Sunday Music - I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You

Today’s music video is I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You  from The Alan Parsons Project.

Link to Video at You Tube

This video was posted to You Tube by Lucap1000

I have mentioned often that in my younger days, I had a regular little record shop that I would visit once a fortnight, and invariably purchase a new LP album for my collection. The owner of this tiny little store knew me as a regular, and more often than not, he would direct me to anything that was new that he thought I might like, and in virtually every case, he was correct.

He knew I was a huge fan of the band Pink Floyd, so, on one Friday afternoon in late 1976, he directed me to a new album by The Alan Parsons Project.

Alan Parsons was a recording engineer who mainly worked out of the Abbey Road studios. He engineered albums for The Beatles, Paul McCartney and Wings, Pilot, The Hollies and a number of other bands and solo artists. However, by far his biggest claim to fame was that he was the engineer responsible for what is without doubt one of the biggest selling albums of all time, The Dark Side Of The Moon from Pink Floyd.

It was so good that Pink Floyd asked him to engineer their next album Wish You Were Here, but in the interim between those two albums, he had teamed up with musician Eric Woolfson, and they decided to work on a project of their own. Whilst Alan Parsons was only a minor musician, his forte lay in engineering. These two decided to base a concept album around the works of author and poet Edgar Alan Poe.

This new association called themselves The Alan Parsons Project, and resultant album took a further two years to produce, and that was the album I was directed to by the record store owner.

That first album was a revelation, and to say I liked it would be an understatement.

I eagerly awaited the release of their next album, and that was I Robot, released in 1977, and the featured clip for today, I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You, comes from that album.

While Eric Woolfson was the only recognised musician of the two band founders, what they did was to bring in session musicians and musicians from other bands for the album, and Alan Parsons did all the engineering, occasionally adding some backing vocals and even occasionally some work on keyboards and flute.

While the album I Robot used the title of the novel from Isaac Asimov, it was not based on that work, but on Robots in general. The album sold well, and actually had three singles lifted from it, but not many people could name a song from the album, although this featured clip for today was the biggest selling single from the album, and climbed into the Top Ten in some places. The album has ten songs on it, and four of those are Instrumentals. The six songs that do feature vocals all had a different vocalist for each of them.

The Alan Parsons Project was a prolific outfit, bringing out 10 studio albums in the years they were together.

Alan Parsons himself was nominated for 10 Grammy Awards over the years, including his first nomination for Best Engineered Album for his work on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. Sadly, he has not won one of them, which for such an artist with such a body of music is quite remarkable.

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Tagged: Music, Music Video, The Alan Parsons Project

Posted in: Music, Videos