Eric Woolfson was one of the most successful musicians in Britain, with worldwide sales of more than 50 million records as the lead singer, songwriter, lyricist, manager and co-founder of the Alan Parsons Project. His solo albums are in addition to this, yet despite this success his natural modesty ensured that he remained largely unknown in the UK.
He was also an early supporter — and a generous financial backer — of the Social Democratic Party, becoming close friends with David Owen, one of the “Gang of Four” who founded the party in 1981.
Woolfson’s unassuming approach to politics was precisely that which he demonstrated towards his music. He came to the party’s notice soon after the Limehouse declaration of January 15, 1981, that laid the foundations of the SDP. Woolfson’s solicitor wrote to Shirley Williams saying that his client desired to remain anonymous but wished to help the new party financially; his initial donation was £25,000. Woolfson also served as a trustee of the SDP from 1988 to 1990 with David Sainsbury. As Lord Owen recalls: “It was such a change to have someone who did not want to push their own personality. That was very typical of him and of his musical career — he was not one to use his own name.”
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Woolfson, described by Lord Owen as “a very liberal person in the very best sense of the word”, took an active interest in the party’s affairs, particularly in its stance towards the arts, but never tried to influence party policy.
Eric Woolfson was born in Glasgow in 1945, and was inspired to become a musician by his uncle, who played the piano. Woolfson quickly taught himself to play the instrument but, despite or perhaps because of his later success, never formally learnt to read music. After a brief but somewhat unsuccessful foray into accountancy, he found work as a session pianist in London. During this period he worked with musicians such as Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who went on to form Led Zeppelin. He also arranged a meeting with Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ record producer. Oldham asked him to play a piece that he had written himself and, after just one song, offered Woolfson a publishing deal with his newly formed company, Immediate Records.
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Oldham placed Woolfson’s work with a number of well-known artists of the day, including Marianne Faithfull and Frank Ifield, as well as using him as a session pianist on many of his independent productions. Songs written by Woolfson found their way into various record producers’ hands, including Mick Jagger’s first attempt as a record producer with the singer Chris Farlowe: Woolfson’s song was consigned to the “B” side but the single, Out of Time, reached No 1 in the UK.
Woolfson signed other publishing deals as more and more of his songs were taken up by leading recording artists, both in Europe and America. He signed a deal with Southern Music, where he joined the ranks of composers and lyricists such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
In the late Sixties and early Seventies Woolfson was an independent record producer for several record companies, and worked with artists including Dave Berry, the Equals and the Tremeloes. Despite his success, he found that earning a living as a songwriter was not easy and decided to try artist management. His first two clients were the singer Carl Douglas, who had just had a hit with Kung Fu Fighting, and a record producer, Alan Parsons, whom he had met at Abbey Road Studios. With Woolfson as his manager, Parsons went on to enjoy a string of successes including consecutive No 1 hits with the pop groups Pilot (Magic) and Cockney Rebel (Make Me Smile/Come up and See Me). Other notable successes were John Miles (the singles Highfly and Music) and Al Stewart (Year of the Cat).
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Woolfson and Parsons formed the Alan Parsons Project (APP) in 1975. The partnership allied Parsons’s deft engineering skills to Woolfson’s considerable ability as a songwriter and lyricist. The APP’s first album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Edgar Allan Poe, was released in 1976. It was immediately obvious that there was more to the idea than one album, so a new deal was struck with Arista Records for nine further albums. Despite an absence of live performances, the albums generated various hit singles, including Eye in the Sky, Time and Don’t Answer Me. Woolfson, typically, was lead singer on all three tracks.
Woolfson later said of the venture: “The APP was never a ‘band’ in the conventional sense. The idea was to make recordings much as Kubrick or Hitchcock made movies, where the production values are the key rather than star actors. I thought at the time that many others would follow in our footsteps but this didn’t happen.”
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After ten APP albums Woolfson decided to move into musicals. His first attempt, inspired by Sigmund Freud, was entitled Freudiana and received its premiere in 1990 in Vienna. Its success led to his second musical, Gaudi, which had its premiere in 1994 in Aachen, Germany, and was later staged in Alsdorf (1995) and Cologne (1996); about 500,000 people saw the show in the five years that it ran.
For his next musical, Gambler, Woolfson drew on his experiences of living in Monte Carlo in the late 1970s, which had also been the inspiration for the album Turn of a Friendly Card by the Alan Parsons Project. Many of the songs from this album (Turn of a Friendly Card, Snake Eyes, Games People Play and Time) were included in the show. It received its premiere in Germany in 1996. Gambler has had seven productions in Korea, one of which toured Japan in 2002 and 2005. Woolfson’s musical Dancing Shadows, a collaboration with the playwright and author Ariel Dorfman, was given its premiere in South Korea in 2007 and was inspired by the Korean play A Forest Fire.
The world premiere of his last musical, Edgar Allan Poe, took place earlier this year in Halle, Germany, to mark the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth. A new album of the same name, with all 17 songs from the musical, has just been released, as has a DVD of an intimate performance of the show at Abbey Road Studios. An album of unreleased APP tracks, Eric Woolfson Sings the Alan Parsons Project That Never Was, was issued in April.
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He is survived by his wife, Hazel, to whom he was married in 1969, and by their two daughters.
Eric Woolfson, songwriter and lyricist, was born on March 18, 1945. He died of cancer on December 2, 2009, aged 64