PYRAMANIA

Egypt's pyramids have long captivated our imagination, with some even believing the magnificent structures harness magical or healing powers. In 1978, masters of the concept album The Alan Parsons Project explored themes of pyramid power and ancient magic on their third studio album, Pyramid. Prog and Parsons step back in time to uncover the story behind the group's Grammynominated and recently reissued record.

- Mark Blake

If you were around in the 1970s, you may recall seeing a dinky metal pyramid sat on top of a milk bottle. During a shortlived craze, these devices were pitched as conduits for pyramid power, which claimed to stop your full-fat turning sour.

This theory first appeared in print in 1970 in Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander’s book, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain, which served up its mysticism with a side dish of Cold War paranoia. According to its authors, the Soviets were harnessing pyramid power to preserve milk and food, thanks to the psychic energy generated by the four points of a compass.

The science was questionable to nonexistent, but that didn’t stop these devices finding their way into household fridges, and inspiring Pyramania on The Alan Parsons Project’s third album, 1978’s Pyramid.

Not that the band’s figurehead or his co-writer/manager Eric Woolfson believed the claims made in the book.

“But there was certainly something in the air,” says Parsons, the morning after playing Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on the Alan Parsons Live Project’s NeverEnding Tour. “We’d all sit around late at night, talking about life and the universe.”

Pyramid was recently reissued as a box set, containing multiple outtakes, Woolfson’s demos (known as ‘songwriting diaries’) and a Dolby Atmos mix. Pyramid continued the group’s yen for otherworldly themes, pioneered on their 1976 Edgar Allan Poe-inspired debut, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, and the following year’s Isaac Asimov-themed Top 30 hit, I Robot. However, Pyramid also threw in some wry cynicism and spliced its art-rock with filmic instrumentals and the radiofriendly single, What Goes Up….

Work on the album commenced in summer 1977 at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, where Parsons had first been employed as a tape op, before helping to engineer The Beatles’