A Whiter Shade of Pale

Highly-collectable CD re-release, 40 years on!

London's Union Square Music, trading as Salvo, releases AWSoP on 13 August 2007 as a CD EP to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Procol Harum. The new writing-credit (see below) makes this a highly-collectable item and if sufficient Procol fans buy it, we have a good chance of seeing Procol Harum back in the charts.

Go to Amazon UK by clicking here, and you can pre-order the single (and several copies for your friends!)
The price is 3.99 GBP. Or you can order from Amazon USA here. It's also available from the BtP online store

 

The front of the CD re-release

The CD itself

The whole insert, folded out

The back of the insert

The track-listing: so the single is a great taster for the beginning of the Salvo series of Procol re-release.
Note the provisional writing-credit for A Whiter Shade of Pale.

Nice to confirm that it’s the same early Magdalene featured on Disc 3 of the Westside 30th Anniversary Anthology; but whereas that was an off-air recording of a broadcast of an acetate, this Salvo version sounds really sharp and studioworthy. It doesn't cut off like the Westside one does, and it starts with GB's count-in. How Salvo have managed to bring back an 'erased' track from the Recycling Bin of time, one doesn't know: but it's amazing to hear with such clarity what the guitar, piano, organ, bass and drums are doing on this early version. It's not without hiss, which seems a trifle intermittent; but it's a huge improvement on what has been available so far.

The other tracks: AWSoP, Whisky Train, and All This and More, sound great, but they are the regular versions. Hard to say what remastering is audible except that All This and More doesn't sound quite so wayward in terms of its vocal mix and panning (nadir of the 'Salty Dog' album surely). No sign, unsurprisingly , of GB's original string orchestration, which was left out of the final ATaM 1969 mix. But still an excellent item for the PH collector.

The sequencing of WT directly after AWSoP is going to administer an agreeably radical wake-up call to anyone who buys this single not knowing the rest of the Procol oeuvre :-)