Alan Parsons

Alan Parsons, of The Alan Parsons Project, of The Darkside of the Moon engineering fame and unreasonable tallness fame, was inclined to select ideas around which to weave an album, in the past subjects... read more included surveillance, Gaudi, pyramids, Asimov robots, not to mention Edgar Allen Poe. In this case his On Air album was about the idea of flight or man’s desire to fly. It was, he said, as much about the idea of flight as about flying itself or about the machines that fly us. I took the notion of an idea, the tried and tested notion, namely that of a light bulb above a head and reworked it as a bulb shaped hot air balloon above a head shaped hillock. It is not uncommon to see air balloons of different shapes rather than only the stereotypic pear shape, so ours is light bulb shaped of course and is photographed at the same time and in the same lighting conditions as the hill over which it is gracefully flying. The idea of flight whilst flying.

Try Anything Once was a the title for Alan’s album in 1993 which suggested something a touch reckless perhaps, or a departure from normal behaviour. Or more specifically a departure from his usual... read more musical style. We followed this idea and coupled it with seeing a bungey jump off a high bridge on television and wondering what on earth people would do for a thrill - jumping from a high bridge? Try anything once, I suppose. I find stepping off the kerb threatening enough. Getting out of bed in the morning let alone jumping off a high bridge into nothingness (but ‘chacun a son gout’ as the great French existentialist said, whilst chucking his beloved cat into the Seine). So I imagined the great bungey jumpers of the sky dropping in, as it were, at the end of extremely long ropes for some kind of a business meeting. Sky dwellers slumming it close to the ground but maintaining a connection to home seemed a crazy enough experiment to qualify for Try Anything Once. However, in pursuit of our ideal that ‘doing it for real’ is worthy the people in our picture are in fact hanging upside down and apart from going quite red in the face, they put up with it with rare stoicism, though I haven’t seen any of them for a long time now. The location is in Spain known as Larva Valley about 20 miles east of Jaen sandwiched between two mountain ranges. It’s a magical spot, as of course it would be when visited by sky dwellers.