'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Fresh Fruit

This song is the album's novelty item, following in the sporadic tradition of Souvenir of London, Boredom, Mabel and so on. Ostensibly a paean to healthy eating – and as such an antidote to the tales of excess that pervade the preceding album – it is nonetheless also shot through with playful sexual imagery, which the voluptuous quasi-Caribbean presentation is presumably intended to enhance.

At a literal level, the song has claims to being the title-track of the album, whose cover painting by Jakob Bogdani (1670 – 1724) was originally entitled merely Birds and Fruit. However the picture does not show juice, seeds and so forth, nor any expectant dogs or victims of disease, so we can scarcely claim that Keith Reid's song has grown out of the image. More likely the painting was selected on its own merits, a decision perhaps clinched by the part-overlap with a song in preparation. ('We named [the album] after the painting because we liked it and we hate the idea of naming any more albums after one of the cuts on it,' said Keith Reid here). The picture is compiled with some artifice: the fruit itself looks like a still-life, but the presence of the three various birds and the rampant vegetation suggests just the opposite. Yet if these creatures are real, it's hard to believe that they would have left such a trove of posed peaches and grapes unsampled. The picture shares none of the messy, sensuous emphasis that Reid places on pulp-gulping, but its superimposition of two frames of reference is precisely mimicked in the song's ingenious words.

Focussing on the interpolated word 'exotic' in the album-title, and reading 'birds' in its slang relation to women, the thoughtful observer may find the ground being prepared for a realization that Fresh Fruit has a subtext recommending particular sexual specialisms; readers of a prudish disposition will doubtless not want to visit this intelligent link about 'dirty' blues songs, nor to contemplate the notion that the present song (whose blues origins are evident in the chord sequence of the opening bars, and in its characteristic flattened melodic seventh ) is a covert paean to cunnilingus, as a pleasure in itself, and as a way to avoid disseminating sexually-transmitted disease.

Though Brooker has been known to improvise references to genuine foodstuffs (hear oranges, chives (?) and coconuts in this mp3) while performing Fresh Fruit on stage, a rock audience hearing references to bananas, lost cherries, and so on is not likely to imagine they are hearing a lecture on nutrition. Keith Reid's song, with its references to Vitamin C and so on, achieves a more coherently fruit-oriented surface-meaning than Robert Johnson looks for in 'squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg': and even when the joke is decoded – as it surely must be, if we are to find anything funny about Fresh Fruit – we sense that his intention is not so much to purvey a smutty double entendre as to model himself on well-crafted, risqué novelties such as I'm Going to Bring a Watermelon to my Girl Tonight, covered in a 1966 rarity by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Fresh Fruit is in G, like the numbers before and after it on the Exotic Birds record – a rare lapse of variety for Procoldom. The music itself is in a jaunty four time, harmonically straightforward, slightly varying its blues-basis by visiting alternate chords a fourth above the expected ones. The chorus goes poppily up into the subdominant C major, and passes through a pleasing B7th into E minor, before coming home in unremarkable fourths. The guitar solo, conventionally placed, stays close to the vocal melody, including its characteristic and highly-emphasised flattened seventh; the organ swirls about engagingly, and the marimba or xylophone (presumably Brooker, though Matthew Fisher is credited with that skill on Boredom, the last Procol outing into tuned percussion) nicely offsets the nimble boogie piano. Like the equally diet-oriented Mabel (and like Piggy Pig Pig of course) this song makes use of sound effects that are generated in the studio, rather than being lifted from effects libraries.

Maybe, like the equally suggestive Souvenir of London, this recording accumulated its surprising soundscape in the hope of becoming a novelty hit single (the next time the marimba surfaced, on Pandora's Box, it worked!). The whistling here has none of the nostalgic quality of Lennon's Jealous Guy whistling; rather, it reinforces the aura of innuendo with its cocky suggestion of a nonchalant window-cleaner at work (Oddly enough we also hear a whistle, albeit non-melodic, on the preceding track). In the heyday of hack songwriting, the potential of a hit depended on the 'old grey whistle test': a melody strong enough for the old grey studio doorman to pick it up, and whistle it, had a good chance of success. This epithet became the title of the UK's premier serious TV rock show of the 1970s, hosted by Bob Harris, whose whispered song introductions, so different from the inane jollities of many of his predecessors, were regrettably excised from the commercial release of Procol Harum's 1974 Radio 1 concert. But the whistler has in general been a despised species in popular music: few all-out whistling assaults on the charts have succeeded, though one-hit wonder Whistling Jack Smith took I was Kaiser Bill's Batman (Deram DM112) to number 5 in a chart run overlapping with that of A Whiter Shade of Pale in 1967. Other whistling hits like Roger Miller's England Swings (hit in 1965 and 1966) and the South African Roger Whittaker's numerous smashes followed the mainly-vocal formula offered on Fresh Fruit. The whistle record to which Fresh Fruit bears most conspicuous relation is Guy Mitchell's Singing the Blues [UK No.1 late 1956] with which it seems to share some key musical passages.

Gary Brooker encourages our investigation of the song's sexual content with his determinedly sensual declamation of 'squeeze', and 'squeeze a little more there'; but he simultaneously sends it up in a stage introduction (Vienna, 1975) with the improbable suggestion that Keith Reid will be 'chucking bananas about during this one' (mp3 here). In another introduction he curtly advises that 'this one's about grapes'. There was no mention of any subtext when (at Bilzen, 18 August 1973) Keith Reid enthusiastically told OOR, the authoritative Dutch Rock Encyclopaedia, that he had just written a song called In Praise Of Fruit, and quoted some of its lines while implying that he had worked on this topic because fruit-eating was, to him, a simple enjoyment.

Keith said then that he had finished half of the songs for the new album, but Gary still hadn’t started on the music! Such was the band's heavy touring schedule (see here) that Brooker did not find time to write most of the music until early December 1973. Procol Harum did not tour again until 28 February 1974, so the band clearly had no opportunity to road-test most of these songs … Fresh Fruit certainly presents some difficulties for live performance, since (perhaps because of a mismatch between independently-written music and libretto) some double-tracking is required to fit in the words at the ends of verses: this overlapping is highly unusual. Stage performances were closely modelled on the album version of the track, though the whistling (which was hard to keep in tune) copied the vocal melody, not the recorded variant; the overlap vocals were taken rather indistinctly by Cartwright or Grabham, who also contributed some goofy ad-libs as the song wound up. The song saw active service in promoting the album, and was enthusiastically received by audiences, but has seldom been heard since.

• 'Here kitty kitty': Gary Brooker's vocal double-tracking starts with this apparently incongruous exclamation on one channel (mp3 here) while the more conventional '… three, four' is heard on the other. 'Kitty' is a young cat, a familiar form like 'pussy', and course 'pussies' in pop music are almost invariably concealed references to female genitalia. It has been suggested that this – usually overlooked – detail has been left in the mix to prepare the eagle-eared for lubricity to follow.
• 'In praise of fruit I wrote this song': later on Reid's songs become more and more self-referential. This one, and Pilgrims Progress ('I sat me down to write a simple story') are in the vanguard of that trend.
• 'Because of fruit my heart is strong': listeners can take the 'strong heart' here as a medical statement about the proper functioning of this crucial organ, or as a metaphorical statement of courage, resolution that one has found the right way forward, and so forth. Most of Reid's references to 'heart' are downbeat, and have little in common with the usual use, or over-use, of the word in popular music: 'Let him who fears his heart alone ':'Endless heartache until she died' (Nothing that I Didn't Know); 'it was tied to my heart' (Toujours L'amour); 'fills our hearts with tears' (Nothing But the Truth; 'Fool's gold broke my heart' (Fool's Gold); 'by the beating of a heart' (Something Magic); 'Wizard man's got an angel's heart' (Wizard Man); 'I played the King of Hearts' (The King of Hearts).
• 'Who could estimate its worth?': this curiously academic phrase is an example of the surprising interpolation of economic terms that we find in various Reid songs ('to pay the cost' in Robert's Box, 'enjoy commissions on the proceeds' in Butterfly Boys, for example.) Reid's importance in the management of the band may conceivably have played a part in keeping such ideas afloat in his writing mind.
• 'Fruit's the finest food on earth': outside this song the word 'fruit' occurs only in Strangers in Space, though grapes get a mention in Mabel and in Grand Hotel, and peaches, with various shades of meaning, in Salad Days (Are Here Again), Luskus Delph, and Grand Hotel. The refrain of the unpublished A La Carte, so Gary Brooker informed BtP, was 'The sweetest thing this side of heaven's a great big slice of warty [= water] melon', but that was in fact recommended for when you had a thirst, not as a food at all.
• 'Fresh fruit, juice and seeds': the resemblance of certain fruit to female sex organs (internal and external) is acknowledged across cultures and through the ages: it is by no means specific to popular music, though that field has cultivated some particularly obscure innuendo in order to be able to sell records and escape the censor. For example, consider the contents and sleeve notes of the Various Artists CD Banana in Your Fruitbasket: a less oblique case is I Want Some Sugar In My Bowl. It's not an exclusively male preserve: Kate Bush has Eat the Music on her album The Red Shoes (not one of the tracks Gary Brooker plays on). Reid here does not name any specific fruits, unlike Bush who regales us with figurative mangoes and pomegranates. The song Strange Fruit is of course one that uses the image in a far more serious way, to depict the hanging corpses from Southern trees.
• 'Please don't touch, please don't squeeze': this sounds like the typical costermonger's admonition to his customers, but it also carries the coy tone of the flirt whose intention is that only the words 'touch' and 'squeeze' should be heard and responded to.
• 'Fresh fruit, juice and pulp, like to gulp the whole lot up': these words are full of the sounds of slurping, but the music requires them to be delivered at tongue-twister speed and much of the sensuality of the onomatopoeia gets swallowed.
• 'Here's another point of view': the music shifts gear to underline the 'other point of view', which is certainly different, and certainly far from true at a literal level.
• 'Fruit is good for doggies too': any self-respecting dog will turn up his nose at fruit, rather than wagging his tail with glee, so we would be ill-advised to take this line literally. However 'dog' is occasionally used to represent the male sex organ (as we will explore in notes on A Salty Dog); old blues songs evade the censor by alluding to 'walking the dog', for example. 'Doggie' is of course a child-like formula. Parents teaching a child to talk often add the suffix '-ies' to important words so that their final consonants will be clearly heard. Although the childish suffix is generally discarded once the proper form of the root word is learnt, it is curiously enough adopted by adults in the jocular common parlance 'doggie position', which describes sexual congress when the female partner is crouching on all fours. The implication in this line seems to be that, while oral sex is delicious, we should not forget that the female 'fruit' is also a pleasant harbour for a gentleman's 'salty dog'. The panting 'doggie' effects on this track may well have been perpetrated by Copping or Wilson, since these recall their Pythonic proclivities, unwittingly revealed to the world when Westside released the unworthily-trawled 'Procol Have a Laugh' on the Home …. plus! album. Other dogs in Procol songs include 'A salty dog, this seaman's log' (A Salty Dog); 'My old dog's a good old dog' (Your Own Choice); 'let the wild dogs tear them up' (Beyond The Pale) 'Taking out the dog for walks' (Taking The Time); 'I'm a dog in a manger' (Man with a mission); 'This old dog has to learn some new ways' (This Old Dog); 'She's seen at the races and walking the dog' (the unpublished A Real Attitude).
• 'Rover wags his tail with glee': 'Rover' is a generic name given to British dogs, more often in cartoons and fiction, one suspects, than in real life. the gleeful wagging tail surely needs no explication, though some readers may not recall that the Latin for tail is 'penis'.
• 'When he gets his vitamin C': Vitamin C, derived from fresh fruit, is considered essential for warding off colds and flu, perennial hazards of dwelling in the UK. But if we are taking Rover the dog phallically, it may be that 'Vitamin C' is his female counterpart, denoting the vagina by the initial letter of its (unprintable) demotic name … in the same way that 'Vitamin C' was 'cocaine' in 1980s' slang.
• 'Have you caught a touch of flu': influenza is not caught by touch, though venereal diseases are. There is a long tradition of coded references to gonorrhea, syphilis and so on in popular music. Brooker has had two records banned by the BBC for just this reason (the Paramounts' Bad Blood and Procol Harum's A Souvenir of London) and it seems entirely plausible that the 'flu' here is another trick reference to that unwanted 'souvenir'.
• 'And you can't think what to do': the remedies for flu are well documented, as indeed are those for sexually-transmitted diseases. Here, however, the problem seems to be how to satisfy your partner while the infection is clearing up: the remedy is to gulp the fruit., not to let Rover near it.
• 'Famous doctors all agree': this sounds like an advertising slogan, but we have not been able to trace it. It's most unusual for Keith Reid's songs to appear to endorse the conduct of doctors: 'The doctors say they must operate' (Song For A Dreamer); 'Got to show it to my doctor' (A Souvenir of London); 'The doctors didn't hesitate', 'The doctors said they knew no cure' (For Liquorice John); 'Doctor where's your remedy?', 'Doctor where's your magic box', 'Doctor please don't lock your door' (Robert's Box); 'Doctors cause uncertainty' (Pandora's Box); 'If only my doctor could see that I'm ill', 'If only my doctor would give me a pill', 'But why can't my doctor just say that I'm ill?' (Typewriter Torment).
• 'fruit's the safest remedy': if the ailment in question were really flu, the adjective 'safest' would not be particularly appropriate; and in any case fruit cannot be a remedy, so much as a preventative, for flu and kindred complaints. 'Safest' is however germane to the venereal reading of the words: syphilis (unless morbidly advanced) would not be spread to a woman by cunnilingus.
• 'Makes you want to give up meat': Reid's references to meat in other songs are restricted to 'Don't eat green meat' (Mabel) and 'We drink fine wine and eat rare meats' in Grand Hotel. However as with fruit, 'meat' is commonly used as a censor-defying, or simply amusing, way of referring to sexual matters; male genitalia are jokingly referred to as 'meat and two veg', and Philip Roth's Portnoy refers to 'beating his meat' for his solitary gratification.
• 'Ripe and firm': terms of this sort apply particularly to the female breast in laddish 'street' lingo.
• 'Makes them squealing taste-buds squirm': the word 'them' is non-standard English for 'those', all adding to a matey, leering effect. Some listeners hear 'squeaming' here (see Dump My Thesaurus) and the bass voice that accompanies the last iteration of this word (2:55) remains unexplained. It is open to doubt whether fruit really makes the taste-buds 'squirm', but the line has evidently been designed to bring together images of tongue and (breast?)-buds in suitably suggestive fashion. The advocacy of particular sexual practices as being good for your health is common among those attempting to slough off repression [cp the Kinks pro-onanism song National Health] doubtless as a symmetrical riposte to scare-mongering from those of an opposite persuasion. However in this case the tone is predominantly so unserious, and the image of the dog hankering for Vitamin C so silly, that the song really does seem to merit being taken solely on a comic footing. Gary Brooker told Chris Welch (liner notes to this CD re-release) that Fresh Fruit was a comedy song. ' It was very much based on the sort of thing that Coasters mighty [sic] have done. When I was growing up I was a big fan of the Coasters and I used to sing all their songs.'

Thanks to Frans Steensma for additional information about this song