Home is the darkest album Procol Harum ever made. Released in 1970, it followed the majestic A Salty Dog into distinctly murkier water: gone was Matthew Fisher’s baroque organ, in came a harder, bluesier attack led by Robin Trower’s guitar, and Keith Reid’s words turned gothic and macabre. If Edgar Allan Poe had played electric guitar, someone once observed, he might have made a record like this. It is uneven, unsettling, and home to Whaling Stories, one of the band’s greatest achievements.

The short version

Home (1970) is Procol Harum’s fourth album, and the first without organist Matthew Fisher, who left after A Salty Dog along with bassist David Knights. In their place came a single man, Chris Copping, covering both organ and bass — which made the band a four-piece and pushed Robin Trower’s guitar to the front. The result is their hardest-rocking early album and by some distance their bleakest, with Keith Reid’s lyrics turning toward mortality and the gothic throughout. It was the band’s first record with producer Chris Thomas, who would stay with them for years. It reached number thirty-four in America and number forty-nine in Britain, and its eight-minute closing epic, Whaling Stories, is one of the most ambitious things they ever wrote.

The Paramounts, reunited

There is a lovely symmetry to how this line-up came about. When Fisher and Knights left, Brooker, Trower and B.J. Wilson brought in Chris Copping — and with that, the four men who had played together years earlier in a Southend rhythm-and-blues group called the Paramounts were back in the same band, this time called Procol Harum. That was rather the point: they wanted some of the old R&B muscle back. The sessions were not straightforward. Fisher had actually begun producing the album before he departed, and the band scrapped that work, regrouped at Abbey Road, and started again with a young engineer-turned-producer named Chris Thomas, then working alongside George Martin. Copping was handed an unenviable job — replacing two men at once, one of them the author of the most famous organ part in British rock — and acquitted himself well, though the loss of Fisher’s classical touch is audible, and it is Trower who fills the space.

The sound

Home is heavier, tighter and grimmer than anything Procol Harum had done. Robin Trower’s guitar dominates, bluesy and muscular, with B.J. Wilson’s relentless drumming behind it; Gary Brooker’s piano and rich, soulful voice still anchor everything, and Chris Copping’s organ fills in the old textures without quite recapturing them. What really sets the album apart is its atmosphere. Keith Reid’s words here are gothic and macabre, preoccupied with mortality from almost every angle, and Brooker sets them to music that is by turns funereal, thunderous and strangely beautiful. Much of the record plays like an operatic lament. It is not comfortable listening — but it is vivid, and unlike anything else in their catalogue.

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The songs

Whisky Train opens the album and stands slightly apart from it: a hard, driving twelve-bar rocker written by Trower, riding a great riff and a herd of cowbells, and a clear nod to the Elvis Presley of Mystery Train. It was the single, and it is where Trower first really lets go on a Procol record. From there the mood darkens sharply. The Dead Man’s Dream is a slow, cinematic piano-and-organ dirge, the album at its most gothic; Still There’ll Be More is bitter and unsettling; and Nothing That I Didn’t Know is the record’s tender exception, a lovely acoustic lament that hints at the fine folk-rock album this band never made. About to Die, another Trower song, is heavy and brooding. Side two brings Barnyard Story, with Copping on harmonium, the grim Piggy Pig Pig, and then the album’s summit: Whaling Stories, eight minutes of slow-building, dramatic, full-blooded Procol Harum, as ambitious as anything they attempted and magnificent on stage for years afterwards. Your Own Choice closes proceedings on a lighter note. Even the sleeve is odd — a garish little board game featuring the band members’ grinning heads.

Reception and legacy

The music press of 1970 loved it. The NME called it a historic landmark and one of the finest albums of recent years; Rolling Stone praised Trower’s wailing, Hendrix-inflected guitar; and several magazines declared Procol Harum among the best rock bands going. Later opinion has been more divided. Some critics and fans hold Home to be a step down from A Salty Dog, finding the arrangements thinner without Fisher and the relentless gloom hard going. Others count it a favourite precisely for that darkness, and AllMusic has called it the band’s hardest-rocking classic. Both readings have merit. What is settled is its place in the story: this is where Procol Harum stopped being a baroque organ band and became a guitar band — a direction that would reach its peak, and its breaking point, on Broken Barricades a year later.

The verdict

Home is not the album to start with — A Salty Dog comes first, and Grand Hotel probably second — and its unbroken gloom will not suit every mood or every listener. A couple of tracks are more striking than satisfying, and the loss of Matthew Fisher’s organ leaves a hole that even a fine guitarist cannot entirely fill. But there is real power here: Whisky Train rocks as hard as they ever did, Nothing That I Didn’t Know is quietly beautiful, and Whaling Stories is a genuine masterpiece that belongs on any serious Procol Harum playlist. For anyone who has fallen for this band and wants their strangest, bleakest corner, Home rewards the trip.

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