The best No 1 records: Procul Harum – A Whiter Shade of Pale

1967: The band were a bunch of unknowns but with this song they captured the possibilities for pop at the time better than anyoneIf any one song sums up the sense of limitless possibilities that suffused English pop music in the mid-60s, when its exponents felt joyously free to decorate their creations with borrowings from the ancient past and an imagined future, it is A Whiter Shade of Pale. Coming out of nowhere, the first release by an unknown band, it skipped across centuries with its infall...

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