The Alan Parsons Project star Eric Woolfson has died aged 64.
The songwriter passed away in London on Tuesday following a battle with cancer.
Paying tribute, his friend Deborah Owen said, "Eric was very much a self-made man. He couldn't read music but if you asked him to play anything he could do it straight away. He had an extraordinary gift."
Woolfson began writing music in his teens and after working as a session pianist he was signed up by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham at the age of 18.
He went on to pen tracks for artists including Marianne Faithfull, Frank Ifield and Joe Dassin, before going on to work with musical duo Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice in the 1960s.
Woolfson branched out into artist management in the 1970s, launching the career of Kung Fu Fighting hitmaker Carl Douglas and Beatles engineer/record producer Alan Parsons, who he later teamed up with to form The Alan Parsons Project.
The pair wrote 10 albums together between 1976 to 1987 and sold more than 40 million records worldwide, with hits including I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You, Games People Play, and Time.
After wrapping up work with Parsons in the late 1980s, Woolfson went on to indulge his love of stage musicals, writing a series of productions including Freudiana, about Sigmund Freud, which was first intended as the eleventh album by the duo, and Gaudi, about legendary Spanish artist Antonio Gaudi. His last musical, a production based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe, premiered in Berlin, Germany earlier this year.
Woolfson is survived by his wife Hazel and their two daughters.
WENN.com