Aphrodites Child

...and Aphrodite

the gods call it one thing, men call it another: that she

was fed by the foam…

(Hesiod, 'Theogony', circa 7th century BC)

At around two in the morning on April 21, 1967, a group of Greek army officers, led by colonels Geōrgios Papadòpoulos, Nikolaos Makarezos and Stylianos Pattakòs, carried out a lightning-fast, meticulously planned coup d'état. Under the pretext of averting a possible electoral victory for the center-left and containing an alleged "communist threat", the military blocked the democratic process before the country could even go to the polls for the elections set for May. At dawn on that spring day, Athens woke up to tanks in the streets. Politicians, intellectuals and activists were arrested en masse, the Constitution was suspended and civil liberties wiped out. Within hours, Greece found itself under the control of a military regime.

Until that moment, the Greek pop and rock scene had been in a period of full expansion, with several musicians keeping their ears firmly tuned to the international scene. Among them were four artists with very different backgrounds, whose paths ended up crossing right in the shadow of the Parthenon, giving rise to one of the most fascinating and unpredictable musical adventures straddling the Sixties and Seventies: that of Aphrodite's Child.

Vangelis, born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in Agria in 1943, was a former enfant prodige: at the age of four, he was already banging away at a piano keyboard, and over time he picked up several other instruments, eventually favoring the Hammond B3 organ, the one he would play from 1963 onward with the Forminx, a popular Athenian beat band whose name was inspired by an ancient Greek instrument. With them he cut nine singles ("Jeronimo Yanka" the most notable) and achieved national fame, penning original songs (under the pseudonym Vagos) to English lyrics written by producer Nico Mastorakis.

After the group disbanded, Vangelis met bassist and singer Demis Roussos, originally from Alexandria, Egypt, where he was born in 1946. Having moved to Greece as a teenager, Roussos had played in several bands before founding The Idols, a beat group hugely popular in the clubs and later signed by Parlophone. Even before recording with them, though, he had changed course, joining We Five, with whom he released two singles in 1966. Even then, his voice was unmistakable: intense, vibrant, capable of shifting from tenderness to dramatic tension. Roussos had been introduced to Vangelis by Loukas Sideras, a drummer born in 1944 in the Greek capital, where he had cut his teeth with the Stormies. With Sideras on board, the three began rehearsing assiduously at Vangelis's house. After the arrival of twenty-year-old guitarist Argyris "Silver" Koulouris, from Piraeus, the band — calling themselves Papathanassiou Set (or Vangelis Papathanassiou and his orchestra) — recorded a demo for Philips Greece, before making their recording debut backing folk singer-songwriter George Romanos.

After the 1967 coup, though, Greece no longer seemed like the ideal place for the dreams of glory of four young musicians. Philips pushed them toward England, but fate had other plans in store: Koulouris had to stay behind for military service, while the other three, unable to obtain work permits in time to cross the Channel, found themselves stuck in Paris just as the riots of May '68 were intensifying.

No matter. In Paris, the band signed with Mercury, and producer Lou Reizner renamed them Aphrodite's Child. In July 1968, "Rain And Tears" came out, a surprising pop reworking of Pachelbel's "Canon in D", transformed by Vangelis into a melancholic, luminous ballad. The song sold a million copies and topped the charts in France, Belgium and Italy.

Two LPs followed: "End Of The World" (1968), which, buoyed by the single "Rain And Tears", cemented the group's success with a mix of baroque pop, psychedelia and Greek folk influences; and "It's Five O'Clock" (1969), recorded in London and marked by a more varied sound, featuring folk and country-rock elements alongside early hints of progressive rock. The title track (destined to become one of their signature songs) climbed several international charts and even won the Festivalbar in Italy.

The fame and success of Aphrodite's Child thus began to spread rapidly across Europe. And yet, even after securing more favorable contract terms, their income couldn't keep up with the costs of an increasingly lavish lifestyle — not least because Vangelis, more interested in experimenting alone in his home studio than chasing fame at any cost, refused to take part in tours and concerts, forcing his bandmates to turn down many lucrative offers. Amid mounting tension, Aphrodite's Child thus entered the final phase of their career — the one in which they would create their masterpiece, and indeed one of the masterpieces of the Seventies. It would be released in 1972 (by which point the band had essentially already broken up), it would be a double album, and it would be titled "666".

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six

("Revelation of John", 13:18)

Built around an adaptation of passages from "Revelation" (the title "666" alludes precisely to that passage, 13:18, from the biblical book), the album staged it all while, outside, the real world seemed to be falling apart. Vangelis (who composed all the music) constructed a visionary fresco, blending progressive rock, electronic experimentation, spoken-word passages, heavy psych, choirs, Eastern-tinged suggestions, traditional Greek music and more. A fresco that found fertile ground in the imagination of director and lyricist Costas Ferris, with whom Vangelis wrote all the lyrics. Ferris was born in Cairo in 1935 and was shaped, besides the Egyptian capital, by time spent between Athens and Paris. After debuting with the feature film "Merikes To Protimoun Khaki" (1965), during the Colonels' regime he lived in exile in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, taking part in the events of May 1968, coming into contact with major international directors, and continuing to serve as a touchstone for the Greek counterculture and, above all, for the "New Greek Cinema" (Neos Ellenikos Kinematografos, or NEK).

Ferris and Vangelis had met in 1966, while the film "Formynx story" was in preparation, initially entrusted to Theo Angelopoulos. "Then came the military coup in April '67," Ferris recalls, "and most of us fled the Junta, mainly heading to Paris. There I ran into Vangelis and the other members of the group again at the Café 'Le Saint Claude', in Saint Germain des Pres, which at the time was a meeting point for Greek refugees".

In 1969, together with Jean-Daniel and Serge Ouaknine, Ferris wrote a screenplay titled "Aquarius", "and the director," Ferris continues, "wanted Pink Floyd for the soundtrack". When the English band turned it down, it occurred to Ferris to propose it to Vangelis, who however said he wasn't interested. A couple of days later, though, it was Vangelis who called Ferris back, asking him for some good ideas for a concept album to make with Aphrodite's Child. "He already knew the group was about to split up, and that the only 'star' capable of a solo career was Demis. So he wanted to make one last record that would showcase his compositional talent." A record, Vangelis would say, that would be "an artistic exploration, not a commercial one".

Ferris came up with a couple of ideas. The first concerned the Passion of Christ reread in light of 60s counterculture, with Christ seen as a sacrificed Great Star. The second was centred on the "Apocalypse of St. John", likewise reread through a sixties lens. Vangelis opted for the latter, because, as he would later recall, "the Apocalypse is what's happening today".

The basic idea Ferris had worked on involved a circus company staging a show about the Apocalypse, complete with acrobats, animals and spectacular effects, with a clear nod to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper...", though the influence of the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, from 1968, can't be ruled out either.

As the show goes on, outside the tent the real Apocalypse descends upon the Earth and humanity, but only the narrator senses the truth and falls into a panic, while the audience keeps mistaking reality for its representation. Only at the end does the tent vanish, and reality and spectacle merge into a battle between Good and Evil, between the true end of the world and its staged version.

According to Ferris, it was a "concept book" rather than a true "rock opera": "The term 'book' (usually 'book and lyrics') is used by American musical writers and lyricists to translate the term used in Italian opera and ballet, 'libretto'. It consists of a minimal description of the stage action, any spoken texts (recitatives), and the lyrics of the 'arias' ('songs') (…) 'Tommy' [by the Who] was the first attempt to create a 'rock opera', inventing a new structure in which the action has no theatrical (dramatic) continuity, but is instead conveyed through a succession of 'songs' that tell different points of view. Kit Lambert, the producer of 'Tommy', was the son of classical composer Constant Lambert, and had been my friend since 1963. The fact that we both worked in film (Kit was unit manager on the film 'The Moonspinners', where I was assistant director) I think influenced both 'Tommy' and '666'. It seems we'd both grasped the role of the music or record producer as that of a film director working with music instead of images. (…) The narrative of '666' had to be freer than 'Tommy', but more rigid and structured than 'Sgt. Pepper', so I 'invented' (in a way) the term 'concept book', which later became 'concept album'. Even this wasn't an entirely original idea, because in the early 60s, famous Greek composers such as Hadjidakis, Theodorakis and others had already created series of records with a central theme common to all the songs, calling this form a 'song cycle', in order to protect their intellectual rights against any unauthorised 'covers'. So I wrote the song lyrics based on a kind of narrative scheme, keeping in mind too the 'temporal-puzzle' narrative typical of films like 'Intolerance' [David Wark Griffith, 1916], 'Citizen Kane' [Orson Welles, 1941], 'Rashomon' [Akira Kurosawa, 1950], 'The Killing' [Stanley Kubrick, 1956] and so on (…) Lastly, another element that's not very obvious on the record is the creation of a main character: the Narrator, who is actually the Protagonist. He is a victim of the Antagonist, or the 'motor character' (a film term), who is... God himself (the true Revelation). That's why he becomes hysterical and delivers the famous 'infinity' part, later performed by Irene Papas".

On learning of the new project, Roussos and Sideras said they were perplexed, since for them it meant drifting all too visibly away from what the band had done up to that point, risking the loss of a large chunk of their audience. Still, given Vangelis's determination, the two of them eventually agreed to take part in the recording of the new material — after securing, in exchange, Koulouris's return to the line-up. Sessions were held at the Europa Sonor studio, with Roger Roche supervising from the control room. The first week, in any case, was devoted solely to setting up a wide array of instruments, including gongs, xylophones, harpsichords, congas, various metallophones and two classical pianos, all ready to be recorded on a 24-track recorder.

Vangelis had even set up two archery targets and canvases to paint on! The sessions, which also featured guest musicians such as Harris Halkitis (bass, tenor sax, congas and vocals) and Michel Ripoche (trombone and tenor sax), began with a series of improvisations, allowing the themes and structures of the various tracks to emerge gradually.

Between late 1970 and early 1971, all the new material was put down on tape. During those months, various fans, friends of the band (including director Theo Angelopoulos) and a few journalists were let into the studio, and some of them even contributed (former Yardbirds and Rolling Stones manager Giorgio Gomelsky, for instance, offered more than one suggestion during production, and also put forward John Forst as the record's narrating voice).

Fallen fallen fallen

is Babylon the great!

Space is getting bounded,

time is getting late!

Framed by a sharp drum hit, the opening "The System" incites revolt ("We got the system to fuck the System!"), echoing Abbie Hoffman's 1967 pamphlet "Fuck The System" and thereby setting out the album's apocalyptic lens.

A driving rhythm, crowd noise, a rubbery bassline and a muscular guitar riff (in which some have also spotted a nod to the Who's "Pinball Wizard") are the key building blocks of "Babylon", a delectable slice of psych-pop (with Vangelis on drums!), whose message — about the fall of "great" Babylon — pairs neatly with an invitation not to remain alone.

In "Loud, Loud, Loud", a piano ostinato built on two chords underpins a hushed vocal (it belongs to Daniel Koplowitz, the son of a diplomat), sketching out the hypothesis of a world freed from war. This vision is then joined by a choral refrain, which gradually expands with calm yet firm conviction.

(This track would later be sampled by Deltron 3030 in "Mastermind").

The day young boys will stop becoming soldiers

And soldiers will stop playing war games

We’ll sing and cry and shout

Loud, loud, loud, loud

Reverb-drenched keyboards and delicate bell chimes keep the verses of "The Four Horsemen" (based on a free reworking of the story of the opening of the first four seals — Pestilence, War, Famine, Death — and the appearance of the famous Four Horsemen) in a state of rarefied suspension, before an impetuous psychedelic blues jam breaks the spell. In the second part, an extended wah-wah-filtered guitar solo drives the track toward its climax.

Among the album's most celebrated tracks, "The Four Horsemen" would go on to influence, among others, Beck (listen to "Chemtrails"), the Verve (its "fa fa fa" chorus was echoed in their "The Rolling People") and Daniel Lopatin, who sampled its slowed-down refrain in the track "A7".

Echoes of traditional Greek music can thus be heard in the instrumental "The Lamb" and in "The Seventh Seal", where John Forst recites the words describing the opening of the seventh seal (the lines "And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal/ Silence covered the sky" would later prove useful to Enigma on "The Rivers Of Belief").

In an atmosphere that is at once dreamlike and steeped in melancholy, where Vangelis's keyboards display all their evocative power, "Aegian Sea" delivers a touching guitar solo (with Koulouris edging ever closer to becoming David Gilmour). Amid the folds of the notes, Forst's voice (pitched down and panned to the right channel) promises that human beings "will no longer suffer hunger, will no longer suffer thirst".

As a kind of interlude, both "Seven Bowls" and "The Wakening Beast" flirt with musique concrète, the former describing the effects of the seven bowls of judgment, by which "the earth turned grey" and the sea black, while the rivers saw their waters take on the color of blood and the air turned to poison (Enigma would again sample the narration from "Seven Bowls" in "The Voice And The Snake").

In the spectral "Lament", Roussos's voice, resembling that of a muezzin, calls for mercy on all humanity. The evocative power of this track also owes much to Vangelis's musical mastery, as he carves out space and time here by playing on the contrast between scattered, repetitive sounds and a fixed, somber drone note used to underpin the melody (in Byzantine music, much loved by the great keyboardist, this was known as an ison or isokrattima).

Alas alas

for the human race

alas

for the kings, the kings

The instrumental "The Marching Beast", meanwhile, rests on a repeated melody of guitar, bass and saxophone, with a piano solo that lights up the theme and a flute trill straight out of the Jethro Tull playbook.

"The Battle Of The Locusts" and "Do It" (the latter taking its name from the book "Do It!: Scenarios Of The Revolution", published in 1970 by activist Jerry Rubin) are aggressive rock instrumentals in power-trio format, with intricate drumming and rapid-fire guitar solos, betraying influences from both jazz-rock and hard rock. Jazz also surfaces in the scant thirty seconds of "Tribulation", where fragmented, atonal phrases from Halkitis's saxophone are heard, overdubbed multiple times.

Somewhere between music-hall and funky chant, "The Beast" recalls Frank Zappa tackling a reworking of a Beatles song sung by Ringo Starr. The track features two vocal interjections by Vangelis, captured during recording as instructions to the various musicians: "Pame" ("let's go!") and "telionoume edho pera, etsi?", meaning "Shall we finish here, then?".

The first record closes with "Ofis", in which painter, costume designer and set designer Yiannis Tsarouchis recites a line taken from "Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake", one of the most famous tales of Greek shadow theatre (or Karagiozis): "Exelthe ofi katiramene, dhioti an dhen exelthe essy, tha se exelthe ego! Ou! Ou! Ou!", meaning "Come out, cursed snake, because if you don't come out on your own, I'll make you come out! Ou! Ou! Ou!"

The second part of "666" opens with the brief proclamation of "Seven Trumpets". By now, the representation of catastrophe and catastrophe itself are on the same plane. It's surely no coincidence that the Apocalypse and the New World it gives rise to are identified, in the following "Altamont", with the Counterculture and with everything the latter was supposed to deliver. The conditional is necessary here, since the title indirectly alludes to the tragic death of eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter, stabbed by a member of the Hells Angels just a few feet from the stage at that infamous concert held in Altamont, California, on December 6, 1969. For many, that event marked the very end of the flower children's season of utopias.

Musically speaking, this track, one of the most famous in the Greek band's catalogue, is built around a repetitive groove, deeply influenced by funk and by the free-form bandleading in the Zappa-esque tradition.

This is the sight we had one day

on the High Mountain

We saw a lamb with seven eyes

We saw a beast with seven horns

and a book with seven seals

Seven angels with seven trumpets

and seven bowls filed with anger

Those are the pictures

of what was

of what is

of what has to come

"The Wedding Of The Lamb" opens like a sonic spell suspended between heaven and earth: electronic keyboards weave an ethereal tapestry of floating melodies, while vocalizations creep in like distant echoes of a mystical ritual. All around, syncopated percussion marks time, evoking tribal dances and ancestral rhythms. The final fade-out opens a passage into "The Capture Of The Beast", with Sideras's drums dominating the space, while percussion explodes like lightning in a sky of drones, and the electronic reverbs generated by Vangelis bring to mind blazing stars.

This is the prelude to "∞", in which Irene Papas (born Eirini Lelekou), the famous Greek actress the band had met a year earlier in Italy during the filming of a TV show, repeats insistently the phrase "I was, I am, I am to", reworking a biblical verse again taken from the Book of Revelation ("I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty!"). Delivered with mounting intensity, the words, which in the Bible refer to Good, are here attributed to Evil and rendered in the first person. Blending sound, breath, moans and screams into a symbolic triumph of birth, desire and transcendence, Papas (who, according to some, seems here to foreshadow the vocal experiments of her fellow countrywoman Diamanda Galás) gradually transfigures them into a visceral, highly sensual expression, staging the attempt to be reborn, to generate another self, to mate with oneself, all within a lyrical-sonic vicious circle that was truly daring for its time.

In a 1983 interview, Vangelis (who played percussion on this track and described it as an expression "of the pain of childbirth and the joy of sexual intercourse") recalled that, after arriving in the studio, Papas freely interpreted the very short text, eventually winning over even Ferris himself, who had initially pushed for a performer with a pronounced British accent, in order to sharpen the contrast with the track's "ascending frenzy".

Vangelis, Irene Papas & Costas Ferris

Over the years, various rumours have circulated about how Papas recorded the track. According to what Rob Hughes wrote in "Prog Magazine", for instance, the Greek actress delivered her performance shut inside her booth, in the dark, and what we hear is simply her reaction to a real orgasm! When he read the article, Ferris blew up: "It's a grotesque lie! It's a ridiculous fantasy dreamed up by some stupid storyteller. It is IMPOSSIBLE for an actor or actress to act (pretend) and actually masturbate at the same time! It's also offensive to the memory of a celebrated tragic actress. In reality, everyone was present, including some friends of Irene's and her dear friend, the Greek actor Takis Emanuel. And the 'performance' took place in full light. Irene remained standing the whole time like a column, and only her face changed expression according to the emotions: pain, choking, childbirth, argument, laughter, sarcasm and so on, including a brief climactic moment. The parts that Vangelis edited, emphasizing the 'erotic' aspect, were - I believe - his own choice, made to cause a scandal for commercial purposes."

The scandal, in any case, first landed in the offices of Vertigo, whose executives raised more than a few objections, though in the end they didn't push to have the track excluded from the tracklist - on condition, however, that its length be drastically cut, given that the full recording stopped the clock at 39 minutes!

(A sample of Papas's laboured breathing would later be used in Enigma's "Principles Of Lust".)

Underlining the urgency of the "here and now" is "Hic et nunc", in which, alongside another appearance of the ghost of the Fab Four, the rumbling crowd and the call to revolt of "The System" return to the fore.

Dominating the final part, instead, are the more than nineteen minutes of "All The Seats Are Occupied", whose title was taken from a record released by the BBC for teaching the English language. Unfolding freely and erratically, amid a climate of sensory alteration (bringing to mind, among others, Amon Düül II's "Tanz der Lemminge"), this colossal sonic ritual weaves together raga figures, bursts of frenetic funk, tribal-tinged interludes and a deliberately chaotic montage of samples drawn from some of the album's most important tracks. What emerges is not the mere narration of the Apocalypse, but its staging as a collective rite, as a grand public spectacle in which time reveals its deepest essence - its being an invisible river of unrepeatable instants - while every sound reveals the grand logic of destiny beyond the appearance of chaos.

The final seal on “666” is set by “Break”, which opens like a suspended breath: Sideras' voice floats over a carpet of piano and organ, tracing sweet lines steeped in a melancholy that Vangelis' ironic choral parts try to temper. If the song's final words (“Fly/ High/ And then/ You make it”) ring out like a suspended, fragile, aching high note, the closing piano-and-organ chord slowly dissolves into silence, before Forst's vocal fragment – “Do it!” – suddenly explodes, like an invitation to actually carry out what “666” has, across these grooves, merely laid out in the form of great music.

Released in June 1972, after being praised even by Salvador Dalì (“an excellent work”, he exclaimed after listening to it in reverent silence at the party Vangelis threw to “celebrate” the album while Mercury was still blocking its distribution), “666” came wrapped in a red cover, on which the “number of the Beast” was printed in black and white, like a car license plate. The artwork was created by Gerard Fallec, the “production coordinator” who had already pushed Vangelis and Ferris (torn between “Apocalypse” and “Revelation”) to settle on the title “666”, which he felt was punchier and less overused. It was also Fallec who arranged for the inner sleeve to feature a painting signed by a mysterious “M. Dubre”, depicting, in a surrealist vein, a car crash.

“Gerard didn't know exactly what connection that painting might have with the album”, Ferris recalls, “but he had a feeling it might be about a car crash, since the cover had a license plate on it. To Vangelis and me, though, it immediately looked like the ultimate representation of human stupidity. And since my interpretation is that 666 is the name of Man who has not yet attained analytical intelligence and behaves with the reactive mind of the beast, the painting was a perfect fit for the album. Idiocy is the cause of all conflicts, wars, massacres, environmental destruction; indeed, idiocy is the cause of suicide. A terrible suicidal car crash could have no other explanation than stupidity”.

The liner notes finally read: “This work was recorded under the influence of ‘SAHLEP’”. Sahlep (in Arabic) or salepi (in Greek) is a hot drink typical of the East, sweet and wholesome. It is a sort of herbal tea with calming, relaxing properties. It contains neither alcohol nor drugs.

Loukas Sideras, Vangelis, Salvador Dalì & Amanda Lear

We mentioned earlier Dalì's admiration for the album: he compared the music of “666” to Gaudí's Sagrada Família and its lyrics to the paintings of Albrecht Dürer, adding that, had he been a musician, this would certainly have been one of his finest works. The great genius of surrealist painting (nearly seventy at the time) hadn't lost an ounce of his provocative, eccentric character (among other things, he loved strolling around walking an anteater on a leash!). It's hardly surprising, then, that to mark the release of “666” he devised a grandiose happening to be staged in Barcelona, which called for blasting the Aphrodite's Child's music through the streets via giant loudspeakers, alongside soldiers marching in Nazi uniforms and a series of shocking, symbolic images, including animals and religious figures caught up in spectacular scenes. Hundreds of swans were to be released in front of the Sagrada Família, with sticks of dynamite sewn into their bellies, set to explode “in slow motion thanks to special effects”. Navy planes were to fly over the city, dropping not bombs but elephants, hippopotamuses, whales and even archbishops with umbrellas! Needless to say, none of it ever came to pass, but Dalì's project gives a good sense of the impact the Greek band's masterpiece had at the time.

Banned in some countries upon release (Franco's Spain, for instance), “666” only reached Greek stores in 1974, in an edition featuring some far from negligible differences: many tracks, in fact, were longer, without fade-outs, or had extended endings, adding up to roughly five extra minutes of music compared with the 1972 version. By that point, however, in the ancient land of Homer and the great philosophers, no one had any objections left to raise about the lyrics' alleged blasphemy or Papas' provocative performance. The wind had changed. Of the Junta of colonels, nothing remained but rubble.

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19/04/2026