Greek pop music of the Nineteen Sixties isn't an space of musical historical past the place anybody who doesn’t fondly keep in mind it first-hand is suggested to dwell. There are a couple of exceptions – storage rock collectors have unearthed a string of obscure, impressively uncooked singles by the Stormies, the Individuals and the Women – however the archetypical mainstream Greek response to the rise of the Beatles is likely to be Vangelis Papathanassiou’s band the Forminx, who dealt in novelty instrumentals, weedy Hellenic-accented stabs at Merseybeat and a facet order of lachrymose balladry.
The Forminx had been profitable in Greece, however it clearly wasn’t sufficient for Papathanassiou, who claimed his earliest musical endeavours concerned experimenting, John Cage-style, with the sound of radio interference. After the Forminx broke up, he took up a profession writing movie scores earlier than forming Aphrodite’s Baby with one other refugee from the Greek beat scene, singer and bassist Demis Roussos.
They had been a very completely different proposition from something that had emerged from the nation earlier than, a product of the anything-goes environment engendered by psychedelia. Their first two albums, Finish of the World and It’s 5 O’Clock, supplied an enormous vary of types that had sprung up across the summer time of affection, from droning raga-rock on The Grass Is No Inexperienced to A Whiter Shade of Pale-inspired balladry on It’s 5 O’Clock’s beautiful title monitor; from You At all times Stand In My Manner’s heavy riffing to Mister Thomas’s mock vaudeville. Crucially, they didn’t simply sound like a pale imitation: Roussos’s vocals – excessive, tremulous, however highly effective – clearly weren’t from an Anglo-American rock custom; nor was their use of bouzouki. In reality, Aphrodite’s Baby sometimes didn’t sound like anybody else, as on the wonderful warped funk-rock of Funky Mary.
This uniqueness was underlined on their masterpiece, 1972’s astonishing double idea album 666, which delivered 77 minutes of wildly experimental music that touched on jazz, proto-metal, prog and stuff that also defies explication: it’s variously becalmed, richly melodic, punishingly heavy and, on ∞ (Infinity), unsettling. It was an unbelievable achievement, however it attracted much less consideration than the band’s earlier European hit singles. In any case, by the point of its launch, Aphrodite’s Baby had cut up, the opposite band members apparently sad with the more and more avant-garde course Papathanassiou’s music was taking.
Roussos subsequently grew to become an enormous MOR star; Papathanassiou’s implausible 1973 solo album Earth continued in 666’s eclectic vein, skipping from slinky funk that will subsequently be claimed by Balearic DJs (Let It Occur) to the pounding Come On, to We Are All Uprooted, an eerie, drum machine-driven monitor that appeared to handle Greeks who, like Papathanassiou, had fled the nation within the wake of the 1968 navy coup.
In a way, it was a disgrace he didn’t make extra albums in that vein, however his consideration was more and more attracted by soundtracks and synthesisers: he relocated to London, constructed a studio in Marylebone and began scoring movies and releasing digital idea albums that positioned him as a form of Greek equal to Jean Michel Jarre or Tangerine Dream, albeit of a extra dramatic, grandiose bent. One thing of 666’s apocalyptic depth lingered round 1975’s Heaven and Hell, and Odes, the album of Greek songs he recorded with actor Irene Papas (though 1979’s album China and his acclaimed soundtrack to the character documentary Opera Sauvage had been simpler on the ear).
He additionally unexpectedly developed a parallel profession as a pop star, within the firm of Sure vocalist Jon Anderson, an Aphrodite’s Baby fan who had contributed to Heaven and Hell and Opera Sauvage. The three albums they launched as Jon and Vangelis deftly bridged the hole between prog rock and the vogue for synth-pop. The songs had been typically lengthy (the title monitor of 1981’s The Associates of Mr Cairo lasted one of the best a part of quarter-hour) and, as at all times with Anderson, the lyrics tended to the opaque and ponderous – however Papathanassiou’s music was richly melodic and the sound of Anderson’s excessive voice in an digital panorama was interesting. I Hear You Now, from their first album collectively, Brief Tales, and I’ll Discover My Manner House, from The Associates of Mr Cairo, had been British hit singles, however their most lasting monitor proved to be the emotive State of Independence, from the identical album, and subsequently alighted on by producer Quincy Jones and coated, brilliantly, by Donna Summer season.
By the point Anderson and Papathanassiou’s partnership resulted in 1983, the latter was additionally a star in his personal proper. His breakthrough got here along with his Oscar-winning soundtrack to Chariots of Hearth. The hovering, valedictory really feel of its theme – one other hit single, inescapable in 1981 – fitted the film’s temper so effectively that the anachronism of getting a movie set within the Nineteen Twenties soundtracked by 80s electronics handed nearly unnoticed. His subsequent soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was even higher. Murkier, extra summary and much more emotionally ambiguous than the air-punch-inducing Chariots of Hearth, its legend was bolstered by the truth that it wasn’t launched as an album for over 20 years: a rotten orchestral model, which Scott and Papathanassiou hated, got here out in its absence.
Their success led to extra soundtracks (though Papathanassiou was picky concerning the movies he labored on) and a collection of 80s instrumental albums. Soil Festivities, from 1984, was essentially the most commercially profitable, however one of the best is likely to be the next 12 months’s sparse, darkish and largely atonal Invisible Connections: if its contents got here out tomorrow, on a limited-edition cassette launched by an underground label, hip retailers equivalent to Boomkat could be throughout it.
On the different excessive, it didn’t require an excessive amount of creativeness to image some numbers from 1988’s appropriately named Direct retooled because the backing tracks for hit singles. Nonetheless, Papathanassiou resisted the temptation to show his hand to pop manufacturing, his releases more and more drifting in direction of new age and classical types, punctuated by the occasional blockbusting soundtrack or occasion. The theme from Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise gained a second lease of life as a suitably stirring accompaniment to sporting occasions – boxers, cricket groups and rugby league sides have all used it as intro music. He offered themes for Nasa’s Mars Odyssey mission, for the 2000 summer time Olympics, wrote music to accompany the touchdown of the European House Company’s Rosetta mission, and scored Stephen Hawking’s memorial service, the latter music beamed by the ESA into the closest black gap to Earth.
Then once more, Papathanassiou didn’t have to dabble in rock and pop music: by the Nineties, his affect on these genres had turn out to be clear. Like Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack to Dangerous Enterprise, his rating for Blade Runner – lastly launched in 1994 – grew to become a set textual content inside dance music, repeatedly coated by trance artists, sampled by the Future Sound of London, Unkle, Air and drum’n’bass producer Dillinja (Boards of Canada, in the meantime, alighted on his 1976 soundtrack to French wildlife documentary La Fete Sauvage). The remainder of his again catalogue was creatively plundered in hip-hop circles: by Outkast, Jay-Z, Firm Circulation and, repeatedly, by J Dilla.
As well as, Aphrodite’s Baby had additionally been rediscovered by youthful artists. When you grew up with their frontman because the kaftan-clad butt of a joke in Abigail’s Celebration, belatedly listening to 666 – and notably its standout monitor, The 4 Horsemen – was a surprising expertise: who knew that Demis Roussos had as soon as made music this experimental, this cool? The 4 Horsemen earned the excellence of being successfully rewritten twice – first by the Verve on 1997’s The Rolling Individuals, which tipped the wink to these within the know by taking its title from the lyrics of 666’s Altamont, after which by Beck on 2008’s Chemtrails – in addition to being subjected to a canopy model by Euro-techno titans Scooter. Elsewhere, the album’s tracks had been borrowed by each Oneohtrix Level By no means and Dan the Automator and, maybe inevitably given its title and material, discovered favour with black steel bands.
So Vangelis Papathenassiou ended up not only a garlanded soundtrack composer, the go-to man should you wanted one thing stirring and epic for a significant occasion, an digital music pioneer and the driving power behind Greece’s most influential rock band – however the thread that improbably linked Rotting Christ, Donna Summer season, Boards of Canada, Jay-Z and the Verve. It wasn’t what he got down to do, however as musical legacies go, it’s a suitably distinctive achievement.
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