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Alan Parsons: When Producer Becomes Star

By Mick Brown

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Parsons may be the first record producer ever to get a bigger billing than the artists he produces. "Actually, producer is the wrong word," he says over tea in his north-London home. "In movies the producer is generally looked upon as the guy with the fat cigar and the checkbook. The one who actually calls the shots is the director, and I like to think of myself as a shot caller."

The analogy with filmmaking is apt; on both albums by the Alan Parsons Project, Parsons has worked like a film director, taking overall creative control and recruiting others to play out his drama. On I Robot his cast included the nucleus of the group Pilot and such vocalists as Steve Harley and the Hollies' Allan Clarke. Parsons' manager and collaborator, Eric Woolfson, wrote the words and most of the music. And although Parsons added some keyboards, guitar and vocals, he is the first to admit that his musical contribution is slight. "But so much of the Project comes out of the control room rather than the studio," he says. "The atmosphere in the grooves is all mine."

Parsons, 28, should know all about atmosphere and more than a little about grooves. He has been an engineer and producer for the last ten years. His first job after leaving school was as a technician trainee for EMI, researching vinyl sound quality. The training course included a spell at EMI's Abbey Road as an apprentice engineer. Over the next four years he wound the tapes and made the tea during the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be sessions. He also engineered everything from dance bands and show soundtracks to The Hollies: Words and Music by Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney's Red Rose Speedway.

But it was working on Pink Floyd's epochal Dark Side of the Moon on 1972 that really opened Parsons' eyes to the creative possibilities of engineering. "Rather than just playing music, the Floyd are very much into cutting up bits of tape and sticking them together, experimenting with different sounds and effects. I'd never had the opportunity to do that before," Parsons says. "The nice thing about working with them was that they would go home and just leave me to it." Many of Parsons' ideas were included on the album; he in turn admits that working with the Floyd greatly influenced his subsequent solo projects. "It happens subconsciously; I play back a tape and realize, 'My God, that does sound a bit like them.' I'm not too worried about it."

After Dark Side of the Moon brought him a Grammy nomination, Parsons switched to producing, and he quickly broke such unknowns as Steve Harley, Pilot, John Miles and, more recently, Al Stewart. The idea of Parsons producing a concept album based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe came from Eric Woolfson. Parsons describes it as "a move by a manager to get his client into the limelight a bit more. At the time it wasn't mentioned that I would be the featured name," he says. "I thought it would be Tales Of Mystery and Imagination by Various Artists, produced by Alan Parsons. But the record company needed an identity to promote it. 'Various Artists' made it sound like a budget compilation album."

The album was a Top Forty hit in both Britain and America, successful enough to warrant a follow-up retaining the Alan Parsons Project persona. I Robot was originally going to be based on the Isaac Asimov anthology of the same name. But Asimov's theme -- that, according to the "law of robotics," man will always be in control of technology -- became transformed. According to Parsons and Woolfson, man is in danger of being destroyed by the machines he has created. "It is kind of pessimistic," says Parsons. "But machines already control our crime records and driving licenses; they know more about us than we do. That's not to say I believe machines will actually take us over -- at least not for another thousand years or so."

Parsons is confident he will have a third Project album completed well before then. Work is already in progress, but as yet not even his record company, Arista, knows what the theme will be. "If you tell them nine months before the album appears, they get bored with the idea," he says dryly. "Give them something fresh, and it gives the promotional campaign more spontaneity."

Despite the success of his own projects, Parsons says he has no intention of giving up outside production jobs completely, although he claims he is now turning down offers "left, right and center. It's got to be the most exciting act I've ever heard before I'll consider it," he says. "I'm not interested in working with any established acts. I feel happier producing new people. For one thing, they don't have fixed ideas about recording; for another, you can get a better deal with the record company...."