The 1984 concept album of the musical Chess. Like he did with his creations with Andrew Lloyd Webber, writer Tim Rice recorded the album first, and only after successful sales started the theatrical production in London’s West End. The record was successful indeed, the production not. I wrote earlier about the principle hit from the musical: One night in Bangkok. The other hit from this work is I know him so well. The chorus of that song was already part of the 1977 tour of ABBA, but it was never recorded. The wiki claims there are bootlegs of those concerts.
Since the 70s Tim Rice was looking for a chance to write about the Cold War. He pitched the idea to Webber, but for some reason they never started it. When he tried again much later, Webber was working on Cats. Being an ABBA fan, he tried their principle song writers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The three started working on it during 1982/3, with Rice sharing a sketch, Andersson and Ulvaeus creating the music and finally Rice adding the lyrics to the music.
The story is about a chess match between an American and a Russian grandmaster (probably based on Bobby Fischer, Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov). The atmosphere of Cold War manipulation and political tension is entwined with the love story of the musical. Florence, sung by Elaine Paige, is a woman that is the manager of the American, and then falls in love with the Russian. The two grandmasters not only fight on the chessboard.