I bought this album after hearing '(The System of) Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether' on Radio Hauraki in Auckland and I was intrigued. I used to read a lot of gothic horror anthologies such as Poe and wondered how they put some of his other works to music.
Here's a bit of trivia. Radio Hauraki started life as a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship in the Hauraki Gulf from 1966 but then became legitimate in the 70s. From 1983-85 one of the presenters was none other than Philip Schofield. I remember first seeing him on New Zealand TV in 1982 when he was just 19, as host of a music show called 'Shazam!'.
Back to the topic, The Alan Parsons Project - and what a project it was. Basically just two guys, Alan Parsons himself, audio engineer, producer, musician and composer and Eric Woolfson, songwriter, composer, pianist and singer. They met in the canteen of Abbey Road Studios in 1974, so that was a good start.
Due to their common musical background and contacts they knew a lot of people in the industry, so when they began making their own stuff, instead of getting together a permanent band they tended to use people best suited to the music they were producing. The Project did have a few recurring regulars, but the line-up of guest artists over the years is quite staggering. This was their first album and they brought in some great talent. The core of the session musicians was made up of members of both Pilot and Ambrosia but some of the individuals who played on certain tracks were stars in their own right. People like Francis Monkman who was a founder of Curved Air (Vinyl Vault 18 June 2020) played piano and harpsichord. Laurence Juber who played guitar with Wings for 3 years, Terry Sylvester, ex member of The Swinging Blue Jeans and The Hollies. The list goes on.
Perhaps my favourite song on the album featured a real blast from the past. Remember 'Fire' by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown? (Vinyl Vault 5 Nov 2020) Arthur comes along and does lead vocals on the excellent track 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. If you're familiar with 'Fire' then Arthur is immediately recognisable on 'Tell-Tale Heart' as soon as he lets out the first primaeval scream !! Add the rhythmic drumming imitating a heartbeat and some wailing synth and the result is a gothic song taken from a gothic story. The lyrics follow the downward spiral of the narrator ..
"Louder and louder
Till I could tell the sound was not within my ears
You should have seen me
You would have seen my eyes grow white and cold with fear"
There's some dark lyrics in the following track too, 'The Cask of Amontillado' where Fortunato pleads for his life in alternate lines ..
"(Spare me my life only name your reward)
Part of you dies each brick I lay
(Bring back some light in the name of the Lord)
You'll feel your mind slipping away"
Going back to Arthur Brown and talking of primaeval screams, one of the guest vocalists on the later album 'Eve' was Clare Torry. Alan Parsons knew Clare from when he was the engineer on Pink Floyds 'Dark Side of the Moon'. He found Clare and she improvised the very memorable wordless vocals on 'The Great Gig in the Sky' where she treated her voice as another instrument.
Side 2 of the album is almost wholly taken up with the 16 minute opus 'The Fall of the House of Usher', which is split into 5 instrumental movements. The year after this original vinyl pressing was released Alan Parsons did a remix and one of the additions was some narration by Orson Welles. He added voice to 'A Dream Within a Dream' as well as the Prelude to 'The Fall of the House of Usher' taking that particular section from 5:52 minutes to 7:02 mins in total. Curiously, neither piece of narration is a direct quote or reference to the works they attach to.
After enjoying 'Tales Of Mystery And Imagination' I followed with the APP's next album in 1977, 'I Robot'. Amongst the guest artists featured here were Alan Clarke (from the Hollies) and Steve Harley (Cockney Rebel). This album released 'I Wouldn't Want to be Like You' as the featured single.
Perhaps their best known charting single was 'Eye in the Sky' from the album of the same name in 1982 where, unusually, Eric Woolfson carried it through on lead vocals
The 'Project' in it's original form sort of faded away a bit around 1990 and both the principles began solo works. Alan Parsons' first album 'Try Anything Once' stuck to the formulae of guests and included Eric Stewart (The Mindbenders) and Chris Thompson from Manfred Manns Earth Band, who did the magnificent vocals on their version of Springsteen's 'Blinded By the Light' (Vinyl Vault 30 June 2021).
I was totally impressed by the fact that in 2004 on his solo album 'A Valid Path' not only did Parsons have Orson Welles narrating again, he also had John Cleese doing the same, but what really blew me away was that on the first track 'Return to Tunguska' he featured the pairing of David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) and the psychedelic electronic music duo Shpongle. I came across Shpongle a few years ago after listening to their album 'Tales of the Inexpressible' and particularly the track 'A New Way To Say 'Hooray!' I suppose there is a connection between the two - the track 'A New Way ...' samples a lecture by Terence McKenna where he references a Pink Floyd song 'The Gnome' from the album 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' so on reflection, Gilmour and Shpongle are not such strange bedfellows.
Between his work on album production and engineering for other artists and his project and solo work, Alan Parsons has been a force to be reckoned with in the music industry for decades. He deserves to be heard.
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