VANGELIS.

Vangelis The Artist


The musical talents of Vangelis first became obvious at the age of four. His parents tried to encourage him to study with a professional teacher, but he did not respond well to formal education as he was generally unwilling to follow instructions.

Vangelis explains, "I have always felt that you should not borrow knowledge from others, because personal experience and development are of utmost significance."

After leaving school he and some friends formed a group called Formynx. In the early 60s this band packed Greek stadiums with thousands of music hungry fans. Vangelis was virually the first artist that brought pop music to his home country. Formynx was soon Greece's most popular musical group.

During the Greek upheaval in 1968 Vangelis moved to Paris. Together with Demis Roussos and Loukas Sideras he formed a band called Aphrodite's Child. This group scored an immediate world wide hit with their first release, Rain and Tears. Aphrodite's Child went on to release several further European number-one singles over the course of three years. The band split up after their controversial double album 666. Vangelis remained in Paris for a while, recording a couple of film soundtracks for the French director Frederic Rossif (among these L'Apocalypse Des Animaux and La Fete Sauvage) and giving an amazing performance at the "Olympia" to promote his first solo album, Earth, on the Philips label.

In 1974 he moved to London in the midst of a storm of rumors that he would be joining the group Yes as Rick Wakemen's replacement on keyboards. After rehearsing with Yes for several weeks Vangelis left, explaining that his musical theory and directions and the group's were too far apart. It was during his stint with Yes that he and Jon Anderson became friends and collaborators.

Vangelis soon signed a recording contract with RCA, and assembled his own 24 track studio known as Nemo Studios. Nemo Studios is near London's Marble Arch, and is referred to by Vangelis as his laboratory. The first album cut here was Heaven and Hell. This first album on the RCA label, a collection of extraordinary and forceful music, catapulted him to the forefront of popular music in Europe and the United States. To this date, all albums that followed Heaven and Hell were equally internationally acclaimed and enormous sellers. Vangelis achieved an array of awards, among them an Oscar in 1982 for the soundtrack of the film Chariots of Fire.

The music of Vangelis is too diverse to be described as either pop, rock, classical, jazz, or new age. Explaining his music, Vangelis says, "All I try to do is let people know what I think through my music. I just bring the music to you and it is up to you to do what you want with it."

"The sound of Vangelis is unique. Through a keyboard-based combination of orchestral and elevtronic textures, he has created a remarkable and unique world of sound. Vangelis plays all the instruments himself: he is composer, arranger and producer. In over 20 albums, in many film, television, theatre and ballet scores, he has created an instantly recognisable and distinctive style,which, although widely imitated, has never succesfully been copied. From the first, he was one of those prophetic artists ahead of their time: in his music, he has continually created challenges for which the logical solutions are yet to be discovered. From the late 1960's as a young boy, with careful use of conventional instruments, he created keyboard-based textures which were only to become fully obtainable with the arrival of the polyphonic synthesiser in the mid-70's. Indeed from his earliest years in Greece Vangelis was taking music beyond mere notes to an investigation of sound. His first memory in life is 'Playing piano, some percussion and whatever else was available that made a noise... I wanted, even then, to go beyond melody, to the totality of the sound. The vibration of sound itself contains melody, harmony and rhythm.' Vangelis' creative imagination was given full rein during his years in Paris with the French film director, Frederic Rossif, in a series of outstanding wild-life films, from which some of the musical highlights were released on 'L'Apocalypse des Animaux' (1973). Further music for the Rossif series was collected over several years onto the album 'Opera Sauvage' (released in 1979). In 1974 Vangelis moved to London and set up his own studio which was to be his creative base for over ten years. From this studio emerged a large variety od truly original musical works in which he brought to full maturity the fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds. Some of this work appeared on such albums as 'Heaven and Hell', 'Albedo 0.39', 'Spiral', 'China' and 'See You Later', in which he demonstrated the full virtuoso range of his imagination. Although acquainted from a very early age with the Western European musical tradition, his roots and musical culture are in the music of his native country, Greece, on the border between the West and the East, shares with Eastern cultures a living historical musical tradition: the music of the people now, both in the country and in the towns, is intimately associated with a tradition dating back over centuries, in a way which does not exist in Western Europe. 'Ethnic music has always been important to me. I carry within me the climate of Greece, its spirit, its traditions and its music - but, to me, all music is one, indivisible.' This oneness of music is the elemental rhythm and pulse, the vibration of nature which is at the root of life, and out of which all music grows. Vangelis is by nature something of a recluse: since the early 1970's he has made very few concert appearances, and he prefers to stay out of the public gaze - his music has made its lasting impact largely without the composer himself being visible. This is above all true in film music, the field in which he has been perhaps most influential. In his Oscar-winning score for 'Chariots Of Fire' (1981) he proved at a stroke his genius as a composer of music for feature films. He does not work, as most film composers do, with the time codes and click tracks: he sits back from the action, absorbs the atmosphere and emotion, and creates music instantly which captures the psychological essence of the visual image. Hence his music used in the course of 'Chariots of Fire' is not designed to fit the physical movements in the scenes - indeed it often contrasts with them extraordinarily, in both pace and superficial emotional involvement. Instead the music possesses a quite separate spiritual entity, where juxtaposition with the actual visual image often evokes a profound sense of both timelessness and poignancy. The title music of 'Chariots of Fire', however, instantly presents the heroism, the striving, the nobility of the sporting endeavour, through the dynamic, throbbing bass line and the primeval upward-thrusting horn-call, out of which the main theme grows. This fanous theme is supported by perhaps the richest and grandest orchestral textures of any of Vangelis' scores, and indeed this music seems, quite remarkably, to have been taken up itself almost as the British national hymn. "

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