Progressive rock is mostly made by bands: four or five people who learned to play together. The Alan Parsons Project was two men who never toured, a pool of session players, and a rotating cast of guest singers.

The short version

Formed in London in 1975 by producer and engineer Alan Parsons and writer Eric Woolfson, the Project built concept albums in the studio rather than on the road, with orchestral parts arranged by Andrew Powell, a fixed core of players and rotating guest vocalists. From Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1976 to Gaudi in 1987 they made ten studio albums, most of them for Arista, peaking commercially with Eye in the Sky in 1982.

Two men in the Abbey Road canteen

Parsons was an Abbey Road engineer with a reputation built on other people’s landmark records. Woolfson, whom he met in the studio canteen in the summer of 1974, set out to manage him and ended up as his co-writer. What they set up in 1975 inverted the usual order: Woolfson arrived with a theme, the two wrote the songs together, Parsons produced and engineered, and only then did they decide who should sing them. Andrew Powell arranged and conducted the orchestral parts on nearly every record.

A different singer every time

The rotating-singer model is easy to get wrong, and it is the thing that defines the band. There is no frontman. On I Robot alone seven different people take lead vocals, and across the catalogue Colin Blunstone, John Miles, Lenny Zakatek, Chris Rainbow, Arthur Brown and Gary Brooker come and go according to what a song needs. Parsons himself almost never sings. Woolfson only steps up in 1980, and from then on his plain, conversational delivery becomes the closest thing the Project has to a signature voice.

If this is your scene, the books go deeper →

The band that played live once

For a group with ten albums and a platinum record, the live history is almost nothing: across the original run the Project performed under that name a single time. The reasons were structural. Both principals occupied the writing and production chairs rather than the stage, and the records were built from layers, guest singers and orchestral parts that would have needed a touring company to reproduce. The albums are studio artefacts, with no contemporary live document to set beside them.

From Poe to Barcelona

The debut came out on Charisma in Britain and 20th Century Records elsewhere; from I Robot in 1977 everything went to Arista. Pyramid, Eve and The Turn of a Friendly Card each reached the American top thirty, and Eye in the Sky took them to number 7 with a platinum album and a number three single. Ammonia Avenue went to number one in Germany and the Netherlands. Then Vulture Culture and Stereotomy arrived within about a year of each other, Sounds and Musician both panned the second of them, and Gaudi closed the original run in 1987.

Album by album

Ten studio albums between 1976 and 1987, each built around a theme and a shifting cast of voices. Tap any title for its guide.

The players who kept coming back

The pool of players is what gives the records their consistency. Ian Bairnson plays guitar on all ten albums; David Paton is on bass for nine; Stuart Tosh drums on the first two and Stuart Elliott on the eight that follow. After the partnership ended Parsons carried on under his own name and took many of those same session players onto the road as the Alan Parsons Live Project — the touring band the original never had. Woolfson turned to writing for the stage, beginning with Freudiana.

Where to start

Start with I Robot (1977): the concept is loose, the studio work is at its most inventive, and it is where the sound arrives complete. Then Eye in the Sky (1982) for the songs that made their name, and The Turn of a Friendly Card (1980) for the sixteen-minute suite that is the longest piece they wrote.

Why they still matter

The Project matter because they proved a producer could be an author. Almost everything here was built rather than performed — sequenced, layered, arranged and cast — at a time when that was still an odd way to make a rock record, and the method has since become ordinary. Their British chart placings stayed modest while their American ones did not, which says something about where a meticulously produced album found its audience. Four decades on the records still sound like nobody else.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →