Keith Reid died on March 23 of cancer. The death of the famous lyricist was announced by his wife. The artist passed away at the age of 76.
Keith Reid is dead. Lyricist Procol Harum was 76 years old
The Procol Harum team also said goodbye to his friend by posting a moving post on social media.
We were saddened to learn of Keith Reid’s death. He was an irreplaceable songwriter, he wrote almost all Procol Harum songs. The words he wrote were one of a kind and helped shape the band’s music. He entertained fans with imaginative, surreal, and layered stories told in his songs. Their complexity was an extremely important addition to the work of Procol Harum.
Reid was born on October 19, 1946 in Hertfordshire, England. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Procol Harum keyboardist Gary Brooker. One of their first projects was the hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.
“A Whiter Shade of White” became the British debut single. It soon turned out that the song was a hit, and the melody soon became a worldwide hit. To this day, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is not only a showcase of the formation, but also one of the most popular rock ballads of all time. The hit has already had over a thousand covers.
Procol Harum hit songwriter dies He wrote the ballad “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
The most important element of the composition is its main motif played on the Hammond organ, but the text also played a significant role in the history of the piece. Its creator Keith Reid admitted that he was inspired at a party where one of the women commented on her friend’s appearance with the words: “You have faded to a whiter shade of white.” The sentence stuck in Reid’s mind.
The artist wrote four verses of psychedelic lyrics, but only two can be heard on the albums. The fans could listen to the third, and rarely the fourth, during Procol Harum concerts. Reid was credited with being inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, but the creator himself said in interviews that he had never read the book.
Maybe these are things that I knew subconsciously, but I certainly didn’t quote Chaucer on purpose, no way – the artist commented on the comparisons.
The phrase “a whiter shade of white” put into the song by Reid came into use in English. To this day, it appears in dictionaries and is used in contexts independent of references to a well-known song.
Source: Gazeta
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