Thursday, 7 June 2007

Procol Harum

Procol Harum. What does this mean?

Few days ago everything I knew about this band was:
- They had a smashing hit called "A Whiter Shade of Pale".
- They were produced by Brian Epstein and when their first album went N1 in 1967 he celebrated with them with a bottle of champagne.
- Ummm.... nothing more.
Then I was searching to buy Marillion album and instead I bought seven different albums, including "Procol Harum - The Essential Collection". Then I started listening to it and I was amazed. I won't say more than the fact that if you list the "top listeners" of Procol Harum in last.fm, I'm there. One of the first.
This band is so good. I can't stop listening to the album. I must find all their albums. And find out what their name means. The latter is easy, three-step exercise:
- google it
- read it
- post it to enlighten the readers (whom I seriously suspect in being not more than one)
"The band name was chosen by its original manager, Guy Stevens, after the name of Reid's cat, and it is almost the Latin for "beyond these things". A more correct spelling of the Latin phrase is in fact Procul Harum, and the band's name has frequently been 'corrected' to this in articles and catalogues. However, even Procul Harum is not quite right grammatically, and the correct Latin translation of "beyond these things" would be Procul His."

One thing I like in Google (apart everything else) it that you usually learn more than what you were searching for. So I'll skip the band's biography and stop at interesting facts:
"-The asteroid 14024 Procol Harum is named after the band.
-The second book in the Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker Trilogy, "The Restaurant At the End of the Universe," was inspired by the song Grand Hotel
."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Enlightened reader here! ;-D
"(whom I seriously suspect in being not more than one)"??? :-(

A band than I like ... tho I've got only their first two albums:
Procol Harum (1967)
Shine On Brightly (1968)

Do you recommAnd me any others?
Thanks! :-)

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On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.