With typical Scottish modesty the man, who often performed lead vocals but declined to give his name to the band, once said “Few people had any idea who I was or what I did.”

Yet, much though he preferred “the shadows to the limelight”, he was a megastar in the eyes of legions of fans across the globe.

His 30-year fascination with Edgar Allan Poe resulted in his first album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, selling eight million copies and leading eventually to the musical POE and More Tales of Mystery and Imagination which he described as “my best work”.

Born into a Jewish family in Glasgow’s Charing Cross, he was brought up in Hamilton Avenue, Pollockshields and it was his piano-playing uncle, psychiatrist Professor Fred Stone, who inspired him to become a musician and to take piano lessons.

But those were quickly abandoned as Woolfson taught himself. Astonishingly though, throughout his prolific career, he remained unable to read music.

After attending Glasgow High School for Boys, his working life began with a brief but unsuccessful stint with Glasgow chartered accountants Peacock and Henry in his teens who said: “Eric should transfer his articles to another firm – may we suggest the circus?” He then headed to London securing work as a session artist, working with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who went on to form Led Zeppelin.

However, in 1969, marriage to wife Hazel, a distant cousin, stalled his music career. She said: “Both his parents and my parents were deeply disapproving and he agreed to give up the music business and come back and be heir to his father’s furniture business.”

He spent two miserable years in the kitchen department of Elders of Charing Cross. But Eventually Woolfson, whose grandfather had been the stepbrother of Hazel’s grandmother, could stand it no more and the young couple set up home in London.

His fame was sealed there when the Rolling Stones’ manager and record producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, on hearing one of his compositions, stood up, uttered the F-word and declared him “a genius”, promptly offering him a publishing deal.

That led to Woolson’s songs being recorded by more than 100 artists in Europe and America, including Marianne Faithfull and Frank Ifield, The Tremeloes and Marmalade. In the 1960s he signed to Southern Music working alongside unknown writers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice – he was later to appreciate the value of their idea to create musicals as vehicles for their songs.

In the early 1970s he turned to management, becoming instantly successful. His first two signings were Carl Douglas, of Kung Fu Fighting fame, and engineer/record producer Alan Parsons, who had worked on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and whom he had met on a session at Abbey Road studios.

It was during their successful partnership with Alan as producer and Eric as his manager that Eric resurrected an idea, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, that he had previously shelved and the Alan Parsons Project was born in 1975.

The band’s name was the working title of a proposal Woolson put to a record company and it stuck. He always said it was better to use Parsons’ name as the figurehead, given his association with Pink Floyd and The Beatles.

The first Tales of Mystery and Imagination album was released in 1976 and a deal was done with Arista Records for nine further albums. Despite no live performances and few hit singles – Eye in the Sky and Don’t Answer Me were two – the venture was a huge success.

Such was the band’s popularity that it featured in an episode of The Simpsons and in an Austin Powers film when long-standing fan, Mike Myers, decided to name his Dr Evil character’s Death Ray “The Alan Parsons Project”.

Later, however, Woolfson, who was a supporter and financial backer of the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, decided to move into stage musicals.

His first, Freudiana, inspired by his wife Hazel’s psychology study of Sigmund Freud, premiered in Vienna in 1990. His next, in 1995, was Gaudi, seen over five years by a half a million people who gave it a standing ovation at every performance. Gambler followed in 1996, Dancing Shadows in 1997 and Edgar Allan Poe premiered in Germany last March.

He is survived by his wife Hazel, their daughters, Sally and Lorna, and three grandchildren.

Mourners at his funeral were told his song Old and Wise is one of the most requested at funerals in the Netherlands. POE features his song Immortal and, thanks to his extensive catalogue, that is now something Eric Woolfson’s memory is surely guaranteed.

Musician and writer;

Born March 18, 1945;

Died December 2, 2009.