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APHRODITE’S CHILD
666 – The Apocalypse Of St John: 50th Anniversary Boxset UNIVERSAL
The Greek prog legends’ sprawling and storied Biblical masterpiece celebrates its 50th anniversary.
By Piers Martin
9/10
IF The Rolling Stones’ notorious free concert at Altamont in December 1969 signalled the end of the ’60s’ hippie ideal, then Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 is the sacrificial ceremony where the hopes and dreams of that decade are finally turned to dust in a beautiful, cacophonous, ridiculous melange of progressive rock, psychedelic folk, Greek myth, Christian scripture, Monty Python… surrealism and countercultural conspiracy.
The victims at this ceremony? Aphrodite’s Child themselves, whose four members went their separate ways long before this controversial 83-minute double-album based on the Book Of Revelations was released in June 1972, two years after the band had delivered it to their label, Mercury.
Stewarded by the Greek maestro Vangelis Papathanassiou – the visionary behind the Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire scores – and fronted by the singer and bassist Demis Roussos – later, the kaftan king of ’70s kitsch – alongside guitarist Silver Koulouris and drummer Lucas Sideras, Aphrodite’s Child began life as Athens’ answer to The Byrds or The Beatles. Drawing on psych-rock, flower power and the lush balladry of Mikis Theodorakis, they achieved notable success in Europe with their first two albums, End Of The World (1968) and It’s Five O’Clock (1969), and singles “I Want To Live” and “Rain And Tears”.
But Vangelis, the driving musical force, soon tired of that charade and sought new challenges to match his colossal ambition. Based in Paris to escape the right-wing dictatorship in Greece – like the rest of the band – he’d experienced the riots of May ’68 and, though not political, sensed something in the air. An encounter the following year with the writer and filmmaker Costas Ferris, who’d touted a script for a film called Aquarius to an unimpressed Pink Floyd, led to Ferris proposing a theme for an Aphrodite’s Child concept album based on either a modern-day Passion Play or the Revelation of St John (known as Apocalypse in Greece), set in the here and now. The idea of Apocalypse – renamed 666 – appealed to Vangelis, who felt the need to compose music not as a celebration of the Swinging ’60s but rather as an almost violent reaction to it. On jazz freak-out “Altamont”, for example, the gods view the unfolding chaos from a mountain: “We saw a lamb with seven eyes/We saw a beast with seven horns”, intones the album’s English narrator John Forst. He also mentions “the rolling people”, which The Verve would use for Urban Hymns.