A Whiter Shade of Pale

 

 

You could say that Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier have long skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor, and have seen so many ceilings flying away in their career.

But not until this season have they lived it in song, skating to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” as their enchanting free dance. Next week, the Canadian champions will compete with it at the world figure skating championships in Boston, aiming for a medal. They are reigning world silver medalists, and last season, won the free dance. Maybe they will win this one, too.

Maybe they will win the world title, especially after having defeated reigning world champs Madison Chock and Evan Bates at the Four Continents Championships in Korea last month. This will be their twelfth world championship. It’s time.

Their “Whiter Shade of Pale” is the latest in a line of epic free dances they have shown in the last half-dozen years. There was “James Bond; the exquisite “Vincent” – music provided by British buskers to spec; “Both Sides Now”, a song that grows darker as you go; “The (wistful) Long and Winding Road”, the passionate “Evita”  and the most haunting of all: “Wuthering Heights” which balanced love and hate on a thin blade last season.

The thing about their free dances is that they are not just a jumbling together of fine required elements, or the slip of an edge, or smiles and arm movements in all the right places. They are works of art. And “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is the ultimate work of art. Just imagine what those choreographic wizards Carol Lane and Juris Razgulajevs have done this time with movement and THIS music.

“A Whiter Shade of Pale” came up in the conversation because it had been the favourite song of Lane’s father: a 1967 hit by the British band Procol Harum, who unleashed it on their debut album.

Back in the swinging sixties, band founder Gary Brooker had been sitting at a piano, aiming to play “Air on a G String” by Bach, when suddenly he realized that he had sort of lost his way in the music and had gone in a different direction after the first two bars. “I thought I had got it wrong or didn’t remember where it went,” he said in an interview, but he continued. In this way, he wrote a memorable sequence with “Air on a G String” as a spark.

Shortly afterward, Brooker received an envelope in the mail; it contained some new song lyrics from friend Keith Reid. The inspiration for one had come when Reid had been at a party, and overheard a conversation about  a friend who looked not herself, quite pale. In his mind, the words: “a whiter shade of pale” lit up. The first set of lyrics that Brooker opened went like this:

“We skipped the light fandango

turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor.

I was feeling kind of seasick

but the crowd called out for more.

The room was humming harder

as the ceiling flew away.

When we called out for another drink

the waiter brought a tray.

And so it was that later

as the miller told his tale [Actually a reference to ancient poet Geoffrey Chaucer]

that her face, at first just ghostly,

turned a whiter shade of pale.

She said: ‘There is no reason

and the truth is plain to see.’

But I wandered through my playing cards

and would not let her be

one of sixteen vestal virgins

who were leaving for the coast

and although my eyes were open

they might have just as well’ve been closed.”

For decades, folk have been trying to figure out the meaning of the mystic words. But Reid, who wrote the lyrics, was a visual sort of musician, who loved painting, cinema, abstract things and was always on the lookout for how he could translate those visuals into words for a singing voice. He loved surrealist painters like Salvador Dali and his melting clock. It was a psychedelic time, a search for higher consciousness.

Some people think the song is about a decadent seduction, but Reid says he was only trying to conjure a mood rather than tell a story. He wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images. He was just trying to be evocative. He was too young, he said, to have experienced any decadence. He was 20 years old when he wrote the song.

Despite the times, the lyrics were inspired by books, not drugs, he said.

Painters could express what they felt with brush strokes. Reid wanted to make the song’s words to feel like a Dali painting looks.

So here are Gilles and Poirier turning the words and the music back into visuals.

The song came out before The Beatles’ rather psychedelic “Sergeant Pepper” album and “it was the very first attempt to really go off into another angle,” Brooker said. The band’s name – Procol Harum – meant “far beyond these things.” (Or it is said to be named after a friend’s male blue Burmese cat, although they took the wrong spelling over the phone.)

At the time, there was nothing on the radio like “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” It was written in good old C major, but it shocked and affected everybody. It crazily combined piano and organ. (Few had done that before because it was troublesome to schlep both a piano and an organ around in a van.)

“A Whiter Shade of Pale” became everybody’s memory of the Summer of Love of 1967. Flower power. Gauze shirts and braid. Long hair. Toking in the corners. It has become one of the most commercially successful singles in history, selling more than 10-million copies. It is everybody’s slow dance. It had Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson saying when he heard it: “I imagined myself at my own funeral.”

So Lane and Razgulajevs took this epic music and made it a show program for Gilles and Poirier for the Stars on Ice tour last spring. It was so successful, it became their free dance for this pre-Olympic season.

And how clever: they used “Air on a G String” as a bridge for the Procol Harum music, sung by Annie Lennox. What could make more sense? And Lane gave it an extra twist, seeing it as a tango. I don’t think Brooker would ever have envisioned the Bach-like music as a tango. But I’m sure he would have been intrigued. (He died at age 76 on Feb. 19, 2022 of cancer.)

And true to Reid’s purpose, Gilles and Poirier do not try to tell a story with the music. There is no explaining ceilings that fly away or 16 vestal virgins leaving for the coast.

“It really isn’t a program about a story or a theme,” Gilles said. “It’s just more about beautiful movements with the essence of tango and beautiful movements between two people and classic ice dance skating,” Gilles said.

It’s an exercise in ice dance that one rarely sees today: intricate holds, beautiful lines. Gilles and Poirier grew up doing these things.

“We left the program ambiguous,” Poirier said. “And we want it to be ambiguous. If you pay attention to the lyrics, they kind of mean everything. And then, they don’t really mean anything at the same time.

“So we’ve left the program open-ended because that’s how the song feels to us. That’s how the music feels to us. And sometimes questions are more interesting than stories, if that makes sense.”

So far this season, they’ve had questions to ask of themselves, and they seem to have answered them. They started earlier than last season, then found they were tired by the Grand Prix Final. They won Skate Canada International, then finished second in the Finlandia Trophy, but were only fourth in the free skate after their blades collided in the twizzles.

At the Grand Prix Final, Poirier hit the boards in a pattern step sequence and fell. They finished a distant sixth in the rhythm dance but rebounded to finish second in the free, fourth overall.

Their sublime performance at the national championships in January was a confidence builder, having figured it all out. They won the rhythm dance by a wide margin and a score of 91.84.

All of that was enough to send them off with a bundle of confidence to Four Continents, where they won the rhythm dance over the two-time world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates. Although second in the free skate, they had enough to win their last event before worlds.

That win wasn’t enough to change the mindset of the veterans, who have seen and endured everything. “We’ve been training confidently since the end of the Grand Prix season,” Poirier said. “Things have gone to plan, the way we wanted to. We know exactly how we wanted to develop the programs through the second half of the season.”

They are going to Boston, believing in their abilities, but that, Poirier said, had more to do with preparation than anything else. They are well trained, but not being over-trained is even more important.

“We know what sells and what does well and what shows off our best skating,” Poirier said. “So it’s really a luxury of time and having the energy to do those things.”

They are rested and ready to push. Let the ceilings fly.