Fopping bargain! (The Best Of Alan Parsons Live - Alan Parsons)

Member Name: pje

Product:	The Best Of Alan Parsons Live - Alan Parsons
Date:	25/01/02 (93 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Old and Wise...

Disadvantages: ...but no Silence and I.

I was surprised to come across a new record shop in Nottingham recently. It's called 'fopp' (website: www.fopp.co.uk) and while browsing through their cheapos (I'm far too stin.. erm, price conscious to buy full-price CD's) my attention was arrested by a cover vaguely reminiscent of Pink Floyd, on sale for £1. The cover features five people standing in a field talking(?) through megaphones. Well, I thought, any CD with a cover like that, must be worth a quid, who's it by...? Whooo, Alan Parsons - long time no hear!

<insert html instruction to make the screen go all wobbly, like on television when they are pretending to take you back in time, say, twenty years...>

My mum seemed to spend much of my childhood ringing Radio Nottingham, either nattering to Dennis McCarthy, entering competitions, or both. Anyway one of many LP's that Radio Nottingham got rid of in our direction was Eye In The Sky by the Alan Parsons Project which was quite good. Not as funny as John Cooper-Clarke's Walking Back To Happiness though. When Mum heard that she rang 'em up to complain about the language. They offered to take it back and give us something else instead, but Mum (I use the word Mum because this is dooyoo and most of yoo are probably a bit posh, she was Mam to us) well, she saw the look on the faces of Dad and me and decided to let us keep it. It disappeared after a while, before mysteriously turning up again - in Dad's briefcase... Oh, but I'm supposed to be talking about Alan Parsons aren't I? (And anyway I can't write about the John Cooper-Clarke record because it went walkies long ago. I have an idea who might have swiped it, along with Lee Marvin's Wandrin' Star, but you never know, said brother might read this one day...)

So, Alan Parsons... First of all, this is Alan Parsons solo rather than the Alan Parsons Project - the difference being the absence of his songwriting partner Eric Wool
fson. Now some of you may be thinking: who the hell is Alan Parsons when he's at home? Well, in the 60's and 70's, Alan Parsons worked as a sound engineer at the Abbey Road studios, so if you haven't heard of him maybe you should go and take a closer look at the credits on The Beatles' Abbey Road album. He also went on to work with Pink Floyd on Atom Heart Mother and, most notably, Dark Side of the Moon - for which he received a Grammy award.

Which brings me back to the cover. It was designed by Storm Thorgerson, founder of Hipgnosis who produced such distinctive artwork for Pink Floyd - hence the similarity. I love the strange pictures inside too. For example, there's one of a tall man in a suit with his head stuck in a cloud of cotton wool, and another of a scientist, in a white lab coat, with a sea-shell where his head should be. You can see lots of his stylish album cover designs at his eyecandytastic website: http://www.stormthorgerson.co.uk - it's well worth a visit.

Of course, it would help if I told you what the CD sounds like, but I haven't even listened to it myself yet, so I'll have to leave that until tomorrow...


THE NEXT DAY...

Well the CD began so quietly I had to get up and check I'd pressed play.
It opens with an instrumental piece called SIRIUS which I wish was longer. Think of Fanfare For The Common Man by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, only less pompous (obviously!) Although this is a live album, it's not a recording of a single gig, rather it's distilled from the best performances from eleven concerts he played across Europe in May 1994. As a result the tracks don't really go together, although Sirius does flow smoothly into EYE IN THE SKY - on which the nice melody and mellow vocals belie the true sentiment behind the lyrics. For this is a song about deceit:

~ The sun in your eyes made some of the lies worth believing...
~ I am the eye in th
e sky, looking at you, I can read your mind.

LUCIFERAMA is another instrumental, driven by an insistent drum rhythm which gives it urgency. I'd say it falls somewhere between Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and the sort of music you might hear in the background of a trailer for an 'action-packed Saturday night's entertainment on BBC1.'

Wistful nostalgia sweeps over me whenever I hear OLD AND WISE.
I seem to remember this getting a fair bit of airplay on Radio Trent when it came out, which is surprising for such a depressing (but beautiful) song.
It was worth shelling out a quid just for this song alone.
I can't resist quoting a couple of verses here:

~ As far as my eyes can see
~ There are shadows surrounding me
~ And to those I leave behind
~ I want you all to know
~ You've always shared my darkest hours
~ I'll miss you when I go

~ And oh, when I'm old and wise
~ Heavy words that tossed and blew me
~ Like autumn winds will blow right through me
~ And someday in the mist of time
~ When they ask you if you knew me
~ Remember that you were a friend of mine

And it's a got a sax solo near the end. Whatever happened to sax solos?

It's truly a case of from the sublime to the ridiculous with the next track, PSYCHOBABBLE. It's catchy, but it was always one of my least favourite tracks on the Eye In The Sky album. All shouty vocals, and weedy synths.

Quote:

~ I don't care, it's all psychobabble rap to me.

Quite.

THE RAVEN, inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story, was, I believe, the first single on which a vocoder was used. But before those vocals arrive, with it's plodding, ponderous bass-line, it vaguely reminded me of Pink Floyd; and the next song, TIME, also has echoes of Dark Side of the Moon too, having a similar laid back lilt to Us and Them. The lyrics don
9;t bear much comparison though, being little more than a string of clichés.

The title alone of track eight, YOU'RE GONNA GET YOUR FINGERS BURNED, should give you a pretty good idea of what the song is like. Suffice it to say that this is the sort of song Bruce Springsteen could sing in his sleep - and he would probably do it a lot better. I think the vocalist here is Chris Thompson (I'm not sure that Alan Parsons does any singing himself. Come to think of it, I'm not exactly sure what he does do!) The Chris Thompson who sang on Manfred Mann's cover version of Bruce Springsteen's song Blinded By The Light, that is. Although Gary Howard of the Flying Pickets also does some of the lead vocals, and I've no idea which is which really.

The second half of the album declines into 1970's/1980's AOR mediocrity. PRIME TIME brought back memories of Yes when they were half Buggles, and LIMELIGHT might have been by Chicago (or do I mean Foreigner?)
While DON'T ANSWER ME and STANDING ON HIGHER GROUND were a bit like tracks from those Mike Oldfield albums on which he collaborated with various guest vocalists in the 1980's.

So, overall: there's a classic bit of misery, a couple of fine, if rather dated, instrumentals, and one or two other good songs. The rest, while not bad, are a bit forgettable. Good value for a quid, but I wish they had included the track Silence and I - another favourite of mine. (If you like John Miles' classic song Music, you'd like Silence and I too, but it's not here. Shame.)


P.S.

My apologies to those of you under thirty who have probably never heard of any of the people mentioned in this opinion.


The catalogue number is CONNOISSEUR COLLECTION VSOP CD 262

and the bar code is: 5||015773||026220||
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