Feed the fire: Vangelis – head man of electronica.

Getty

The Running Man

Electronic éminence grise and soundtrack icon Vangelis left us on May 17.

EVÁNGELOS ODYSSÉAS Papathanassíou was always captivated by the expressive possibilities of keyboards, and even as a four-year-old would marvel at the sound of his parents’ piano, having appended miscellaneous kitchen utensils to its strings. Innately talented, he rejected music lessons and remained an instinctive, autodidact composer, once opining that formal tuition would only have impaired his intuitive creativity.

Born in 1943, in Agria, Thessaly, and raised in Athens, Vangelis’s career took off in 1964, as organist in Greece’s first popular rock band, The Forminx, who would enjoy a string of chart successes. After a right-wing junta overthrew the Greek government in 1967, he, like many of his peers, absconded, initially targeting London but settling instead in Paris. There, he would launch psych-progrockers Aphrodite’s Child, alongside fellow émigrés Demis Roussos and Loukas Sideras. Originally billed as Vangelis And His Orchestra, they recorded three albums for Mercury, enjoyed hit singles, including the millionselling Rain And Tears, and became major stars in France. Their 1972 chef d’oeuvre, the ambitious, sprawling double-set, 666, was their last, and Vangelis’s debut solo album, Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Long Que La Nuit (Make Your Dream Last Longer Than The Night), inspired by the May ’68 Paris riots, was also released that year.

“He rejected music lessons remained an instinctive, autodidact composer.”

He relocated to London in 1974, signing to RCA and crafting a sequence of chart-grazing, synth-heavy solo LPs in his Nemo ‘sound and laboratory’ near Marble Arch, not least 1975’s Heaven And Hell, which was mined for the soundtrack to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. Vangelis’s stock rose further after signing on for a 1981 film conflating faith and the 1924

Paris Olympics called Chariots Of Fire being directed by Hugh Hudson, an erstwhile collaborator on a commercial for Chanel. Hudson advocated for the track L’enfant from Vangelis’s 1979 album Opéra Sauvage as title music, but the composer convinced him otherwise. The resulting theme would garner an Oscar, and the accompanying album topped the Billboard charts, while its august, Yamaha C-80 synth-led title theme was a global hit single and a still-enduring, oft-parodied trope of sports broadcasting.

Vangelis’s elegiac score for 1982’s Blade Runner was similarly acclaimed, and influential on a generation of electronic artists, although rights issues would delay the soundtrack album until 1994 – bootlegs contributing to the music’s burgeoning mythos in the interim. Other major film commissions followed, including The Bounty, Bitter Moon, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise and Alexander, and he created celebratory accompaniments for a brace of Olympic Games and the 2002

FIFA World Cup. Vangelis’s final album, 2021’s Juno To Jupiter, saluted the titular NASA probe, and he maintained a lifelong fascination with space, even composing music for the 2018 funeral of Professor Stephen Hawking, which was beamed into the cosmos by the European Space Agency.

David Sheppard

Judy Henske

Imposing beatnik queen of the 1960s BORN 1936

“There are three types of singer: male, female and banjo-playing chick,” announced Judy Henske. Tall (6’, 1”), with a deep, strident voice and wild unkempt hair, and with just a few songs in her repertoire – which required her to be funny to pad the time – she was a beatnik curiosity in the LA jazz clubs and coffee houses she unsettled as the 1960s dawned.

Following a stint with the Whiskeyhill Singers in 1961, and a lauded TV appearance with Judy Garland, she signed with Elektra in 1962. The label styled her as a cocktail singer in the Julie London mould, which didn’t suit her voice or personality, both of which remained unfettered. Moving to New York, she briefly became a folk world sensation, appearing on the cover of Time and in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan and Woody Allen, who’s said to have based Annie Hall on her.