Procol Harum or Gary Brooker: who is back?
This concert, at which the Barbican Hall creaked with a mixture of ages between twenty and sixty-five, achieved a boundlessly enthusiastic success. Everyone’s performances were excellent and Gary Brooker shone brightly in the vocal department. The orchestra was directed with terrific panache by the young Maestro Nicholas Dodd, and it joined in with lively and surprising arrangements of songs, both melodic and rocking, spawned over almost thirty working years by the minds of dynamic duo, Gary Brooker and Keith Reid (words). None of the record’s guest artists, however, took part in the present concert. Certainly in the absence of this breath of fresh air it was hard to see what the group’s future plans might be. Without a doubt last February 8th Procol Harum deservedly added an enormous Oscar to their career: almost two-and-a-half hours of music, with three loudly-demanded encores by their deeply affectionate devotees. Backstage I should have met Kellogs, whom I’d persuaded by fax to all
