LATE NEWS

Rip It Up, Issue 15, 1 September 1978, Page 3

LATE NEWS

Francis Stark

Late News: The Stones US tour is now finished and several members of the band are now holidaying on the West Coast of' America, prior to a short European tour in September. Keith Richard comes up before a Canadian court in October charged with trafficking in narcotics . . . and Mick is reportedly set to play the role of Antonin Artaud, French actor and writer, in a film titled Wings Of Ash ... Be Bop Deluxe leader Bill Nelson has decided to split the band. Nelson was "bored with the limitations of a rigid group structure" and has now moved on and formed a new unit called Red Noise . . . The # Temptations longest serving member, basssinger Melvin Franklin, was shot and wounded in a mugging incident. The group will continue without him on a forthcoming European tour . . . Pacific Eardrum, the group comprised largely of NZers based in London, have had their second album Beyond Panic released in Britain . . . The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean are to perform together on a short American tour. It will be the first time the two acts have played together since 1966 . . . Bernie Taupin and Alice Cooper have got together to write songs for Cooper’s new album From the Inside, which is reportedly an autobiographical examination of the drying-out period Cooper underwent when he stopped his large alcoholic intake . . . The Darts, British doo-wop band have lost vocal bassman Den Hegarty and pianist Hammy Howell . . . and to finish the news on a low note, Charlie’s Angel Cheryl Ladd when asked what it was like recording her debut album, replied candidly, “Making an album is like losing your virginity. It’s a real agony-ecstasy situation scarey yet wonderful.”

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Alan Parsons is a professional polite person. As he says himself, "There’s a whole lot of bluff in producing you give them a technical reason for not doing something when it’s really a creative reason, even if the guy is singing totally flat." Equally, I guess, you chat politely about pyramids and Pink Floyd, even if you’d rather be back home making another record. Parsons was in Auckland last month to promote the latest in a series of albums which bear his name. The churlish have suggested that calling Pyramid an Alan Parsons project is a little extreme, bearing in mind that he does not perform on it at all, and his compositional credits stem largely from what he calls, “constructing like a jigsaw” the elements provided by the performers and fellow-writer Eric Woolfson. Still, a conversation with Parsons leaves one with the impression that he is very much in charge in the studio, and never more so than when working on a Project album. His increasing reputation as a producer of others’ work, and now as a recording personality strong enough to warrant top billing on three top-selling albums, put him in the forefront of those who could be said to be instituting a new era of the producer-star. "Obviously,’’ he says, “the producer is becoming more recognised now. Phil Spector in the old days was ridiculous: there was so

much of him in his records, it was like the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers were nobodies. I think it is wrong, and I always have considered it wrong for a producer to try to extract a group's credibility or talent

and overshadow them. Even if Nick Lowe is the strength behind the people he produces, it’s wrong that he should get more credit than he is actually due.” He obviously doesn’t feel, however, that the producer is only there to get down on tape whatever the artist actually presents in the studio. "At the end of the day, in the event of a dispute, it should really be the producer who has the ifinairdecision.’jßßß^jmMMßßwSii In the light of that, it is interesting to hear his opinion of Geoff Emerick, the producer of Split Enz’s Dizrythmia. Where Split Enz apparently found him a little too powerful for their taste, Parsons obviously admires him as someone who can walk into a studio and set everything up as he wants it within minutes. That kind of control of the technology is one of the strongest feelings one gets from Parsons’ work especially on the Project records but it is often tempered with an apparent shortage of spontaneity and humanity. That also shows up in the reluctance that Parsons has to put the Project on stage. He puts it down to a risk of undermining the imagery built up by the album. "A band playing on stage takes the abstract out of the kind of music that I do.’’ It is as though the appearance of flesh-and-blood musicians producing those sounds would bring home to an audience that Parsons’ music often has little

to do with the conventions of rock and roll, and perhaps also that his own role is so much a non-performing one, that there is no place for him in the performance of his work. He does concede that his new-found reputation might put a strain on relationships with performers who are new to him, but still maintains that he is much more interested in producing a new act than in working with established acts, and that is borne out by his obvious affection for artists like Pilot, Ambrosia and John Miles none of whom could be classed as major league acts rather than those who made his name; Wings, Cockney Rebel and Ai Stewart. Perhaps it is the lack of the ego-stroking received by public performers, or simply the essential diplomat in him, but Alan Parsons shows few of the less pleasant characteristics one would expect from a man who has had three platinum albums in the United States. He sat calm and affable through an hour-long press conference, then an impromptu Maori concert, apparently equally at home describing how to keep the Sunday roast fresh in a cardboard pyramid, or why he prefers Abbey Road studios to any others. Whatever it is, he sits and smiles and chats, the professional nice chap, making his living the way he always has done, by being polite, and getting what he wants in the end.