Singer-songwriter and pianist Gary Brooker, who fronted the English proto-prog band Procol Harum and co-wrote their 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” has died of cancer, Rolling Stone reports. He was 76. The band announced his passing in a statement on their official website, writing, “Gary’s voice and piano were the single defining constant of Procol’s fifty-year international concert career. Without any stage antics or other gimmicks he was invariably the most watchable musician in the show.”

Brooker was born in Hackney in 1945. His father was a professional musician who played with Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders, and Brooker learned several instruments as a child. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he played in an R&B group called the Paramounts, who scored a minor hit in 1964 with a cover of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Poison Ivy” before breaking up in 1966. A year later, Brooker formed Procol Harum with lyricist Keith Reid, recruiting several former members of the Paramounts to join him.

Procol Harum’s debut single was the Bach-inspired “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” which Brooker wrote with Reid and organist Matthew Fisher and which became a hit in both the UK and the US. “His first single with Procol Harum, 1967’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale,’ is widely regarded as defining ‘The Summer Of Love’, yet it could scarcely have been more different from the characteristic records of that era,” the band wrote in their tribute to Brooker. “Nor was it characteristic of his own writing. Over thirteen albums Procol Harum never sought to replicate it, preferring to forge a restlessly progressive path, committed to looking forward, and making each record a ‘unique entertainment’.”

In addition to his work with Procol Harum, Brooker released several solo albums and performed and recorded with musicians like Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. He was appointed a Member Of The Order Of The British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honors in 2003 for his charitable work. Most recently, he raised over a million pounds for the Royal Marsden Hospital with a concert days before London’s first COVID lockdown in 2020.