboards did nothing to restore order: in early 1977 Gary was singing snatches of Cockney tunes (mp3 here), and The Peanut Vendor (El Manisero - yet another Latin-American standard) had started to rear its head. Even after Chris Copping retired, this tune remained in the middle of Grand Hotel, sometimes accompanied by caterwauling (mp3 here) from the band. Dark Eyes was introduced either by a shout of 'well my son' or by a peremptory 'Let's tango!'. By the time of the New Testament band, however, Gary Brooker seemed to regret these good-natured self-indulgences, and the song - which has been heard at the great majority of Procol gigs since 1992 - has been played very straight since (except when the Palers' Band inserted Mabel in the middle ... another ditty about food and sex).

• Tonight we sleep on silken sheets': despite his frequent references to dreams, Reid does not use the word 'sleep' very often. To the Englishman in his nylon or flannelette bedding, 'Silken sheets', alliterated for heightened sybaritic impact, would seem as sophisticated, erotic and even decadent as the French themselves. At Nuremberg in 1992 Gary gave the following account of the genesis of Grand Hotel, in a very waspish, but coherent voice: 'This is not the first time we've been here, we played here before in nineteen-seventy ... ohh ah nineteen-sixty ... ah, it was 1953 just after the you-know-what. We stayed at the Bahnhof. I went to bed with Keith Reid one night and he said (adopts exaggerated vocal precision) 'These sheets feel like silk, Gary.' And I said, 'Well that's just what the record company have provided'. Keith said, 'Shall we write a song about it, Gary?' (adopts knowing, arch tone of voice) 'I said, "Later Keith, we'll do it later".' [see also here] Setlist from Nurnberg '92 here
• 'We drink fine wine and eat rare meats': literature often uses elaborate eating as a prelude to sexual dalliance, not least since voluptuous table-habits can be described without offending the censor. In the real world, too, the seduction of a partner, by means of delicate fare, is not unknown. 'Rare' means not only 'unusual' but also 'lightly, or barely, cooked'.
• 'On Carousel and gambling stake': Carousel is the title of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and a film; On A Carousel was a hit for the Hollies in February 1967. It is a French word, originally signifying a tournament or merry-go-round, now abased to the supermarket display equipment that Nabokov referred to as 'sorry-go-rounds'. The word 'carouse' means 'make merry'. A gambling 'stake' is the sum of money bet, and we hear a pun on 'steak', one of the rare meats in the previous line. Perpetual Motion revisits some of the dining / dancing / gambling imagery of the present song. Reid also refers to gambling in 'You've gambled and your chance was lost' (The Piper's Tune); 'We gambled and then we lost' ((You Can't) Turn Back the Page); we also hear 'faîtes vos jeux' (place your bets) in Ghost Train, the Brooker / Fisher / Reid song that Procol Harum adopted from the third Brooker solo album.
• 'Our fortunes speed, and dissipate': the line suggests either that we are wealthy, but lose money quickly; or that the imaginary fortunes we might have made come to nothing. 'Dissipate' means 'fade away', but 'dissipated' is used to signify dissolute or debauched behaviour.
• 'It's candlelight and chandelier': three lines begin with 'It's', a favourite device of tabloid headline-writers; Reid starts several songs with this formula too. Here he revisits the type of light that is featured in Shine on Brightly, but the context is now very different, being one of frivolity and hedonism rather than neurotic introversion. Other candle images occur in 'search in vain by candlelight' (Shine on Brightly); 'No candle burned with fire enough to tear that city down' and 'Light a candle up in kingdom come' (About to Die) and 'By the light of thirteen candles' (The King of Hearts).
• 'It's silver plate and crystal clear': is the waiter's tray solid silver, or merely 'silver plate'? 'Crystal' is the fine-cut glass of a goblet, and 'clear' is its transparency to romantic candle-light: but 'crystal clear' means 'entirely evident', perhaps relating to the seduction of this 'continental bride' in which both parties can distinguish the apparently classy rituals of the evening from the underlying transactional motives. A similar double-application of words occurs in Shine on Brightly where the chandelier 'is in full swing' ... the phrase applies to a party that is going well, and invites us to imagine revelers disporting on the light fittings.
• 'It's serenade and sarabande': 'serenade' is another French word; it's used idiomatically for 'to woo', but its proper application is to 'evening music', often sung in the open outside a lover's window (eg in Don Giovanni). Its eighteenth-century development as an instrumental piece by Mozart was followed by many other big-name composers, and it has been used in entitling song cycles by Britten and Vaughan Williams. 'Sarabande' is an old Spanish dance in triple time, frequently with a long note on the second beat of the bar. The two musical terms alliterate sweetly; it could be argued that the first part of each Grand Hotel verse was a serenade ('tonight we dine') while the 'waiters dance' music was a sarabande of sorts. Gary Brooker's father played in an ensemble whose name included the word 'Serenaders'
• 'The nights we stay at Hotel Grand': the verse started with 'tonight', and ends with 'nights', suggesting a lavish lifestyle perpetually, rather than an indulgent excursion, The reversed word-order imitates the French, adjective after noun. Grand Hotel is thus one of the five songs on the album whose title is heard in the song.

• 'Tonight we dine at Hotel Ritz: A golden dish with every wish': Ritz is not an uncommon hotel-name, and it was also a cinema name at one time. 'Ritzy' is used to mean 'glamorously decorated' as in the song, Putting on the Ritz. The location has shifted but we need not assume it's a different night, just another phase, following the first verse's glimpse of the bedroom, and the foray to the gambling tables. Conceivably the Spencer Zahn illustration (right) harks back to 'putting on the Ritz'
• 'It's mirrored walls, and velvet drapes': mirroring the wall is a tactic to create the illusion of a larger room, but it also allows guests to check their appearance unobtrusively and, of course, to monitor the antics of other guests. 'Velvet drapes' are curtains (the word 'drape' is used only for heavy, extensive curtains in English). Velvet, like silk, is a luxurious fabric. In Perpetual Motion the narrator refers to 'velvet days', presumably implying days of plush satisfaction. We refer to smooth speakers as having a 'velvet tongue', and the profits of gambling are 'the velvet'. 'Velvet' is a dark-skinned woman, 'velvet tunnel' the vagina; 'velvet room' is a select, salubrious inner room in an inn. 'Drape' is also used for wrapping oneself loosely around a thing or another person.
• 'Dry champagne, and bursting grapes': this allusive line could refer to grapes so full that they rupture in the mouth, or to grape-based drinks which sparkle, bubbles bursting against the tongue; dry wines (especially French) enjoyed a cachet among the Brits at this epoch. In any event our attention is drawn to dry and moist textures, and to foods and drinks commonly associated with seduction. 'Grape' is a word with sexual applications, to testicles or breasts.
• 'Dover sole, and Oeufs Mornay': Dover Sole is a special type of this delicate fish, Dover being the Kentish port closest to France, and subject of the famous wartime song The White Cliffs of Dover. The English find eggs a banal dish, but offered them under French nomenclature in an improbable combination with another food, they scent sophistication. Mornay is a cheese-flavoured white sauce whose name origins are unclear; this is the first cheese to present itself in Procoldom since The Devil Came From Kansas. There the cheese is mysterious, but here we seem to be involved in another menu recital like that in Bringing Home the Bacon. In the 1970s French 'cuisine' was a real lure for the steak-and-kidney Brits, and the marketing men shrewdly transformed 'bacon and egg pie' into 'quiche', just as they turned 'quilts' into 'duvets' in order to make their money out of this Gallic leaning. Reid in 1967 was noted for his use of Gauloise cigarettes.
• 'Profiteroles and Peach Flambé': more French words invade the menu, of course: 'Profiteroles' are a choux pastry dessert with a chocolate sauce; peach flambé is a brandy-soaked peach, ignited. The only other Procol peaches were sexual ones in Luskus Delph and Salad Days (Are Here Again). The song Life is A Minestrone, by 10CC, took the food-love-life equation into the top Ten in 1975: 'love is the fire of flaming brandy' and so forth.
• 'The waiters dance on fingertips': this surreally compacted line invites us to imagine waiters who move nimbly, and who dance to the attention of the diner when a finger is raised to catch their attention. 'Fingers' is a word Reid likes to use: 'Clutching fingers break the puzzle' in Kaleidoscope; 'Not a man who had a finger' in Whaling Stories; 'They put their fingers in their ears' in Butterfly Boys; and 'You wear down your fingers' in Typewriter Torment; 'Rings upon your fingers' (All Our Dreams are Sold).
• 'One more toast to greet the morn': 'toast' here is not the crisped bread beloved of British breakfasters, but a celebratory glass of wine raised while some proclamation is repeated by all involved. This practice is possibly invoked in All This and More ('come Lollard raise your lute and sing') and is explicitly mentioned in the unpublished One Eye on the Future, in 'We'll make our toast and drain the glass ... we'll raise our glass to absent friends'. 'Toast' is also used for a devil, a lively old man, a long poem. 'Greet the morn' is the first archaism to grace the album, in which we may think Reid has linguistically entered a more modern world ... until Fires (Which Burned Brightly). In this case it presumably supplies the rhyme for the next line: the whole song is presented in couplets, chiefly rhyming, some half-rhyming.
• 'The wine and dine have danced till dawn': 'wine' is occasionally used as a verb - a courting man may wine and dine a woman - but 'dine' as a noun is unheard of. The last wine in Procoldom was in Your Own Choice, like Shine on Brightly a downbeat song: in the re-appearance of wine, candles and chandeliers here we may suspect an attempt to revisit the same symbology in a more upbeat, malaise-banishing context. 'Dance till dawn' was the sort of slogan that would attract people to a hotel or ballroom in days before a man could permissibly go anywhere private with an unmarried partner.
• 'Where's my Continental Bride?': The Continental was a 1930s song / dance of sophisticated mien, revived as a surprise hit for Maureen McGovern in 1976. 'Bride' normally refers to a woman on or around her wedding-day, but it has also been used to signify 'prostitute' and 'girlfriend'. In the Grand Hotel lyric-booklet 'Continental Bride' has initial capitals, as if it were a specific product or brand name (duvets were first marketed as 'Continental Quilts'): however Keith Reid's book, My Own Choice, capitalises only the first word. The phrase might refer to a prostitute or escort in the hotel, who seems to be being 'ordered' now as an afterthought. (If there were space to dilate on the possible Brooker/Reid stage musical, we could suggest that the alleged VD song on side two of the album comes as a consequence of the libertine's hedonism in the opening number). 'The Continental' is a dance, and 'Slip and slide' is a common sexual euphemism, accompanied by a semitone descent in the music which is not heard at similar points in the other verses. Perpetual Motion reprises this idea in 'slip and sliding across the floor'; the very suggestive Playmate of the Mouth has a 'baby sandwich ... slippery sliding ten feet tall'.
• 'Early morning pinch and bite': whereas 'bite' is a nibble of something to eat, this line suggests sexual foreplay, which is confirmed in succeeding lines. Reid makes a different pun on 'pinch' in Robert's Box. A variant line, heard in concert, cannot be Reid's: at RockPalast, 1976, Gary sang 'Afternoon is very nice, but I prefer it late at night'.
• 'These French girls always like to fight': gone is the sentimental specificity of 'bride'; the narrator's partner is one of 'these French girls' - no name - and even the country of origin now sounds dismissive. Gary sometimes sang this line with an appreciative false stutter on 'f-f-f-fight', however. There is much fighting in Reid - Pilgrims Progress, TV Ceasar, Fires Which Burnt Brightly, As Strong as Samson, Fool's Gold, The Final Thrust, This Old Dog, I'm a Reader and a Writer - but very few girls, although another French girl 'has offered to give me a chance' in Toujours l'Amour. Otherwise there is only 'I'm gonna find a girl' (Whisky Train) and 'Burn me up sweet oyster girl' (Luskus Delph). The French Girl is an old Iain and Sylvia song, recorded by Gene Clark, in which the central figure meets a French girl and they 'find a room': she promises to meet him again, and later when he tries to find her her friends won't help him, not even by speaking to him in English. 'I'm thinking of renting a villa in France' in Toujours l'Amour is just one more of many French references on this record.
• 'The nights we stay at Hotel Grand': songs containing references to 'night' include A Christmas Camel, In The Wee Small Hours Of Sixpence, Wish me Well, Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone), Glimpses of Nirvana, In the Autumn of My Madness, Memorial Drive, Grand Hotel, Nothing But the Truth, Beyond The Pale, Something Magic, (You can't) turn back the page, Perpetual motion, and the unpublished This Old Dog and I'm a Reader and a Writer. Throughout the song Brooker declaims Reid's sumptuous libretto with soulful gravity, yet in performance, even when there is no mischief with 'stowaway' melodies, there is simultaneous fun in his French asides and cod brass-noises (last heard on Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone): In the dying moments of this fine song the chorus takes up 'Les nuits qu'on passe à l'Hotel Grande', but on the road Gary has occasionally subverted the mood with off-the-wall German: 'der Nacht ein Kippen von Hotel Grand' was one such effort. The contradictory spirit of pure Procol has always suffused performances of this endearingly eclectic song.