The first concept album — where the classic Eloy formula was born. After the cohesive space rock of Floating, Frank Bornemann steered the band into the concept-album fashion of the mid-seventies with a time-travel opera: the story of a young man thrown back to medieval Paris and a doomed love, framed as a parable of a humanity advanced in technology but stunted in wisdom. It reins in Floating’s wild jams for something more structured and symphonic, and it directly sets up the story of Dawn. Uneven and transitional, but the record where the real Eloy sound began.

The short version

Eloy’s fourth studio album, recorded in the summer of 1975 at Tonstudio Nedeltschev in Cologne and released that October on Harvest; ten tracks, around forty-two minutes. The line-up expands to a five-piece: Bornemann on vocals and guitar, Manfred Wieczorke on keyboards, Luitjen Janssen on bass, Fritz Randow on drums, and new second guitarist Detlef Schwaar. It is the band’s first concept album, built around a science-fiction love story, and a clear turn toward more structured, symphonic writing. It was also Wieczorke’s last album with Eloy: after it the group splintered, leaving Bornemann to rebuild for Dawn.

Eloy’s first concept

Concept albums were in fashion among seventies prog bands, and Bornemann did not want to sit the trend out. Working from a story scripted by Gordon Bennit, Eloy built a whimsical time-travel tale: a young man named Jamie uses his scientist father’s experiments to travel back to the Paris of 1358, where he falls into a love affair with a girl named Jeanne, tangles with a scheming magician, and is finally returned to his own era only to find it scarred by war. Beneath the fantasy runs Bornemann’s real theme, a favourite of the era: that humanity has raced ahead technologically while lagging far behind in wisdom and feeling. The story does not end here either — it carries directly into the next album, Dawn, making Power and the Passion the opening chapter of a larger tale.

The sound

A heavy, bass-driven symphonic space-rock opera, and the album where Eloy’s lasting formula clicks into place. The old hard-rock flavour of the early records is finally gone; in its place comes the Floydian space rock and synth-tinged symphonic prog the band would ride for decades. Bornemann reins in the wild improvisation of Floating, his solos a little less frenetic, the arrangements more composed and rehearsed, and the Mellotron makes its first real appearances alongside Wieczorke’s prominent organ. Through it all, Luitjen Janssen’s bass is the driving force, powering the long pieces with the same relentless momentum Lemmy once gave Hawkwind. It is more disciplined and more overtly progressive than what came before, if not yet as polished as the orchestral albums that would follow.

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The songs

A brief Introduction and the short Journey Into 1358 set the scene and ease you into the concept, before the album’s centrepiece arrives: Love Over Six Centuries, ten minutes that make the difference, deeply Floydian without ever being a clone, its clean guitar, strange organ and Krautrock-tinged bass carrying spoken words from Mary Davis-Smith. Mutiny is the other long epic at nine minutes, and the second side moves quickly through the story — Imprisonment, Daylight, Thoughts of Home, the slightly awkward Zany Magician, and Back Into the Present — before the six-minute closer The Bells of Notre Dame. The shorter narrative pieces can drag a little, and the tale is told rather insistently, but the two long tracks are where the album truly lives.

Reception and legacy

Power and the Passion is generally seen as a strong, interesting transitional album rather than a peak — the record that inaugurated the Floydian-symphonic formula Eloy would follow for the next forty years. Admirers praise Janssen’s bass, the guitar-and-organ interplay and Love Over Six Centuries; the common criticisms are that it is uneven, that some narrative tracks meander, and that the concept is pushed a little too hard. It is best understood as a practice run for the masterpieces to come: the band splintered after it, Bornemann reassembled a new line-up, and the very next album, Dawn, continued this album’s story with far greater majesty. For anyone following how Eloy became Eloy, this is a pivotal chapter.

The verdict

A rewarding transitional album and an essential piece of the Eloy story, though a step below Dawn and Ocean — the moment the band committed to concept-driven symphonic prog. Come to it for the birth of the classic formula and a charming time-travel tale, rather than for polish or flawless pacing. Play Love Over Six Centuries and Mutiny. Then Dawn to hear the story and the sound fully realised, Floating for the space-rock phase it grows out of, and Ocean for the eventual masterpiece. Where the real Eloy formula was born — the first chapter of their classic era.

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