Alan Parsons – "It Was Pure Convenience"

So Alan Parsons tells Jo Kendall, looking back on the opportunity that took him from EMI lab lackey to Abbey Road engineering icon. But his production work with The Beatles, Hollies, Pink Floyd, Pilot, Al Stewart, Ambrosia and more wasn't the end of the story. When Parsons met musician and producer Eric Woolfson, his creativity translated into the enormously successful Alan Parsons Project, and a long-lasting solo career to sit alongside his Art & Science Of Sound Recording educational programme and occasional forays as not just a technical wizard, but a real life one, too. Oh, oh, oh, it's magic, you know...

- By Jo Kendall

Two minutes into our Zoom call, Alan Parsons has disappeared from his seat. He returns with a stack of books written by his late father, Denys, a scientist, musician, and humourist. "This is just half of them," he says, holding them up to the screen, smiling. He seems proud of his dad, and the musical family he was born into in 1948. Denys was also a pianist and flautist who developed The Parsons Code, a visual form of musical notation ("He was way ahead of his time," his son tells RC), and Alan's mother Jane was an actress and harp player who sang traditional folk songs.

Parsons became a teenage blues guitarist, then landed a job at Abbey Road studios aged 19, working as an assistant engineer on The Beatles albums Abbey Road and Let It Be. He's best-known as the recording engineer on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon and as the producer on hit singles Magic by Pilot, Music by John Miles and (Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile by Cockney Rebel. He sprinkled prog fairy dust over American group Ambrosia's Somewhere I've Never Travelled and produced/arranged Al Stewart's internationally successful 1977 album Year Of The Cat.

In 1975 he met vocalist and keyboard player Eric Woolfson at Abbey Road and they formed The Alan Parsons Project. A string of albums in the progressive rock vein emerged, beginning with Tales Of Mystery And Imagination in 1976, a concept album inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A total of 11 Project albums have just been collected into a new LP set, The Complete Albums Collection, which features the 2014 "contractual obligation" record disliked by Parsons, The Sicilian Defence.