Enter Keith Reid, Dragging A Coffin

Early in 1966, while The Paramounts were still struggling on and long before Brooker realised he would have to make it on his own, Guy Stevens introduced him to a would-be poet who was trying to break into songwriting. Brooker recalled the circumstances of the meeting to UCLA Radio in 2001:

One day, he said: 'This is Keith Reid. He writes words'. And I said: 'Oh, really? I've never written music before. Why would I want to do that when there's all this good stuff around to play?' But I remember being handed a bag full of his lyrics. In fact, I think I went home stoned and didn't find it until quite some months later. There was a vague recollection of where I got it, and when I opened it up, I think there were about ten lyrics in there, which were absolutely marvellous. And as soon as I read them, I sat down and wrote a song with the first one.

For Sounds in 1971, he added:

I went to the piano and, for the first time in my life, composed a song. The words had to do with a tombstone following Keith around. I didn't discover until afterwards that these were the first words he'd written. That same afternoon, I received a letter from Keith. It asked me to ring him and closed with a line from the words he'd written about the tombstone. We spoke and decided to work together.

That song, 'Something Following Me', became the template for all that followed: a sly, enigmatic tale of a man pursued - a little comically but with fierce intensity - by his own inescapable death.

Reid also asserted that this was his first song. In 1969, he told Crawdaddy magazine that the song was 'the first song lyric I wrote', by which I take it he means the first set of words that became a finished professional song. It may just as easily have meant that Reid sent Brooker some very old and much- rejected work. 'Something Following Me' was certainly not the first time Reid had heard his words set to music. In his teens, he'd tried writing songs with neighbour Marc Feld (later Marc Bolan). More recently, Reid had given two lyrics to singer Michel Polnareff - 'Time Will Tell' and 'You'll Be On My Mind' - which were released on Polnareff's French-chart-topping album Love Me, Please Love Me in spring, 1966.

That Brooker and Reid hit it off is surprising, given their quite different experiences in the industry. Brooker had had some minor success in The Paramounts, including appearing on Ready, Steady Go! and playing a couple of dates supporting The Beatles. Reid - who was just over a year younger than him - had practically nothing to show for himself in his home country. The closest he came to a breakthrough was when he managed to get a sheaf of lyrics to Steve Winwood of The Spencer Davis Group, but Reid recalled that that band's lyricist Jim Capaldi ensured that Reid was muscled out. There was even a chance that Reid might write for the newly formed Cream, but Pete Brown got that gig.

Reid's bookish and somewhat severe look was never likely to make him a frontman, even if he'd wanted to be (though it was possible, as Robert Fripp demonstrated), so instead, he positioned himself as a Coleridge of the suburbs, charting macabre seas of the imagination. Reid never seemed to like to talk openly about himself and may well have dissembled just how scholarly he really was. For example, he told The Argotist in 2008: 'I never read any poetry at school. I never really read any poetry until sometime in the '90s'.

He also admitted to failing his eleven-plus and being an academic washout. 'I wasn't any good at academic work', he told The Times of London in 1972. But in The Daily Express in 1997, he spun quite a different tale:

My mother taught me to read at a very early age when I was about four or so, and I read constantly and voraciously until I left school when I was 15. I'd go to Mile End Library. My parents let me use their ticket, so I used to go not just into the children's library but upstairs in the grown-up's library as well. I just used to grab anything off the shelf that looked interesting. It was my escape, really. I escaped into a world of books.

And for sure, his work is peppered with classical allusions, as well as the Biblical references you'd expect of a Jewish poet steeped in introspection. Reid proudly noted that while he was working in the city as a legal clerk, he'd pop over to Foyles bookshop at lunchtime and immerse himself in literature. Thus inspired, he'd secretly write lyrics at his desk.

In Crawdaddy in 1970, Brooker noted the enigma at the heart of Reid's quasi-academic approach to writing: 'In 'Pilgrim's Progress', I'd never read the book of the same name - by John Bunyan, isn't it? - and I read what must have been the preface, and it was exactly the same tone as Keith's words. So I said to him, 'Have you read this?' and he said 'No'. And it was exactly the same. Not the same words, but the same tone'.

What Reid certainly did have by the time he began writing songs with Brooker was a mutual appreciation for another Jewish poet steeped in introspection: Bob Dylan. Reid told UCLA Radio in 2002: 'Without question, Bob Dylan was a huge influence on me, right at the beginning. He was the first person that when I heard him, I thought, 'Hmm, maybe I could do that'. So although I'd liked a lot of music and liked a lot of songs before then, it was Dylan that made me think I could write'.

By and large, Brooker and Reid's working technique wouldn't alter from their first days together in 1966 to the sundering of their professional relationship after The Well's On Fire in 2003. According to Reid, the lyric tended to come first. He'd post it to Brooker, and Brooker would feel his way around the piano until he'd invented a way to frame it into a song. Reid told Goldmine in 2009:

His method was basically to sit down at the piano and put some lyrics up there and just play around with some chords, see if anything fit. And then if he'd get an idea, get a spark of something, he'd give me a call and say: 'I think I've got something which will maybe work with this. Why don't you come and have a listen and see what you think?'. We'd get together and he'd play me sort of bits and pieces, and I'd say, 'Oh yeah, I think that works well. Why don't you maybe go somewhere here or go somewhere there?' or 'I think we've got it'. We'd just generally have these kinds of songwriting sessions and pull the songs together.

The place the two men's versions of events differed markedly is that often Brooker would already have a tune, and would look for a Reid lyric to fit it. Brooker told SongwriterUniverse in 2020: 'I'd have ideas sitting at the piano, just waiting for the right thing to come along. And that's the way it happened most times. There is an idea I would have, and suddenly, there was a lyric there that was perfect. Because I was a singer, I could vocalise, so you can make any lyric fit your musical lines because you're singing it. So the phrasing is up to me'.

Phrasing aside, Brooker wouldn't mess too much with the words, choosing instead to develop lyrics or reject them wholesale based on whether he thought they suited him. In 2018, he told Prog magazine: 'I always had a whole folder of Reid's lyrics that didn't get used. Sometimes the idea was too brief, and I couldn't fit it into something, or it didn't spur an idea. Now and again, there would be something I liked, but there would be some words in it that I just couldn't sing. Sometimes Reid just said, 'Oh, okay', and didn't try to change it. So it never got done'.

Reid's resistance to change the lyrics as originally written seems to have caused the most friction between the two men. During the press rounds for Novum - the only Procol Harum album written with Pete Brown - Brooker stressed how great it was to finally work with a lyricist who didn't mind if you asked for rewrites. Still, once the song was in progress, the pair worked it up to a finished state together, as Reid told Zigzag in 1973: 'I always know what it's like before we go in and record it. That's the strength or weakness of the relationship, you know. The better the words and music come together, the more perfect the marriage, the better the song. The most successful songs we do are the best marriages of words and music'.

Like Dylan in 1965, Reid's lyrics were often opaque to everyone else. Certainly, Brooker had little clue as to their true meaning. Though Reid's work became less painterly and more direct in 1971 when he shifted his allegiance from Dylan to Randy Newman, the abiding feel of early Procol Harum is of a mysterious dreamlike suspension in which everyday objects and events are transformed not so much into drug-like states but into that unsteady and somewhat queasy liminal space between hard reality and the tricks of the subconscious - the surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico or Leonora Carrington placed in contemporary urban settings. Reid admitted to being influenced by painters, in particular Francis Bacon. Much of this early work is dark, haunted and subtly menacing, and it's no...