“Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" was Procol Harum's very first single, out on 12 May 1967, and it arrived sounding like nothing else on the dial: a slow, stately, Bach-derived melody, a soulful, aching vocal and a lyric of cryptic, dreamlike strangeness. Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher wrote the music, Keith Reid the words, and the whole thing drifts past like a hazy procession through a candlelit hall.

It shot to number one in Britain on 8 June and stayed there six weeks, and with barely any push behind it climbed to 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of the signature sounds of the Summer of Love. Sales ran past 10 million copies worldwide, and more than 1,000 other artists have taken a crack at it.

Credit where it was due took a while. Only Brooker and Reid were listed at first, and Fisher had to go all the way to the Law Lords, who ruled unanimously in his favour in 2009, to be named as co-writer of the music. By then the honours had piled up: a Brit Award in 1977 as the best British pop single since 1952, shared with Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", a place in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, and a 2004 finding by Phonographic Performance Limited that no record had been played more on British broadcasting in 70 years.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.