Eve was something of a disappointment to me: one of the weaker albums overall both musically and sonically. Pyramid had some fine moments: best among them - Colin Blunstone’s haunting vocal on The Eagle will Rise Again, and John Miles’ performance on Shadow of a Lonely Man.
There were some very good songs there too - my favourites are Don’t Let it Show, beautifully sung by Dave Townsend, and Breakdown, with its Handel-like choir. With I Robot we still had the feeling of breaking new ground - two tracks in particular (Alan’s Nucleus and my Total Eclipse) were not the sort of titles one usually came across on a rock album. We used unusual seating layouts for the orchestra for stereo effects on some titles: most of the orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road, except for the very large orchestra used on Usher which was done at the old Kingsway Hall in central London - which had a great acoustic, but one could occasionally hear the underground trains during quiet passages! Alan and I both still feel that this is our favourite APP record. So a long process began of working on the songs and on the lengthy suite about The Fall of the House of Usher, a process that was really enjoyable, although hard work: we all felt that we were doing something that hadn’t been done before in quite the same way. Alan liked my unusual approach to arranging - he said I was the only arranger he had worked with who doubled string lines with wind instruments (a common enough trick in Classical music), and who used avant-garde textures (as in the title Ritz on The Psychomodo). I had met Alan some time before when Steve Harley insisted on using me to arrange Cockney Rebel’s 2nd album The Psychomodo.
He had an idea for a new album, based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and wanted me to become involved as arranger, conductor and co-writer. We met for tea at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Sometime early in 1975, Alan Parsons phoned me to ask me to a meeting with his manager, Eric Woolfson. Andrew reminisces about his work as arranger, conducter, and musical director for The Alan Parsons Project.
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