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Eric Woolfson
Eric Woolfson
Eric Woolfson (born 18 March 1945 in the Charing Cross area of Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland) is a Scottish lead singer, songwriter and lyricist, executive producer, pianist, and co-founder of The Alan Parsons Project. After splitting up with Alan Parsons during the recording of Freudiana, Woolfson has pursued musical theatre. Those are mainly performed in Germany and Austria, but also in Korea and Japan.
The start of The Alan Parsons Project
In 1975, Woolfson joined forces with record producer Alan Parsons who was a recording engineer on many Beatles and Paul McCartney albums as well as having engineered Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Eric and Alan formed a new kind of collaboration that would allow Parson’s engineering skills to be exploited to the full and at the same time give Woolfson a vehicle for his talents as a songwriter/lyricist. The Alan Parsons Project was born, the name originally being intended as a working title for their collaborative project. From 1976-1987, Eric conceived and wrote the lyrics for all ten albums by The Alan Parsons Project (he and Parsons collaborated on writing the music), which have achieved world-wide sales in excess of forty million. On every Project album, Eric would sing a ’guide’ vocal track for every song, which the album’s proper lead vocalists would later use for reference. Some of these guide vocal tracks can be heard on the new remastered editions of the various Project albums, released in 2007. Eric himself was the actual singer on many of the Project’s biggest hits, such as "Time", "Don’t Answer Me" and "Eye in the Sky".
Life before The Alan Parsons Project
Woolfson, who belongs to a Jewish family, was raised in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow. He started composing music in his early teens. He moved to London where he found work as a session pianist, at the age of eighteen. The record producer for the Rolling Stones, Andrew Oldham, signed him up as a songwriter. During the following years, Woolfson wrote songs for such artists as Marianne Faithfull, Frank Ifield, Joe Dassin, The Tremeloes, Marmalade, Dave Berry, and Peter Noone. His songs were recorded by over one hundred artists both in Europe and America. During the sixties he worked with two then-unknown writers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. In 1971, with the assistance of Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley, Lol Creme and Graham Gouldman (who later became 10cc), a single was produced under the name of Eric Elder ("San Tokay" b/w "Sunflower") and issued on UK Philips 6006 081 and US Philips 40699. Woolfson then produced a single by Graham Gouldman ("Nowhere To Go" b/w "Growing Older") which was issued in 1972 on UK CBS 7739. In the early seventies, Eric turned his hand to management and was instantly successful. His first two signings were Carl Douglas (whose record Kung Fu Fighting was one of the biggest selling hits of all time) and engineer/record producer Alan Parsons.
Splitting up
Freudiana was originally meant to be the eleventh album by The Alan Parsons Project, but Woolfson was keen to explore the possibility of realising the project as a musical. While recording the album, Brian Brolly was introduced to Woolfson and promised to steer the album in this new direction. Brolly was previously a partner with Andrew Lloyd Webber, and together they created such musicals as Cats. With some help from Brolly, Woolfson was able to turn Freudiana into a stage musical. Before the Freudiana stage production opened in 1990 in Vienna, a double-length studio album was released. The musical had
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a successful run, and it was planned that the show would open in other cities. However, plans were put on hold when a lawsuit broke out between Brolly and Woolfson, each fighting for control of the project. In the end, Brolly won. The studio disc (the "white" album) was quite difficult to obtain for a while. There was also a double-length German-language cast disc (the "black" album) which is currently out of print.
Eric Woolfson
was given a demonstration prduction at Abbey Road studios, London in 2003.[1] Dancing with Shadows (based on the antiwar play Forest Fire by the Korean playwright Cham Bum-Suk and with a book by Ariel Dorfman) was premiered in July 2007 in Korea.[2]
Other activities
Woolfson was also active in the short-lived British Social Democratic Party or SDP.
Musical theatre
Woolfson was eager to write for musical theatre. He explained his career switch during an interview by MusicalWorld on 7 July 2004: "I eventually developed The Alan Parsons Project as a vehicle but then I realised that there was more to it than that and that Andrew Lloyd Webber was right and that the stage musical was a fulfilling media for a writer like myself. I got into stage musicals in the mid-eighties." His musicals are mainly performed in Germany. This was for two reasons: The Alan Parsons Project was well known in Germany, and at that time the arts were very well funded there. His first musical premiered in Vienna in 1990: Freudiana, about Sigmund Freud. The success of this first work led to Woolfson’s second musical Gaudi (concerning the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi) (1995), which ran for over five years in several German productions. Gambler, Woolfson’s third musical also premiered in Germany in 1996 and had a first run of over 500 performances. Gambler has had five productions in Korea, one of which also toured Japan in 2002 (the first time a Korean language production had been staged in this way). A fourth musical Edgar Allan Poe, based on the life of the author,
Works
• 1990 Freudiana • 1991 Black Freudiana (German Original Cast Musical Soundtrack) • 1996 Gaudi (Musical) • 1997 Gambler (Das Geheimnis Der Karten) • 2003 Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination • 2005 Gaudi • 2005 Gambler • 2007 Dancing Shadows • 2009 The Alan Parsons Project That Never Was
Notes
[1] http://www.edgar-allan-poe-musical.com/ EN/POE_Abbey_Road.html [2] http://www.ericwoolfsonmusic.com/ DancingShadows/index.html
External links
• • • • • Eric Woolfson website 2009 Eric Woolfson Interview Poe CD The official Alan Parsons (Project) fanclub The official Alan Parsons Project site
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Woolfson" Categories: 1945 births, Living people, People from Glasgow, Scottish Jews, Scottish male singers, Scottish rock singers, Scottish pianists, Scottish songwriters, Jewish musicians This page was last modified on 6 May 2009, at 17:45 (UTC). All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) taxdeductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers
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