Gary Brooker

More sad news from the music world. It seems all the pop stars that became legends are slipping off this mortal coil. Whiter shade of pale, I think, was just a set of ideas set to that brilliant organ riff, I don't think they were meant to make sense or tell a tale just entertain us as they obviously did and still do. Homburg was another great song they did. RIP Gary Brooker     

Hi Jim. I think you've mixed up the Gary Brookers my friend? The guy we are talking about was the pianist and vocalist in Procol Harum during the sixties, and several bands after they broke up.     

Cheers Jim and Phill

"B. J." Wilson  was the original drummer with Procol Harum. A brilliant drummer one of the best and was also in big demand as a session drummer. He played on recordings with Lulu and Cat Stevens to name two of the many he played for. Gary Brooker was a vocalist and piano player When I saw Procol Harum on stage they had two keyboard players. Matthew Fisher and Gary  Brooker.  Mathew played the Hammond organ on the 1967 single "A Whiter Shade of Pale", for which he ended up winning a songwriting credit.

I found this below on Wikipedia in answer to Jim’s question where did their name come from.

Band name
Stevens became their manager, and named the band after a Burmese cat, which had been bred by Eleonore Vogt-Chapman and belonged to Liz Coombes The cat's pedigree name was Procul Harum, 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.

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.

The name of the band is frequently misspelled; often with "Procul", "Harem", both, or other variations.