An album about the gap between what scientists do and what the rest of us think they do, carried by a single built as a deliberate homage to Phil Spector, with an animated video that got a nomination at the first decade of the MTV awards.

The short version

Ammonia Avenue was released by Arista on 7 February 1984, with Parsons producing and engineering and Woolfson as executive producer. Its subject is the mutual misunderstanding between industrial science and the public that watches it. The album reached number 15 in the United States and number 24 in Britain, and went to number 1 in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It was certified gold in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Science, the public, and a Wall of Sound pastiche

Woolfson sings four of the nine tracks here, more than on any album before it, and the theme sits more lightly on these songs than on the concept albums that preceded them. The Philharmonia Orchestra plays Andrew Powell’s arrangements under leader Christopher Warren-Green; Mel Collins returns on saxophone; Chris Rainbow contributes keyboards as well as vocals. The title comes from an industrial road, and the sleeve keeps the image: pipework, vapour, and a landscape built by people who were not thinking about how it would look.

The sound

Lush, Spector-shadowed AOR. Parsons brings the Fairlight CMI onto four tracks and adds a LinnDrum to one of them, and the textures are heavy and glossy. The centrepiece is an open piece of homage: on ‘Don’t Answer Me’ Parsons deliberately worked in the manner of Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound, layering the parts until the record sounds like it was cut twenty years earlier. Around it, Bairnson’s guitar is economical and Elliott’s drums are heavily processed. One instrumental sits on the second side; everything else is a song.

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The songs

‘Don’t Answer Me’, sung by Woolfson, was released on 13 February 1984 and reached number 15 in the United States, number 4 on the American adult contemporary chart and number 1 in Canada. Its comic-book-styled animated video, directed by Michael Kaluta, was nominated for Most Experimental Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards. ‘Prime Time’, also with Woolfson on lead, followed in May 1984 and reached number 34. ‘Pipeline’ is the only instrumental on the record, and sits on the second side.

Reception and legacy

The trade press treated it as a band arriving at a settled sound rather than a band developing. Music Week called it an excellent album of adult-oriented rock, about as pop as the Project was ever likely to get; Billboard wrote that the sound was now fully established and that only minor revisions could be detected with each new set. Parke Puterbaugh reviewed it in Rolling Stone in April 1984. Commercially it was one of their strongest records in Europe, taking the top spot in three countries and going gold in five.

The verdict

Ammonia Avenue is the most consistent of the later albums and the one where Woolfson is most clearly the frontman rather than a guest among guests. If the pastiche on ‘Don’t Answer Me’ is your kind of thing it is a wonderful record; if you came for the instrumental writing of Pyramid you will find less of it here. Either way it is the last Project album where everything is working at once.

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