In 1976 an Abbey Road engineer stopped serving other people’s records and made one of his own. It had an orchestra, a choir, a vocoder and a different singer on almost every track, and the whole of it was built on the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

The short version

Tales of Mystery and Imagination was released on 25 June 1976 by Charisma in the UK and Ireland and by 20th Century Records elsewhere, and was cut mainly at Abbey Road. Alan Parsons produced and engineered, Eric Woolfson wrote with him and ran the project from the executive chair, and Andrew Powell arranged and conducted the orchestra and choir. It reached number 38 in the United States and number 56 in Britain. It is the only Alan Parsons Project album not released on Arista, and the only one whose songs all draw on a single author. The lyrics are original writing by Woolfson and Parsons rather than Poe’s own text.

A producer steps out from behind the desk

Parsons had engineered at Abbey Road and had a reputation made on other people’s landmark records. Woolfson, whom he met in the Abbey Road canteen in the summer of 1974, began as his manager and ended as his co-writer. What the two of them formed in London in 1975 was not a band in any ordinary sense: no fixed singer, no touring line-up, and across its whole original run the Project performed live under that name exactly once. What it had instead was a pool of players who came back record after record — Ian Bairnson on guitars, David Paton on bass, Stuart Tosh on drums — and a different guest voice for every song.

The sound

What this produces is gothic, orchestral art rock: a rock band, a full orchestra and the English Chorale under Andrew Powell, with the studio itself treated as an instrument rather than a room. Two of the seven pieces carry no vocal at all, including the five-part suite that fills most of the second side. Parsons appears on ‘The Raven’ through an EMI vocoder. John Leach adds cimbalom and kantele, and four members of the American band Ambrosia play on the second track. The whole thing sits closer to a scored dramatic work than to a rock album, which is more or less what a producer with a free hand and Abbey Road at his disposal would be expected to build.

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The songs

‘(The System of) Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether’, sung by John Miles, was the first of three singles and reached number 37 in the United States. ‘The Raven’ is the track that carries the vocoder, with Leonard Whiting on lead; he returns as narrator on the closing ‘To One in Paradise’, which Terry Sylvester sings. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a five-part instrumental suite and the only piece on the record credited to Woolfson, Parsons and Andrew Powell together rather than to the writing pair alone.

Reception and legacy

Reviews at the time split. Billy Altman, writing in Rolling Stone, judged that the record did not fully reproduce the tension of its source; Billboard called it a worthy blend of European rock and symphonic sounds, and Record World called it a considerable accomplishment for Parsons, Woolfson and Powell. Sales were strongest outside Britain, and the album was certified in several territories. In 1987 Parsons remixed it, adding narration by Orson Welles to the opening piece and to the extended prelude of the Usher suite — the version many listeners now meet first.

The verdict

Tales is the odd one out in the catalogue: the album where the orchestra does the heavy work rather than the decorating, and where the source material is a real body of writing rather than a theme. If you arrive from ‘Eye in the Sky’ you may find it stiff and stagey. If you arrive wanting to hear what a great engineer does when handed an orchestra, a choir and Abbey Road, it is the obvious place to begin.

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