Music producer and engineer Alan Parsons offers an in-depth look at his distinguished career, reflecting on his work with the Alan Parsons Project including the new reissue of their landmark album Pyramid. He also recalls his time at Abbey Road Studios, including working with The Beatles and the technical challenges of the rooftop concert, as well as collaborating with Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon.
We spoke four years ago for the re-release of Ammonia Avenue. So it’s great to see the reissues are continuing, this time with Pyramid. Was there anything surprising that you heard when you went through the material for this release?
What was surprising is that some of the elements of some of the tracks were missing. So we had to dig deeper and find them in quarter inch tapes and in some cases regenerate them. There was a bell on the opening of side two that we couldn’t find. We re-recorded that, just recreated it from scratch. But yeah, I hadn’t heard Eric’s demos since then. In fact, a lot of them I wouldn’t have even heard at the time because sometimes he would just sit down and play it at the piano. But it gives a good impression of how the songs developed from inception to final mix. It’s always a nostalgic feeling to go back. My God, it’s 40 years, 45 years or something. I dread to think how long it is, but yeah, it was good to go back.
This is the first Dolby Atmos mix of the Alan Parsons Project. So what was the process for that?
Well, instead of mixing on five speakers for surround, you’re mixing on 11 speakers. You’ve got four speakers above you, two speakers at the side, and then the regular left and right front, left and right back, and the centre channel. So, one has to ask how many people in the world are going to put 11 speakers into their living room. So, it’s really the elite that will actually hear it, anything like the way we heard it in the studio. Having said that, there are some good headphone systems that give a better result than just literally just hearing it in stereo. But Atmos is a new format, it’s still very much under development. In fact, it’s a voyage of discovery, we’re discovering what’s possible and what’s not.
But in a creative sense, it’s great to have occasional things happening above you. It’s a little distracting if you put stuff up there all the time. So you have to be selective about what goes on up top. But it’s a fun experience. It’s all enveloping. The new buzzword is immersive and it’s definitely immersive on Dolby Atmos.
Just for the record, you might want to let your listeners know that we recently remixed a live version of Dark Side of the Moon from 1994. I did that with David Gilmour’s full collaboration and approval in all three – stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos. So brand new mixes of that concert and it’s got video. It’ll be released as a Blu-ray, I would imagine.
So whether it’s the Alan Parsons Project or the live version of Dark Side, that’s a way of almost future-proofing it for future generations to keep up with modern standards.
You can bet your life there’ll be 10 years from now something else new, I’m sure. But for the moment, yeah, we’re up to date.
Was it Eric’s idea for the concept of pyramids? Because I think it was very en vogue in the 70s, wasn’t it?
It was. The album originally started as an album about witchcraft and the occult and what was known as pyramid power at the time. It was part of that mysterious witchcraft subject. So we just decided that we could base the entire album around the history of the pyramids, the mystery of the pyramids, and this new new-fangled fashion which was to get involved with pyramid power.
The song ‘Pyramania’ is a sort of a joke that leans towards that somewhat unbelievable format, which a lot of people were into. Like putting a bottle of milk under a metal pyramid and supposedly the milk wouldn’t go sour, but it was just folklore. It actually didn’t work. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother with fridges anymore! [laughs]
We’d all have our home pyramid!
That’s right. [laughs]
What was the process for choosing a particular singer whether it’s Colin Blunstone, John Miles, Jack Harris. Did you and Eric have an idea of who might be a good fit for a song or did you try them out?
When we were recording the tracks, we hadn’t really considered who the singers were. But ‘The Eagle Will Rise’, I just heard Colin singing that song in my head. And he came in and did a fantastic job.
Jack Harris was a guy that I’d worked with. He was a very prolific songwriter, as well as a good singer. I did a single with him actually called ‘Sail Away’, which got on Radio Luxembourg’s Power Play, but it still wasn’t a hit, believe it or not, despite it being played every hour. [laughs]
John Miles had always been a favourite. He was the voice of the century, he really was. It’s so sad that he died. But he did a magnificent job on the last song. What’s it called?
Shadow…
‘Shadow of a Lonely Man’. I get confused between the albums sometimes. But if I haven’t got it in front of me, I don’t remember the song titles. But he did a brilliant job on ‘Shadow of a Lonely Man’. That really worked in Atmos as well. We had celestial voices coming from the ceiling and stuff. So it really worked. And John appeared arguably more than anybody else on the Project albums in general.
Are there any other tracks on Pyramid that are significant for you?
I liked ‘In the Lap of the Gods’, because I made a valid contribution to that, it was instrumental. It was fun to work on that again. Generally, the songs were solid song ideas that Eric would come in and would analyse them and put verses and choruses in different order and stuff like that.
So it was a restructuring that often happened when he would come in with his demos or play a song. But it was always a band that would play so many records these days. It started with a drum loop out of a machine and then you add a bass, then you add a guitar and then you add bits and pieces.
But I’ve always been one for working with a band on the original tracks. That forms a big part of what you hear on the final records, so it’s an important process. But ‘In the Lap of the Gods’, I feel I was much more responsible for that than some of the other tracks on the album.
How do you see Pyramid fitting in with your catalogue? It’s one of your best and was sandwiched between two other great albums, I Robot and Eve.
It was the third album. So it was the second for Arista. So Clive Davis was the first to hear it. And we did well with it. It just worked well as an album. I don’t think we had any hit singles per se on Pyramid. But it worked well. At the time we moved to live in France for a while, Eric and I both actually had apartments in Monte Carlo and moved there with our families and our kids, went to record Eve at a studio in the hills above Nice.
So we were already focused on the next album by the time that Pyramid came out. I remember we went to the North of France to do a promotion. We flew a lot of British journalists out from the UK on a plane from Lyd to Le Touquet. I don’t know if that air schedule still exists, but that’s what it was. We had a nice lunch and played the album. It went down well.
And Eve was around the concept of women.
Yeah, we really didn’t know at the time that it would be the concept. I think that not all the songs really fit into the concept that well, but some of them do. ‘Damned If I Do’ in particular is kind of angled towards women, you know. [Recites lyrics] Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, but I love you.
It’s got a lot of tension in the production of that track.
We had fun recording. In terms of the sound I hope it’s not negative because we were always having a good time and smiling and laughing, all the time when we made records. We got to know the band really well, they were like brothers, really. It was fun to record back then.
Lesley Duncan was on vocals on ‘If I Could Change Your Mind.’ How much had you worked with her?
Really only as a session singer. She worked on Dark Side of the Moon, of course. But we didn’t really know each other very well, but I knew her work and we flew her out to the studio near Nice to do that. But Eve probably did better business than Pyramid did when ‘Lucifer’, the opening track, was a number one in Germany. And the album also hit number one in Germany. The UK somehow was never very good to us. I blame radio! [laughs] Because Radio 1 wasn’t really a prog rock station. And we definitely were fitting into a prog rock category. But there we are.
It does seem strange, given that you produced and worked on so many great singles that were hits on Radio 1. You’ve got the Steve Harley material and Pilot who released perfect pop songs. So you had that in your locker.
Pilot, of course, were the framework of the rhythm section for the Alan Parsons Project. David Paton on bass, Ian Bairnson on guitar. Stuart Elliott became the regular drummer from Pyramid onwards. Eric kind of took over on keyboards, whereas the late Billy Lyle had played on the first two albums.
But the singles hits really started happening on Turn of a Friendly Card, two albums later after Pyramid. We had two top 20 hits in the States, ‘Time’ and ‘Games People Play’. So that was good, but no hits in the UK. The biggest hit we ever had in the UK was ‘Old and Wise’. I think it got to number 27 for two weeks or something, then got forgotten.
What do you think were your greatest lessons working in that early period as a tape-op and engineer at Abbey Road?
Just watching the talent that existed in the engineers and producers. I worked with the greatest, with Geoff Emerick, the engineer of Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road. And George Martin, I kind of modelled myself on the way he worked. As well as the Beatles he had Cilla Black, Matt Monroe, various others. But he was always respected by all those artists. And that respect worked in both directions. He respected them. They respected him.
I tried to not be a dictator, not be a guy screaming and shouting that it wasn’t right or the part was wrong, whatever. I was always receptive to incoming ideas. I used to joke that you would get the band or the artists to have the impression that they thought of all the good ideas, even if it was your idea or my idea, is what I’m saying.
Did watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back change your perception of that period? Did it bring any memories back?
It did, actually. I was so, so grateful to Peter Jackson. We actually met a few months before the movie came out. He showed me some of the clips that he’d rescued, which did not feature in the original Let It Be movie. Not only did he find clips, but he was kind enough to put my name on the screen, saying Alan Parsons – tape operator. I’m very proud of that. I said to myself, at last, living proof that I was there. The original movie didn’t make that clear.
Given that you became familiar with the setup for the Beatles recording process, do you have any observations of what the technical challenges were for the rooftop concert?
It was very challenging. The control room was in the basement of the building. So the mic cables were tremendously long from roof to the basement. So we had to run cables up the stairwell. And that was quite an effort. But thankfully, EMI, the company behind Abbey Road Studios, had a mobile unit where often the hall where the orchestra or the soloist was playing would be quite a distance from wherever they were monitoring.
So those cables existed and we got them to work. Everything worked out. But it was an exciting day. The Beatles seemed much happier than they had been stuck in the studio, trying to get good takes of the same songs in a more controlled environment. They just seemed to shine when they were up on the roof. And that adrenaline that came out from that session was very evident. They were enjoying it, for sure.
EMI, in a way, seemed to have the perfect apprenticeship. You were able to build up, working the tape library to be a tape operator to be assistant engineer, engineer. It seems to be the perfect way for you to get a grounding of how the studio works.
Yeah, it was actually an unusual request on the part of George Martin and Glyn Johns. They were short staffed at the Apple Studio. So they called me and asked who was available and I was one of them. Down I went and started tape opping, recording every moment of every song, changing reels as fast as I could when the tape ran out. And then the rooftop session itself, I was up there just making sure that nothing broke down. We were fortunate, nothing actually broke as far as I remember during the rooftop session. There I was watching the Beatles play live for the first time, it was quite an experience.
By the time of the Abbey Road album, you stepped up to be an engineer, how much you were involved in those sessions.
No, Abbey Road, I was still very junior. It was just the summer after. I’d originally started in October and the Let It Be sessions were, I think, January of 69. So I’d just turned 19 at that point. When the Abbey Road sessions came along that was the following summer, I was still a tape op. Can’t make any claim to be an engineer. Until later, I went on to engineer for Paul, of course, with Wings and did a number of records for him, ‘Hi Hi Hi’, ‘C Moon’, the Red Rose Speedway album.
In later years, we were actually neighbours. I had a place in Kent and his farm was no more than 10 miles away. So we socialised on occasion as well as working with each other professionally.
The sound effects and non-musical elements of The Dark Side of the Moon work so well. How did you and the group decide on each of those particular elements and then incorporate them into the final mix?
Most people remember the clocks, which introduced the song ‘Time’. I recorded those clocks in a local shop quite close to Abbey Road, an antique shop. It had a really good selection and I just got the boss of the shop to stop all the clocks. Then I recorded each one of them separately, both ticking and chiming. And then back in the studio, we put them on multitrack and made them all tick together, and then finally strike at the same time. It’s easy to do on a multitrack session, but it would have been even easier in today’s workstation world to just take each sound and line it up to happen at the same time. There were a number of other effects.
In fact the loop effect on ‘Money’. We just gathered a few different sounds, dropping a bag of money on the table, throwing money in the air. Tearing up paper, suggesting tearing up the money. One of those sounds was actually a telephone exchange sound. Completely unrelated to money, but there we go. Anyway, those seven samples we had to make into a continuous loop. Much of the song is in a time signature of seven beats in a bar, 7/4 time, which is very unusual.
So we compiled that loop to be continuous, and that would get recorded onto the multitrack. And the band would play to it. It was effectively the click track that they actually played the song to. There wasn’t a separate metronome or click track of any sort. They just played to that loop.
What are the positives and benefits of working in that analogue era? Because the sound of those records seems to be better than what we have now, but now you’ve got the benefit of unlimited tracks and digital recording.
I think if Dark Side of the Moon had been recorded today, it would have taken a month, not a year. Everything would have been quicker. And it was helped by the fact that the band were all getting on with each other, they were good friends back then. Sadly, that’s not the case today. They’re totally at each other’s throats. But no, it was a fun period. It was all analogue recording back then. Everything was done with tape. There were no digital delays or any digital effects.
Any effect that you had was done with tape. And a case in point would be the delays that you hear on the vocals on us. And then it’s all done with tape machines running, running slower than usual. And sometimes going through a multi-track tape. In fact, ‘Us And Them’ was done with eight track, using two tracks for every delay and then feeding back on itself to make it recycle.
How was your production work with Al Stewart? Because Al’s work, certainly with Modern Times and Year of the Cat, had a glossier sound rather than some of his earlier, folkier music. Was it a conscious decision by Al to broaden the palette?
I think I had a degree of influence on that too. I would suggest double tracking stuff, going for a bigger sound. Orchestration, it was a big thing that he hadn’t really done before. The famous sax solo on ‘Year of the Cat’, that completely flummoxed him. He didn’t know what to expect with a saxophone solo. He said, “Saxophone, that’s a jazz instrument. I’m a folk rock artist.” But in the end, he loved it. Somewhat ironically, he actually took on Phil Kenzie, the sax player that played on ‘Year of the Cat’. He took him on to play in his live band. So he clearly changed his mind on the value of saxophone.
I want to close by asking you about your last solo album, From the New World. What was the concept for it?
Dvořák , the Czech composer, his most famous work was what we know as the New World Symphony, but it was actually called From the New World. And we include a song based on Dvořák’s symphony. The melody was actually used in the well-known Hovis commercial in the UK. It’s a very pretty tune, and the lyrics were written quite a while ago, I think, in the 20s. And I sang it, and it was fun to do that.
‘Goin’ Home’.
Yes. Ironically, the Moody Blues were originally commissioned to do a version of the New World Symphony, but they went into the studio with the label thinking that that’s what they were doing, but they actually were making Days of Future Passed. Interesting story. I actually got Justin Hayward involved at one point to say, “Would you like to sing it?” And he declined for whatever reason, but I’m glad I ended up doing it.
It’s a very moving piece of music.
Oh, thank you. I’m glad you liked it. I just wish the album could have done better business, but such is life.
It’s a very different world, isn’t it, you can produce your best work, but time moves on. You’ve still got a huge audience. It’s just more in a particular niche.
Yeah, when we play live, we tend not to play anything from the solo albums. It just tends to be the hits of the Alan Parsons Project. That’s what they want to hear. But hey, that’s fun. [laughs] We’re perfectly happy playing those hits. In fact, I don’t know when this is going out, but I’m travelling tomorrow to do a series of shows starting in Denver, moving on to Colorado Springs, Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas.
So you’re still having great fun doing those live dates.
Oh, yeah it’s always good fun. The camaraderie is fun. We all have a good time.
Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alan. It’s been great listening back to Pyramid and great that you’re still releasing records and touring.
Very welcome. I hope you receive a box set before too long. Take care.
Further information
The Alan Parsons Project, ‘Pyramid’, released 23rd August via Cooking Vinyl
Audio podcast of this interview coming soon
