The Alan Parsons Project was a British progressive rock band from the late 70s to the late 80s.
Alan Parsons was the man behind the mixing desk of, among others, Abbey Road (The Beatles) and Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd). With his own project, Alan Parsons scored two big hits in our country in the early 80s: 'Don't Answer Me' and 'Old And Wise', sung by Colin Blunstone.
It was clear early on that Alan Parsons’ future lay in music. As a child, he was excellent at playing piano, guitar and recorder. Yet Parsons chose the other side of music and became a producer. In the late sixties, Parsons got a job at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. Here he had the chance to work on various projects by The Beatles, including the much-acclaimed album Abbey Road (1969) and the song 'Let It Be'.
When The Beatles broke up, negotiations followed between Alan Parsons and Paul McCartney. Parsons became the producer of some early works of McCartney’s band Wings, including the album Red Rose Speedway. At the same time, he also worked with The Hollies and produced, among others, the well-known 'The Air That I Breathe'. But after his involvement in the Pink Floyd album Dark Side Of The Moon (1973), Parsons’ career as a producer really took off. Almost everyone who mattered in the music world wanted to work with Alan Parsons afterwards.
Themes
Parsons contributed to the production of records by Pilot, Steve Harley, John Miles and Al Stewart. With the latter, he worked on the concept album Time Passages, which gave Parsons an idea. Together with Eric Woolfson, with whom he had worked at Abbey Road Studios, he decided to start working for themselves for the first time and to make concept albums. In 1974, the two gentlemen began their first project: a musical interpretation of the work of the writer Edgar Allan Poe. After nearly two years of sifting through thousands of tapes, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, the first album of the Alan Parsons Project, was a fact.
Gold and platinum
The duo’s next work was I Robot, inspired by the science fiction stories of Isaac Asimov. Continuing Pink Floyd’s tradition of approaching serious subjects with music, The Project then made an album about ancient myths, Pyramids. A year later came Eve, about women’s issues. Both albums went gold in England and in 1980 the two gentlemen made their first platinum album: The Turn Of A Friendly Card.
In 1982, Alan Parsons Project experienced its greatest success. The album Eye In The Sky became a big hit and the title track stormed into the top ten of the charts. The Project continued making concept albums. Gaudi was made in 1987 with the Spanish architect as the main theme. The album was praised worldwide, but the success of Eye In The Sky was never matched. Parsons and Woolfson finally made the psychoanalytical Freudiana in 1993, which was not released as an album but as a musical. After the premiere, the two decided to part ways and to end the Alan Parsons Project.
The Scottish composer and co-founder of The Alan Parsons Project, Eric Woolfson, passed away on 3 December 2009.
The Alan Parsons Project has 4 songs in the Top 2000 of 2020:
Sunday Morning Classic: Eye in the Sky
On 21 March 2021, The Alan Parsons Project with the album "Eye in the Sky" was our Sunday Morning Classic.
The album begins with the well-known Sirius, a short, gripping, bombastic instrumental. The track leads into the title song (one of the best pop rock songs of the 80s), which reached number 3 in the American charts. It has an 'eighth-note pumping bass' arrangement with pleasant guitar strumming. The song has a very pleasant vibe and an immediately catchy melody, with great vocals by Eric Woolfson.
Children of the Moon is a mid-tempo rocker that is taken to another dimension thanks to the excellent orchestral arrangements by Andrew Powell. It is a beautifully versatile piece, complete with chords and string and brass orchestrations.
On Silence and I, the band used a full symphony orchestra conducted by Powell. The song opens and closes like a ballad.
The middle section, however, is a huge sequence that makes use of the full capacity of a symphony orchestra. The result is one of the best orchestrated songs APP has ever made.
The tempo picks up a bit on You're Gonna Get Your Fingers Burned, and this is really more of an 80s pop-rock song. Quite a catchy tune that could have been a single. Psychobabble is a classic, built on a rhythm section, plus the addition of pounding keyboards.
Mammagamma is an instrumental, almost entirely played by a computer. For Step by Step, a very interesting guitar sound was created, but it is nevertheless the weakest track on the album.
Eye in the Sky ends with the rhapsodic ballad Old and Wise, a return to APP’s slow, melodic style. Sung with breathtaking melancholy by ex-Zombies singer Colin Blunstone, he delivers the sentimental lyrics straight to the heart. His presence is so defining that the song is a classic because of him, and Eye in the Sky’s most moving moment, expertly closed with a saxophone solo by Mel Collins.
(source: Jan Liebregts, NPO and Wikipedia)
