This is the Alan Parsons Project album that reached everyone: a number three American single, a number seven album, and a two-minute instrumental opener that has been played at basketball games for forty years.

The short version

Eye in the Sky was released by Arista on 14 May 1982 and recorded at Abbey Road across 1981 and 1982. It reached number 7 on the Billboard 200, went platinum in the United States and topped the charts in Austria, Germany and Spain, while stopping at number 27 in Britain. It carries two instrumentals, six different lead singers, and the pair of tracks — ‘Sirius’ and the title song — that are still the best known things the Project recorded.

The one everybody knows, and the instrumental in front of it

By 1982 the working method had been in place for six years, and this is what it produced at full stretch. Woolfson sings two leads including the title track; Lenny Zakatek also takes two; David Paton, Chris Rainbow and Colin Blunstone take one each, Blunstone on the closing song; and Dave Terry, credited on some sleeves as Elmer Gantry, sings another. Unlike almost every album around it, this one carries no announced overarching theme in the sources. What holds it together is tone rather than subject, and the tone is watchfulness — which is why the title has been read as prescient ever since.

The sound

Polished, radio-shaped studio rock, assembled with unusual precision. Parsons handles the Fairlight, the programming and a LinnDrum; Woolfson covers Wurlitzer, piano and organ; Bairnson plays acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitar; Stuart Elliott drums. John Wallace adds piccolo trumpet to one track and Mel Collins the saxophone on the closer, with Andrew Powell arranging for brass band and orchestra and the English Chorale singing under Bob Howes. Nothing is loud, nothing is rushed, and every element sits exactly where it was put. It is the sound of a studio being used as a compositional tool rather than a recording room.

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The songs

‘Eye in the Sky’, sung by Woolfson, was released as a single in May 1982 and reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. ‘Sirius’ is the instrumental that opens the album and runs straight into it; since 1984 it has been played at Chicago Bulls home games, and since 1994 at Nebraska Cornhuskers football. ‘Old and Wise’ closes the record with Colin Blunstone singing and Mel Collins playing the saxophone solo, and was itself a single that December.

Reception and legacy

It became the Project’s best-selling album, certified platinum in the United States, Australia, France, New Zealand and Spain, double platinum in Canada, and gold or silver almost everywhere else. Critics were not uniformly kind: Ken Tucker in The Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed the record outright as banal. The engineering drew a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album in 1983, and the 35th-anniversary box set won Best Immersive Audio Album at the Grammys in 2019 — a nomination and a win thirty-six years apart for the same songs.

The verdict

If you want to understand why this band sold records for a decade, Eye in the Sky is where to look, and it holds up better than that framing suggests. The title song is a strange piece of pop — cold, watchful, built on a guitar figure that never resolves the way you expect — and ‘Old and Wise’ is the finest ballad in the catalogue. If you want the ambitious Parsons, go back to I Robot or the Friendly Card suite. If you want the one that reached everyone, it is right here.

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