Vangelis was born in Italian-occupied Greece during World War II with the moniker Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, but quite understandably, when he came of age said to hell with that and went by plain old Vangelis (or Vangelis O.) most of the time. A true pioneer of synth prog music, Vangelis made his name with Aphrodite’s Child in the late 1960s before breaking out on his own some years later. In the 1980s his relatively tame soundtrack for the Oscar-winning flick Chariots of Fire propelled him to wider fame; you might also know his music from Blade Runner.
In 1974 he appeared on a French TV show called Melody and the results were frankly mind-blowing. This is quite simply a totally righteous 1970s jam (man) in the best sense of the word. The footage is broken up into a few different parts but the throughline is Vangelis burning it up on the synth as well as various percussion instruments, accompanied at various points by a quartet of bongo players and an enormous drum circle of young people bashing the bejesus out of a dozen or so kettle drums.
The material here heavily emphasizes Vangelis’ 1973 album Earth. The second song in the set is called “Let It Happen” and is almost certainly a track that the French electronic act Air pillaged for their own uses a good 20 years later. The third track is a cheery number called “My Face In The Rain” and resembles a satisfying mashup of mid-career Flaming Lips and Genesis in the days right after Peter Gabriel left.
Vangelis would soon record his masterpiece Heaven and Hell, which ended up furnishing the music for Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS series Cosmos and also represented his first collaboration with Jon Anderson of Yes. The two men would later release several albums under the name Jon and Vangelis.
The joyous and infectious jam sessions in the show are fantastic, but what pushes this video into must-see territory is the audacious video effects knob twiddling that director Marion Sarraut demanded for the occasion. Basically there seems not to have been a back-projected visual effect that didn’t get used here, and indeed, the final takeaway is that the technician in the booth was improvising right along with the musicians. Vangelis and his singer spend much of “My Face in the Rain” floating around on individual magic carpets (take my word for it; you’ll see) over footage of the Iguazu waterfalls in Argentina and Brazil and similar natural wonders. Those effects and Vangelis’ brazenly open jacket, revealing a multitude of Greek chest hair and at least five ostentatious medallions (couldn’t tell if any of them was a coke spoon but I would be none too surprised), are the clearest markers of the year this footage was produced.
Those of you who remember how a VCR works will understand what I mean when I say there are a couple of bad tracking glitches during the video, but none of them lasts too long.
This video goes on a little longer but has annoying watermark text obscuring the image, so I’m opting to embed the one with more visual appeal:
I’d bet anything this video was at least part of the inspiration for the hyperbolic and utterly magnificent “Lords of Synth” parody video Adult Swim dropped a couple of months back:
via Electronic Beats
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Insane Vangelis improvised synth freak-out, 1982