A recording engineer and record producer. He worked, in hardware, for
EMI, but soon became an employee at their
Abbey Road studios, where he assisted on
The Beatles'
Get Back (later to become
Let it Be) and
Abbey Road. Post-Beatles, he engineered/produced early
Paul McCartney solo stuff and
Wings LPs; he also helped The Hollies achieve a comeback/makeover for the
70s, when Graham Nash's departure should have consigned them to the
nostalgia circuit.
His work on Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother led to his famous gig on Dark Side of the Moon, where he provided much of its painstaking sonic minutiae. That led, in turn, to providing the "Parsons Sound" to other mainstream rock projex - some OK, like Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, or Pilot's "Magic"; some defined the awfulness of the 70s - Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat", or the American soft rock band Ambrosia.
With Eric Woolfson, he formed the Alan Parsons Project, a brand name for a "group" of session players; LPs include an Edgar Allan Poe set (Tales of Mystery and Imagination) and I, Robot. His fame - different from the showbiz svengalis who gained auteurhood - helped usher in today's Shinola Age, where engineers and techies are often more important than musicians, and "good music" means an impeccable aural sheen that masks an underlying dearth.