The Salmon of Doubt

I’ve been a very great fan of Gary Brooker and Procol Harum ever since thirty years ago when they suddenly surprised the world by leaping absolutely out of nowhere with one of the biggest hit records ever done by anybody at all ever under any circumstances. They then surprised the world even more by turning out to be from Southend and not from Detroit as everybody thought. They then surprised the world even more by their complete failure to bring out an album within four months of the single, on the grounds that they hadn’t written it yet. And then, in a move of unparalleled marketing shrewdness and ingenuity, they also actually left “A Whiter Shade of Pale” off the album. They never did anything straightforwardly at all, as anyone who’s ever tried to follow the chords of “A Rum Tale” will know.

Now, they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they did, which I expect some of you here will know, called “Grand Hotel.” Whenever I’m writing, I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular occasions I had “Grand Hotel” on the record player. This song always used to interest me because while Keith Reid’s lyrics were all about this sort of beautiful hotel—the silver, the chandeliers, all those kinds of things—but then suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn’t seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought, “It sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floor show going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe.” And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from—from “Grand Hotel.”

Anyway, enough from me. We’re in for a great night tonight. There’s no band quite like them. And tonight I’m glad to say the London Symphony Orchestra is going to sit in with them. So I’d like for you to welcome please—the London Symphony Orchestra; the Chameleon Arts Chorus; Procol Harum; the conductor, the great Nicholas Dodd; and Gentleman-Scholar-Musician, and I believe now also Rear Admiral—Gary Brooker. Thank you very much.

From the Procol Harum and London Symphony Orchestra concert, FEBRUARY 9, 1996

Hangover Cures In fact—if I may digress for a moment (and if you don’t want me to digress, then you may find that you are reading the wrong column)—it turns out that there may be a very good reason why we fail to keep our New Year’s Resolutions other than the obvious abject feebleness of will. It’s this. We can’t remember what they are. Simple. And if we actually wrote them down, then we probably can’t remember where we put the piece of paper, either. Oddly enough, the piece of paper has sometimes been known to turn up again exactly a year later when you’re casting around for something on which to write the next year’s abortive attempts to pull your life into some kind of shape. This is not, it turns out, a coincidence. Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that ...” or the craven “they say that .

. .” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?

It seems that the brain is affected by alcohol. Well, we know that, of course, and those who don’t yet are about to find out. But there are different gradations to the effect, and herein lies the crux. The brain organises its memories like a kind of hologram (it turns out). To retrieve an image, you have to re-create the exact conditions in which it was captured. In the case of a hologram, it’s the lighting, in the case of the brain it is, or can be (it turns out), the amount of alcohol sloshing around in it. Things that happen to you or, frighteningly enough, that you yourself say or do while under the influence of alcohol will only be recalled to your memory when you are under the influence of that exact same quantity of alcohol again.