Usually I get my tributes out immediately when musicians I love die, but I was totally dumbstruck when I heard a few days ago that Vangelis had died. To me, he’s Beatles or Elvis or Rolling Stones level; a majpr influence in my listening and composing.
And that’s why I couldn’t just throw out a tribute to him; to explain how important he is takes a lot longer than posting that Chariots of Fire video with #RIP. There’s a lot more to Vangelis Papathanassiou than that.
I heard him first hough the soundtrack to Blade Runner, a film that’s been there for most of my life and an important part of my makeup, musically and visually. It’s a film I knew well and loved in it’s original form – but the fact that for a long time the soundtrack was unavailable was criminal, and seeing the Director’s Cut at a rainy Cristal Peaks in Sheffield one mid-week night during art school was an event I will never forget. That cut blew me away (and the Esper Edition bootleg is the best and most complete version of Vangelis’s soundtrack)
And it introduced me to Demis Roussos in a way that went beyond the cheesiness of ‘Forever And Ever’ and highlighted a past that I delved head first into – Aphrodite’s Child.
Aphrodite’s Child was the progressive psych band that Vangelis, Demis, Loukas Sideras and Silver Koulouris formed after several of them fled the military junta in Greece – amazingly Vangelis wasn’t allowed into the UK, so settled in Paris (our loss). Aphrodite’s Child mixes east and west, psychedelic pop, religion/occult and darker themes and folk into a rather disturbing mix in their apocalyptic album 666.
I am sure the situation in Greece informed that album, there’s a lot of comment on revolution and political instability on that album, through the lens of the Book of Revelations. I have used ‘Loud Loud Loud’ in mixes, and seriously ‘Seven Bowls’ is one of the spookiest songs commited to tape this side of Fifty Foot Hose’s Cauldron.
Black Aquarius in full effect.
After Aphrodite’s Child Vangelis went solo – and created I think my favourite album of his. Albedo 0.39, “the proportion of the light it receives that is reflected back into space.” – it’s actually 0.30, but that was the figure in 1976. You can see a rare Vangelis performance of Alpha from that album – looks like one of the 1980’s Docklands performances – at the top of this post.
I must say I’m less enamoured with his later work – and that’s mostly UMG/Polydor anyway (his exellent Jon & Vangelis stuff falls foul of the latter, I’ll Find My Way Home is genius and feels similar to his work with Demis) so rather not focus on it here, but with those three albums, he changed how I saw and related to electronic music.
It’s been a bad month for electronic music with the death of Klaus Schulze which I had missed at the end of April. I knew of him more through who he influenced and his collaborations/producion with others rather than his own work (which I am rectifying slowly, the length of his songs and albums makes it hard for me to listen, I zone out after 8-10 minutes) but I loved some of his spookier work on Mirage, like Crystal Lake. It reminds me of Goblin, obviously influenced them as he did Negativland who posted about Klaus’s passing.
Apologies for tagging him onto this post about Vangelis, that’s because I do not know enough about the music of Klaus to write a full post on him, but his work feels important enough to mention….
I have a big blind spot of him and Tangerine Dream, mostly because long progressive evolving works are usually not my thing unless I get some ‘handle’ on them, like vocals, a lyric or a visual – which tend to be completely absent or fairly blank in those artists. I find long classical pieces hard for the same reason, unless there is a visual or vocal element, I need a ‘frame’ or ‘hook’ into the music.
Only real problem for the next podcast is if I honour both of them, that’s half of the podcast gone! Please keep the rest of Tangerine Dream in cotton wool til then…
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