FOR an artist who has sold in excess of 55 million albums worldwide, Alan Parsons is not a face you’d immediately recognise. “It’s because we never played live, so no-one ever saw me!” he says. “Frankly, I was pretty happy not being recognised. I saw what other artists had to deal with, and it was madness. Poor old Paul [McCartney] couldn’t go to restaurants or clubs. He couldn’t even be in his own house in Sussex – he’d have fans breaking through the fences to get a look at him!”
Parsons has always been comfortable as a backroom boy. After dropping out of school at the age of 16 he embarked on an EMI training scheme before working as a “balance engineer” at Abbey Road studios, where he assisted on key recordings by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Hollies and Wings, and later produced huge hits for the likes of Steve Harley, Pilot, Al Stewart and John Miles. But it was The Alan Parsons Project, established in 1976 with the Scottish musician Eric Woolfson, that made his name. Their works weren’t so much concept albums, more audio musicals, themed around single subjects, including albums based on Edgar Allan Poe, Isaac Asimov, Antoni Gaudí and Sigmund Freud. After 11 studio albums – which next month are gathered into a new boxset, The Complete Albums Collection – Parsons and Woolfson split in 1990, but Parsons has continued solo, even finally taking his music on stage. “It’s not really prog rock,” he says. “I’ve always seen it as prog pop.” Here, he takes us through his remarkable catalogue – starting with a rite of passage at notable addresses in Mayfair and St John’s Wood… JOHN LEWIS
THE BEATLES ABBEY ROAD
APPLE RECORDS, 1969
A baptism
