I imagine that there are a lot of people out there who are blissfully unaware that Procol Harum ever recorded anything beyond A Whiter Shade of Pale – the debut single from Hell, given that its phenomenal success and ubiquity meant that everything that came after was doomed to be a failure in comparison. I wasn’t quite that unaware – as a youth, I picked up a second hand copy of their 1973 album Grand Hotel, which struck me as decidedly unremarkable at the time and has since languished, unplayed, in my record collection. And I knew the band kept going until the punk era (Procol Harum seem to be one of the few prog bands that actually were killed off by punk), but I had no real knowledge of the band’s history.

So Henry Scott-Irvine’s exhaustive and loving biography was a welcome arrival, detailing as it does the entire history of the band, from the early days of acclaimed but unsuccessful British R&B band The Paramounts (where Procol main man Gary Brooker and several future members of the band got their start) through the heady days of late Sixties success and on through the often difficult days of the 1970s, Brooker’s solo work in the Eighties and the reunion and high profile court case of the last couple of decades.
What you learn from this is that Procol Harum was a more significant band than you might give them credit for. Their work playing live with orchestras was pioneering (and something that has continued throughout their career), and their albums – at least in the opinion of the author, a self-confessed fan – equally innovative. Scott-Irvine makes a strong argument for the idea that the band could have been up there with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and others if they’d had the necessary breaks. I’m not sure he’s right – reading between the lines here, it seems the band were too unfocused musically to build that level of a fan base. But I’m certainly curious to hear more of their albums after reading this. I might even dust off Grand Hotel and give it another spin.

There’s certainly no doubting the fact that the band attracted some high profile fans. The book has a foreword by Martin Scorsese and an introduction by Alan Parker, and is dotted with loving quotes from people like Jimmy Page and Douglas Adams, so perhaps they really could have risen above the status of Cult Band. Either way, this is a thorough, highly readable and very impressive biography of the near-half decade history of the band, and one well worth investing in.

DAVID FLINT

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