Liddle Britain

J.S. Bach should claim the royalties

18 November 2006

Rod Liddle reflects on the Procol Harum case and the stunning pretentiousness of 1970s pop groups that ripped off classical music with appalling results

The song has always been credited to the acknowledged leader of Procol Harum, pianist and singer Gary Brooker, and the lyrics — described in my 1974 edition of the NME Book of Rock as ‘scholarly’, although you may prefer the term ‘stupid’ — by Keith Reid. Mr Fisher is not claiming rights over the words, but over the very thing which truly sold the single, the descending pattern of notes played on the organ which comprises the introduction to the song and which are referred to in all the documents before you, m’lud, as a ‘riff’.

And this is where the irony crops up, because in all honesty neither Mr Fisher nor Mr Brooker wrote this ‘riff’; it was ripped, bodily, from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No 3 in D, known more popularly as ‘Air On a G String’. Mr Brooker had heard the music accompanying an advert for Hamlet cigars and, frankly, nicked it. So it is J.S. Bach who really should be sitting in the high court looking embittered and grizzled and surrounded by a phalanx of carnivorous lawyers.

Annoying though the song might be, it does have some historical importance. The newspaper coverage this week, and the counsel for Matthew Fisher, has suggested that the song ‘defined’ that famous Summer of Love of 1967. Well, I suppose it may have done for lawyers and the like, but even at the time it was considered a little naff by normal people; the cognoscenti were listening to Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. This, though, isn’t the point. It marked the beginning of rock music’s yearning for self-importance and high seriousness, a development which — by its apogee in the mid-1970s and the advent of perfectly horrible groups such as Yes and Genesis and Emerson, Lake and Palmer — brought to mind the vision of a five-year-old child attempting to read Molière or Proust. Procol Harum — and yep, the cod Latin name is a giveaway — made a career from purloining classical music riffs and appending to them words which sounded meaningful but were, rather, pretentious drivel of the most risible kind. Harum was one of the first bands to be allowed to indulge their craving for high seriousness by performing in concert with a classical orchestra, which they did for A Salty Dog, their concept album about boats and stuff. They had a couple of minor hits with the similarly Bach-inspired ‘Homburg’, ‘Pandora’s Box’ and the rather likeable and catchy ‘Conquistador’, the latter a piece of cute rhythm and blues reminiscent of the Zombies which showed how good Harum might have been had they stuck to the basics. A later single, ‘Souvenir of London’, had no Bach influences at all and took as its subject matter venereal disease; after that there was pretty much nothing, just blissful decades of utter silence. Think of them as their John Cage years.