Vangelis

Biography

In 1982 Vangelis won an Academy Award for the music to “Chariots of Fire” and did not go to the ceremony: he was afraid of flying. He also turned down the offer of a stateroom on the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 for the crossing.

Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou was born on 29 March 1943 in the coastal town of Agria in Magnesia, Thessaly, and grew up in Athens. His father worked in property and was an amateur sprinter; his mother had trained as a soprano. He began composing on the family piano at four, placing nails and kitchen pans inside it and picking up radio interference. At six his parents enrolled him for lessons, but he could not take to formal tuition and never learned to read or write music. He recalled pretending to his teachers that he was sight-reading, while in fact he played from memory. Later he thought himself lucky not to have gone to music school. At fifteen he formed a band with school friends, and three years later he bought a Hammond organ. After brief stints in art college and an apprenticeship in filmmaking, in 1963 he founded the rock band The Forminx; in three years it released nine singles and a Christmas EP, and then broke up.

For the next two years he worked mostly in the studio as a composer and producer, writing music for Greek films.

In 1967, against the background of the coup of the Greek colonels, he formed a group with Demis Roussos, Loukas Sideras and Silver Koulouris, at first called the Papathanassiou Set. They wanted to try their luck in England. Koulouris was called up for military service, the other three were refused entry because of work permits, and they settled in Paris, where they signed with Philips and became Aphrodite’s Child. Their first single, “Rain and Tears”, was a success in Europe, followed by the albums “End of the World” (1968) and “It’s Five O’Clock” (1969). The idea for the third, the double concept album “666”, based on the Book of Revelation, was Vangelis’s; it came out in 1972, when the group had already split after the tensions of recording. He went on to produce Roussos’s records.

He spent about six years in Paris: the events of May 1968 made him feel obliged to stay. He wrote music for films (“Sex Power”, 1970; “Salut, Jerusalem”, 1972) and for television. His first solo album, “Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la nuit” (1972), was conceived as a symphonic poem in support of the students: music, snippets of news, protest songs, lines taken from graffiti on the walls. With the director Frédéric Rossif he made several films about wild animals, among them “L’Apocalypse des animaux” (album, 1973). In 1974 Jon Anderson invited him to replace Rick Wakeman in the band Yes. Because of difficulties with a visa, a rejection from the Musicians’ Union and his reluctance to tour, Vangelis declined.

By the end of 1974 he had moved to London. There, on Hampden Gurney Street, he set up Nemo Studios, a sixteen-track facility that he called his laboratory. In August 1975 he signed a four-album deal with RCA: “Heaven and Hell” (1975), “Albedo 0.39” (1976), “Spiral” (1977) and “Beaubourg” (1978). Carl Sagan used excerpts from the first two in his television series “Cosmos” (1980). From 1979 Vangelis recorded albums with Anderson as the duo Jon and Vangelis, and with the actress and singer Irene Papas he made arrangements of Greek folk songs (“Odes”, “Rapsodies”). He released “China” (1979) on Polydor.

He took on Hugh Hudson’s “Chariots of Fire” (1981) because he liked the people and the film was modest and low-budget. He scored this period drama set in 1924 with a synthesiser rather than an orchestra, which was unusual. The main theme, “Titles”, after a five-month climb spent one week at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100. In 1982 came Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Costa-Gavras’s “Missing”. For many years the release of the “Blade Runner” recordings remained a matter of dispute: after a disagreement the studio put out orchestral adaptations, and Vangelis’s own recordings appeared only in 1994. He turned down a great many offers, not wanting to become “a factory of film music”. His other films include “Antarctica” (1983), “The Bounty” (1984), “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992, nominated for a Golden Globe), Roman Polanski’s “Bitter Moon” and Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” (2004). For Jacques Cousteau he scored undersea documentaries.

He also worked for the stage: in 1983 he wrote the music for “Elektra”, directed by Michael Cacoyannis at Epidaurus with Irene Papas, and from the same year he composed for ballet. In 1988 he closed Nemo and took up a nomadic life with portable digital equipment; the first album made with it was “Direct”. He designed the opening ceremony of the 1997 World Championships in Athletics in Athens, wrote the music for the Olympic flag handover at the closing of the Sydney Games in 2000, and in 2002 the anthem of the football World Cup in Korea and Japan. In 2001 he performed the choral symphony “Mythodea”, written back in 1993; NASA used it as the music of its Mars Odyssey mission. In 2003 the agency awarded him its Public Service Medal. For the landing of the Philae probe on Comet 67P (2014) he wrote three short pieces, and in 2016 the album “Rosetta” appeared. His last studio album, “Juno to Jupiter”, inspired by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, was released on 24 September 2021.

He also painted: a first exhibition of seventy works was held in 2003 in Valencia, at the Almudin building.

Vangelis died on 17 May 2022 in Paris, in a hospital.