On This Day 18/02/1977 Procul Harum

On this day, 18 February 1977, rock band Procul Harum played Cardiff University.

Formed in 1967. Their best-known recording is the 1967 hit single "A Whiter Shade of Pale", one of the few singles to have sold over 10 million copies.

Although noted for their baroque and classical influence, Procol Harum's music is described as psychedelic rock and proto-prog with hints of the blues, R&B, and soul.

Guy Stevens their manager, named the band after a Burmese cat, which had been bred by Eleonore Vogt-Chapman and belonged to Liz Coombes. The cat's "cat fancy" name was Procul Harun, Procul being the breeder's prefix.

In the absence of a definitive origin, the band's name has attracted various interpretations, being said to be (incorrect) Latin for "beyond these things"; the correct Latin would be procul hīs.

Band member Keith Reid describes how the name came about:

It's the name of a cat, a Siamese cat. It's the pedigree name, and it belonged to a friend of ours, just somebody that we used to hang out with when we were forming the band. One day, somebody pulled out the cat's birth certificate and said 'Have a look at this', and the name of the cat was Procol Harum. And somebody else, in fact a chap called Guy Stevens who was quite instrumental in Gary [Brooker, the singer and pianist] and myself getting together in the first place, said, 'Oh, you must call the group Procol Harum'. And we just accepted that. We never even questioned it, never even thought if it was a good name, we just went ahead with that suggestion.

Once we put the record out, people started to say, 'Oh, it's Latin, and it means 'beyond these things'. But in fact, we had spelled it incorrectly. It should have been P-R-U-C-U-L, I think, or P-R-U-C-O-L H-A-R-U-M. I believe that's right anyway. If we'd spelled it correctly; it would have meant beyond these things. But it seemed quite apt. That was it really. It was the suggestion of a friend and we just stuck with it.