The Alan Parsons Project - The Turn of a Friendly Card
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 07.11.1980
Roni Calderon and Felix Halfon are two of the many footballers throughout history who loved to gamble and got into trouble.
In October 2025, a gambling scandal exploded in the NBA, in which Chauncey Billups, a former NBA champion and then head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, Deni Avdija's team, was arrested. Billups was placed on leave and had to put his coaching career on hold.
Pathological gambling is a mental disorder expressed as an addiction to gambling. Gambling in itself is not a sign of mental illness, but a compulsive need to gamble severely harms a person's normal course of life and is considered a mental disorder that can be severe and disastrous for the individual and their family.
Gambling is a worldwide phenomenon, and many people gamble both legally and illegally. Sometimes even the most seemingly normal person can get into trouble and lose all their money, and in some cases even lose or take their own life because of their inability to control themselves.
The thrill of gambling sometimes revives people who have already seen the world, retired and managed to forget the tension of work and daily life. Suddenly they have all the time in the world but feel there is nothing to do with it, and so they may gamble to bring back the thrill that was lost.
It is precisely this subject, gambling as an escape from the stagnation of middle age, that "The Turn of a Friendly Card" is about, the fifth studio album by "The Alan Parsons Project", released on November 7, 1980.
The concept album came about when band member Eric Woolfson sat in a casino in Monte Carlo, watching the activity and listening to the sounds around him. He took the album's title from a song he wrote in the 1960s, and the name suited the new concept well.
The album was recorded in just six short weeks in Paris, whereas it usually took the band many months to record an album.
The successful song "Games People Play" features Lenny Zakatek on vocals and an arpeggio synthesizer that complements a lead piano. The song is convincing and focused, dealing with the strategies people use to get what they want from other people, while observing that they are not getting any younger. It is worth noting that there is a book on the subject by the psychiatrist Eric Berne, also called "Games People Play".
Alan Parsons used a tool he invented called the Projectron on this song. Like the Mellotron, it used tape loops to play back samples. Here he draws on all the knowledge and the many studio hours he had accumulated (the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Al Stewart) to deliver a focused, goal-oriented result with high technical ability.
"Time", released as a single in April 1981, was the project's first single with Eric Woolfson singing lead. Woolfson, who had sung on the band's demos, was determined to be the lead singer on "Time". Parsons recalled that he had earlier opposed the idea of Woolfson singing on all the material the Project recorded, and admitted that he had misjudged Woolfson's vocal talents. He later said Woolfson did a great job on the recording, and admitted that it is in fact a very difficult song to perform, covering an enormous vocal range, citing the contrast between the notes in the verses and the chorus as an example.
Responding to the song, Woolfson said that "Time" represents "another form of risk-taking" for the band, and that the song "could just as well have been sung by a sea captain about to set out on an overland voyage of discovery in unknown territory, or equally by a modern astronaut heading to some destination in space".
"I Don't Wanna Go Home" tells of a gambler who has lost all his money. His conscience recoils from the situation he has landed in, and he says he should never have tried gambling, not even once. The song then shifts to the gambler's own point of view, and he naturally feels terrible, having lost everything. He only wishes he could play "one more time", but unluckily for him, he has run out of money. Alan Parsons, who wrote the song with Eric Woolfson, said in an interview: "It's quite a sad song. I think it has been an inspiration to many people who are getting old or ill. It is played at funerals. It's a bit melancholy".
"May Be a Price to Pay" opens the album with royal horn sounds provided by orchestra conductor Andrew Powell, and in it the singer Elmer Gantry presents the album's central, dramatic theme: while the master is away riding, the servants decide to play, and there may be a price to pay.
And the price is paid in cash in the second half of the album, which is preceded by the instrumental piece "The Gold Bug", which closes the first half and is named after a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The second half is devoted entirely to the 16-and-a-half-minute epic "The Turn of a Friendly Card", divided into five parts of roughly three to four minutes each.
The epic's lyrics contain the inner monologue of a man with a noose around his neck who cannot leave the table where he lost all his money. It is a beautifully constructed piece that captures the despair of the addict perfectly.
The idea that the game is never over while your whole world hangs on a single friendly card can also be read as an important moral for life: as long as we keep trying and hold on to hope, a friendly card may arrive from an unexpected place, shuffle our lives anew, and lead us to places we never dared dream of.
The album cover was designed by the musical duo Godley & Creme. It shows an illustration of a man holding a playing card against a shadowed or dark background, a stylized portrayal of a gambler playing cards, in keeping with the album's theme of gambling and its various aspects.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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