Back in its heyday in the ’70s and ’80s, British progressive-rock collective The Alan Parsons Project released a string of albums that yielded eight Top 40 singles, including their 1977 breakthrough “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You” and 1982’s No. 3 smash “Eye in the Sky.” In spite of the group’s commercial success, they never performed live. That was because it would have been technically difficult to reproduce their studio work in a live setting, but also because Parsons, who got his start at EMI working as an engineer with legendary groups like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, considered himself primarily a producer and writer. By the 1990s, Parsons concluded that technical advances had made it possible to perform the group’s music live, so in 1994 he launched The Alan Parsons Live Project. He brings the current incarnation of the group — Parsons (acoustic guitar, keyboards, vocals), P.J. Olsson (vocals), Manny Focarazzo (keyboards), Guy Erez (bass), Alastair Greene (guitar), Danny Thompson (drums) and Todd Cooper (sax, percussion, vocals) — to the Ryman Auditorium Thursday night for a performance that will in part celebrate the 50th anniversary of their debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which they will perform in its entirety.
7:30 p.m. at the Ryman
116 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
