BackLounge Loves | The Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project comes to Mumbai. We revisit their legacy of experimental lyricism
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Vocoder magic
Decades before the French electro-pop band Daft Punk made the vocoder an essential studio component and used it extensively through their career, right up to their global hit single Get Lucky in 2013’s Random Access Memories, there was The Alan Parsons Project.
Led by a man who always had an ear for the future, the celebrated English sound engineer and musician is often credited with the honours of first use: the use of the digital vocoder—an instrument which interprets the human voice through robotic tones—in The Raven, from the Project’s debut Edgar Allan Poe-inspired, 1976-released album Tales of Mystery And Imagination, is widely acknowledged to be the first time the vocoder came to play in rock music.
In their prime, the 1975-born The Alan Parsons Project, coming off the band leader’s ground-breaking sound engineering work in Pink Floyd’s monumental The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) album, were way too hip for their time. The Project, which will perform at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio this evening, was often typecast as a progressive rock outfit. But it was never a box big enough to confine their music—through their career, beginning with the gothic and experimental Tales of Mystery..., followed up by 1977’s breakthrough I Robot, and right up to Parsons’ fourth solo album, A Valid Path (2004), electronic, disco, funk, opera and classical have overlapped with the pleasures of pure pop-rock melodies in a grand, dramatic scale. The stylistic debts of the Project, spearheaded by Parsons and the gifted Scottish songwriter and producer Eric Woolfson, have overridden genres.
The clue to the genesis of the sound can be sussed from Parsons’ work at the mixing board of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side… album. Sonic experimentation at its finest in those pre-sampling and pre-looping early days of quadraphonic sound design, the exacting nature of Parsons’ work enjoys cult reverence, especially represented in Time, the fourth track of The Dark Side.... For its long opening passage of tick-tock clocks and whirring alarms, Parsons went out to an antique clock store near the Abbey Road studios, requested the manager to stop all the clocks and then recorded their sounds individually. Without a computer to help, these sounds were later manually and painstakingly superimposed on the album by the man who, between learning from George Martin while the latter recorded The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969) album, would serve tea to John Lennon and Paul McCartney—he couldn’t have asked for a greater grounding, Parsons has gone on record saying.
Though not known to have been acknowledged, the imprint of Pink Floyd can be palpably felt in some of the early Project productions—thematic concept albums, which ignore the thumb rule of the 4-second gap between tracks; Floyd guitarist David Gilmour playing on Return to Tunguska from the A Valid Path album; and a general resemblance to the mellow melodic core of Floyd albums like Meddle and Obscured by Clouds.
Often severely technical, The Alan Parsons Project would suffer because of its over-reliance on studio production—the original team comprising Parsons and Woolfson could perform live only once in their early career; recreating the studio sound live was a challenge.
Yet the biggest hit of the band, the single Eye in the Sky from the eponymous 1982 album, is pop-rock at its innocent best, a number that seemingly floats on gossamer wings. As The Alan Parsons Project takes to the stage in Mumbai, the audience will understandably be waiting for Eye in the Sky—ironically, a composition by Woolfson. That Parsons had actually disliked, as he mentioned in an obituary for Woolfson, who died in 2009, and arguably his “most famous mistake".
The Alan Parsons Live Project will perform as a part of the Johnnie Walker—The Journey festival, 8pm onwards, 14 December, at Mehboob Studio, Bandra (West), Mumbai. Tickets, ₹ 3,000, are available on in.bookmyshow.com
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