Alan Parsons looks back with Jason Barnard at The Alan Parsons Project and their classic album Ammonia Avenue. This interview was drawn from the March 2020 Strange Brew Podcast with Alan.
Great to talk to you Alan. There’s a new box set coming out Ammonia Avenue. How much involvement did you have in assembling the package. It looks fantastic and has a great attention to detail.
Quite a bit. I mean. Obviously I had to write quite a bit. Sally Wilson did a great job in unearthing some really good memorabilia and that was really her department. I have a lot of that stuff myself but I’m in California, she’s in the UK, and that’s where it needed to be really and she did an excellent job compiling Eric (Woolfson)’s demos as well, but, yes I was heavily involved in the package, to be sure.
Yeah. Disc two, as you mentioned, features quite a lot of Eric’s demos and songwriting diaries. Listening back, was there anything that surprised you or was there anything new about it that you heard?
It’s always interesting to be reminded of the history of a song so, yeah, I mean I think his cassette recordings were interesting. You got to glimpse behind the scenes in the songwriting process. Sadly, when I came up with original songs or instrumentals, I didn’t often make demos. I just streamed straight into it in the studio. Which is why there’s no demos of the songs. You’ll notice that there’s no demo for “You Don’t Believe” and there’s no demo for the other instrumental song but it was really good to listen to the original multi-tracks again. The original mix did have a certain 80s feel to it because there was a drum sound very associated with the 80s period which was called Simmons and because I was given an opportunity to remix it I eased back on the Simmons drums a bit – and it was great to mix it in surround as well. I think it works really well in surround.
In relation to that, one of the singles off Ammonia Avenue was ‘Don’t Answer Me’. It’s got that sort of lovely wall of sound style backing.
It was a deliberate attempt to emulate the Phil Spector sound and that’s when we decided to give it that Spector treatment and that’s when it came together and we got excited about it. It was a single and it did very well.
The opening line refers to magic and there’s quite a lot of reoccurrence of magic throughout your career and I understand that’s also an interest.
It is very much. I put out an album in April last year called The Secret and that’s heavily influenced by my passion for magic, but I think “Don’t Answer Me” was not necessarily directed at my passion. It was Eric’s line, not mine. The video got a lot of exposure on MTV and I think it won some kind of animation award at the time. I just came off a month-long tour of Germany for the Night of the Proms. I don’t know if you are familiar with that.
Yes.
It’s an event that happens every year in Belgium and Germany and we actually showed the “Don’t Answer Me” video as a backdrop to playing the song live, so that was that a cool thing.
And, in relation to playing some of this material live, tracks like “Prime Time”, do you extend the material live as opposed to recording? Does it change?
Oh yeah, we give our lead guitarist a lengthy solo, much longer than on the record and we actually do guitar and keyboard lengthy solos from those when we play it live. It’s always been a very popular song and we tend to wrap up the show with that song before we leave the stage. We come back for an encore but that’s usually the last song of the main set.
You mentioned your most recent album The Secret. It does seem to encapsulate some of your classical influences like the opener of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Yes, indeed. We make no pretence. The piece was written by Paul Duca, a French composer, and the piece was immortalized in Fantasia. It’s the piece where Mickey Mouse is rushing around the magician’s lair carrying buckets of water and he casts a spell on a broom and the broom starts doing the carrying. Did you see Fantasia?
Yeah.
If you haven’t seen it you’ll say “what is he talking about?”
Yeah. Classic Disney.
Yes. It was essentially a rock version of the piece and a slightly abridged version. The original piece probably runs to eight or nine minutes. We’ve got it down to I think five or six. It was fun to do. We’ve got some great musicians on it. We’ve got Nathan East playing bass and Vinnie Colaiuta playing drums. It’s very challenging parts for those guys.
Is that the track with Steve Hackett on or is that another one?
Yes, it is. He does the lead guitar line. Interestingly Steve and I we were on a cruise at the beginning of last year and he’d already done the parts by then but we actually worked at a distance. He worked in his own studio at his own pace and we just communicated through hearing what he was up to, by sending files to each other. And some of the vocals on my Secret album were also recorded at a distance. I recorded Lou Gramm from Foreigner in New York while I was in Santa Barbara and Jason Mraz was in Dallas. So he was singing in Dallas and I was listening in Santa Barbara. It’s totally realistic these days to do that. Internet recording is here and it’s here to stay. It’s great.
And it’s interesting, in the run up to the creation of the Alan Parsons Project you had a lot of success as a producer. Was it two number ones that you produced – Pilot and Cockney Rebel just prior to it?
Yes. And the interesting thing, or the amazing thing, was that they were consecutive. The Cockney Rebel single “Come Up And See Me” took over from “January” as a number one so I was definitely drinking champagne that night when I found out that I’d had two consecutive number one hits. It was a great feeling.
And am I right that you met Eric in the canteen at Abbey Road?
Yes. He’d booked one of the studios, I think it was studio two, for a child prodigy known as Darren Burn and he was actually the son of an EMI executive and Eric had been taken on to produce him. He’d had some success as a songwriter previous to that but I just sensed he knew the sound recording business. I sensed that he had a really good knowledge of it and he offered to become my manager and that’s how it all started. Our original arrangement was pretty much business but it became creative very soon after we signed each other up for management.
So, working with Eric and then bringing in some of the musicians from Pilot and Ambrosia, that led to the recording of the first Project album Tales Of Mystery and Imagination?
Yeah. It just seemed to me an ideal situation that we had a self-contained band in Pilot that were used to working with each other, got on with each other, got on with me. So it just seemed like a really good starting point to make it the foundation of the first album and it worked really well. Sadly Billy Lyle (keyboards) passed away and wasn’t able to get beyond the first album but, yes, David Paton (acoustic and bass guitars), Ian Bairnson (electric and acoustic guitars), Stuart Tosh (drums/percussion) played on the first two albums and then Stuart Tosh went off to join 10cc. Then we’ve got Stuart Elliott (drums) from Cockney Rebel. It was all kind of family relationships. It was great.
Even then, you had a pioneering use of the vocoder in it. Tracks like “The Raven” experimentation?
Yeah. EMI’s research department had come up with a very primitive machine that was a nightmare to use. It was incredibly fussy on what levels and what sounds that you could produce with it, but it was a vocoder and it was, as far as I know, the first real use of vocoder on a rock album. So, yeah, it was a proud moment.
You followed that up with the I Robot album?
That’s right. That was 1977 and impeccably timed to coincide with the release of the first Star Wars movie so, yeah, it was a good piece of timing and it was also the era of punk rock. The Sex Pistols and so on. I don’t think anybody who was really into punk rock was really into the Alan Parsons Project but they were running concurrently – punk rock and our first couple of albums.
Do you think that’s why, in some ways, you had more success in the US and on the continent whereas it was a bit more the punk thing over here that tainted some of that?
It could be. The thing at the time was that we were heavily reliant on airplay and progressive rock, or what has now become known as classic rock, was just not Radio 1 fodder and you needed to be played on Radio 1 to get any kind of attention really.
We didn’t fit into the Radio 1 format whereas, in America, FM radio was incredibly strong and there were countless prog rock stations that were ready to play our music. Sometimes they’d play a whole side of an album, which is something Radio 1 certainly would never have done but, having said that, Alan Freeman was always very supportive of us and Bob Harris was always supportive but we just didn’t fit into the sort of day-to-day format of Radio 1 at the time.
And The Turn of a Friendly Card – a hugely successful album and an interesting concept. Am I right that you were living in Monte Carlo at the time?
We were. Yes. Eric and I both moved our families there and we actually recorded that album in Paris. We commuted to Paris for periods of a couple of weeks while still resident in Monte Carlo. It was a fun period. I had two young sons then who enjoyed the Côte D’Azur sunshine and the ocean and it was a fun time for everybody.
And is there a link in relation to Eye In The Sky, you know, hidden casino cameras etc?
Yeah. I think that was perhaps spelled out a little more in the Eye In The Sky album but yeah I think the lyric of “Eye In The Sky” covers the sort of the security camera, the hidden camera, the notion that we’re not alone. Every move we make is chronicled somehow.
And the link-in track to that, “Sirius”, has taken on a new life of its own across the media?
“Sirius”? Yes. It got picked up by the Chicago Bulls as Michael Jordan’s walk-on music and, ever since that day, countless sports events have used it, not just basketball. The New Orleans Saints American football team used it the year they won the Superbowl which was another great thing. People expect that we get very rich because of the countless plays that “Sirius” gets but it’s unfortunately not the case because it comes under the blanket agreement that stadiums have with the collection agencies, so we just get lumped in with all the music that gets played at stadiums and arenas and so on. So we never actually get directly paid for these things but, hey, I mean it’s good exposure and I’m very proud of the fact that it’s being used so much and that we are associated with it. It’s a good feeling.
More up to date and to draw to a close, am I right that “As Lights Fall” from The Secret, your latest album – is that the first track where you’re actually on lead vocals?
It’s the first album track that I’ve sung lead. Yes. I’ve done a couple of singles where I did a vocal but, yeah, it’s the first song that I’ve done a full-blown live vocal on and it’s good and it’s been fun to play it live as well. I’ve been getting more confident as a singer in the last year. I’m enjoying singing the song live as well.
And you’ve got a string of dates with the Alan Parsons Live Project also coming up?
Yes. We have. We’ve got 10 shows in the States coming right up. We’ve got a tour of Europe including Germany, Spain and Italy also coming up and we’re going to be doing a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Turn of a Friendly Card starting in the summer so I’m hoping that Cherry Red and Sally will get their skates on and get that ready so that we can release it in the summer in time for that anniversary tour.
I love the track “Time” from that album. It’s just wonderful.
Oh. Right. Yeah, yeah. Well “Time” did incredibly well for us. It’s a firm favourite live as well.
I’ve heard it gets played at funerals and it’s got a real resonance with many people.
It does. There are two songs that people favour for funerals – doomy gloomy – but “Old and Wise” is another song.
Oh yes. Colin (Blunstone).
Yeah.
Further information
The Alan Parsons Project on Cherry Red Records
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nigel Davis for transcribing this interview.
