( The 'Time' Video )

Alan Parsons Project

(A Sample from Pyramid's)

Alan Parsons (b. 20 December 1948 in London) is a British audio engineer, musician, and record producer. He was involved in the production of several successful albums, including The Beatles' Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon, for which Pink Floyd credit him as an important contributor. Parsons' own group, The Alan Parsons Project, has also been commercially successful.

In October 1967, at age 18, Parsons went to work as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road Studios, where he earned his first credit on the LP, Abbey Road. He became a fixture there, engineering such projects as Paul McCartney's Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, five albums by The Hollies, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, for which he received his first Grammy Award nomination.

He was known for going beyond what would normally be considered the scope of a recording engineer’s duties. He considered himself to be a recording director, likening his contribution to recordings to what Stanley Kubrick contributed to film. This is apparent in his work with Al Stewart's Year of the Cat, where Parsons added the saxophone part and transformed the original folk concept into the jazz-influenced ballad that put Al Stewart onto the charts.

( Al Stewart's - Year of the Cat )

It is also heard in Parsons’ influence on the Hollies’ He Ain't Heavy, He’s My Brother and The Air That I Breathe, sharp departures from their 1960s pop Stay, Just One Look, Stop! Stop! Stop! or Bus Stop. Parsons was also known to have swapped shifts during the engineering of The Dark Side of the Moon so he could work entirely on the project.

The Alan Parsons Project was a British progressive rock band active between 1975 and 1990, founded by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons.

Recalling his earlier Edgar Allan Poe material, Woolfson saw a way to combine his and Parsons' respective talents. Parsons would produce and engineer songs written by the two, and the Alan Parsons Project was born. Their first album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, including major contributions by all members of Pilot, was a success. The song "The Raven" features lead vocals by actor Leonard Whiting, and, according to the 2007 remastered album liner notes, was the first rock song ever to utilize a digital vocoder, with Alan Parsons speaking lyrics through it.

( An Excerpt From 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination' )

The claim seems spurious, however, as Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" predates "Raven" by two years, although it can be argued that that particular case escapes the qualifier of "rock music".

Arista Records subsequently signed The Alan Parsons Project for further albums. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, the group's popularity continued to grow (although they were always more popular in North America and Continental Europe than in their home country, never achieving a UK Top 40 single or Top 20 album), with singles such as "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You", "Games People Play," "Time" (Woolfson's first lead vocal), and "Eye in the Sky", making a notable impact on the pop charts. After the No3 success of the latter in the US (and No6 in Canada), however, the group began to fade from view. There were fewer hit singles, and declining album sales. 1987's Gaudi would be the Project's last release, though they did not know it at the time, and planned to record an album called Freudiana next.

Although the studio version of Freudiana was produced by Alan Parsons (and featured the regular Project backing musicians, making it an 'unofficial' Project album), it was primarily Eric Woolfson's idea to turn it into a musical. This eventually led to a rift between the two artists. While Alan Parsons pursued his own solo career and took many members of the Project on the road for the first time in a successful worldwide tour, Eric Woolfson went on to produce musical plays influenced by the Project's music. Freudiana, Gaudi and Gambler were three musicals that included some Project songs like "Eye in the Sky", "Time", "Inside Looking Out," and "Limelight." The live music from Gambler was only distributed at the performance site (in Moenchengladbach, Germany).

From Wikipedia