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

Anyway, pop-pickers, let me leave you with another story about ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The song was covered in the United States by a band called the Box Tops, fronted by a mop-headed 16-year-old kid from Memphis, Alex Chilton. Later, Chilton was to become one of the most deranged and interesting figures in the pop music industry, an immensely talented and agreeably self-destructive maverick who contributed two of my favourite lines in a pop song: ‘Here’s a little thing that’s gonna please ya/ It’s just a little town down in Indonesia — Bangkok!’ Someone give that man an atlas, please. I saw Alex in London a decade or so back and someone had given him an atlas — he changed the first words to: ‘Here’s a little thing that’s gonna phase ya/ It’s just a little town down in south-east Asia — Bangkok!’ Maverick even at a very early age, the Box Tops decided that ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ would work best without that organ riff nicked from Bach, so they left it out altogether. A bit like missing out the piano part from the Moonlight Sonata, or the guitar part from Neil Young’s ‘Down By the River’. Still, it sold well enough, despite the lyrics, which they left intact. We skipped the light fandango, indeed.