Greek singer became unlikely caftan-wearing sex symbol
Demis Roussos, the Greek singer who died Jan. 25 at age 68, became an unlikely heartthrob in the 1970s when his album sales earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
He scored his biggest success in Britain in 1975 when he had five albums in the top 10 simultaneously and in 1976 when his romantic ballad Forever and Ever was No. 1 in the single charts. Worldwide he sold more than 60 million albums.
“My music came right on time,” Roussos told an interviewer in 2002. “It was romantic Mediterranean music addressed to all the people who wanted to go on holiday. My music was liked by the people … other artists of the same era, Mediterranean, like Julio Iglesias and Nana Mouskouri, followed me.”
His publicity people described Roussos’s songs as a mixture of “Byzantine psalms and muezzin prayer calls,” and there was something otherworldly about his tremulous, near-falsetto delivery. But there was much that was strange about Roussos. Even if his voice had not compelled attention, his Falstaffian 146-kilogram girth, beard, long hair and penchant for billowing caftans would have marked him out.
Incredibly to some, Roussos — who became known as “The Phenomenon” — became seen as a sex symbol. In Britain the mostly middle-aged female audiences at his sellout concerts became every bit as hysterical about his wobbly voice and zithery ballads as their teenage counterparts had been for the Beatles. In later life he recalled that women in the front row would sometimes try to grab his caftans to see if he was wearing anything underneath (the answer, he claimed, was no).
Critics, though, were less easily smitten. One critic called him “The Big Squeak” and likened him to a cross between Mickey Mouse and Moby Dick. Others called him the “The Love Walrus” or “The Singing Tent,” while The Sunday Times said he sounded like a spaniel that had been kicked. And after two years of British hits, Roussos faded from view. The coup de grace, according to some, was administered by Mike Leigh in the scene in his Play For Today, Abigail’s Party (1977), in which the monstrous Bev (Alison Steadman) sways gormlessly to Forever and Ever, consigning Roussos to the ranks of the irredeemably unhip. His next two singles struggled to gain entry into the Top 40.
Roussos, however, felt his inadvertent role in the film was proof that he had left an enduring impression on the 20th century: “Nobody can deny that my name left a mark into the century’s music,” he told The Guardian in 1999. “Even if I die tomorrow, Demis Roussos left a card, a trademark, something that cannot be forgotten.”
Artemios Ventouris Roussos was born to Greek parents on June 15, 1946 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was working as an architect.
The family was forced to flee Egypt for Greece during the Suez crisis of 1956, leaving all of their possessions behind, and as soon as he was old enough young Demis, who sung in a Greek Byzantine church choir as a child and learned guitar, trumpet and piano in school, began work as a cabaret musician to help his family make ends meet. His teenage years coincided with a boom in the Greek tourism industry and he began singing in tourist bars. By the mid-1960s he was performing covers of British and U.S. pop hits, such as House of the Rising Sun and When a Man Loves a Woman, with a band called The Idols.
Toward the end of the decade he hooked up with the future film music composer Vangelis, with whom he formed Aphrodite’s Child, a prog- pop combo who fled to France after the Greek military coup of 1967 made them unwelcome in their homeland. In 1968 they released the song Rain And Tears (derived from Pachelbel’s Canon) during the student riots in Paris. Referring to the tear gas used on demonstrators, it sold more than a million copies in France and managed to scrape into the Top 40 in Britain.
After half a dozen albums in three years, Aphrodite’s Child broke up in 1971 and Roussos went solo, cutting his first album, On the Greek Side of My Mind, the same year. He was already well known in Europe but little known in Britain until 1974 when a BBC documentary, The Roussos Phenomenon, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
His first U.K. single to make the charts, Happy to be on an Island in the Sun, reached No. 5 in 1975. Other hits included My Friend The Wind; Goodbye My Love, Goodbye; Quand je t’aime, Someday Somewhere and Lovely Lady Of Arcadia.
By the time his star began to wane in Britain Roussos was a wealthy man with a mansion outside Paris, a private jet, an estate in the south of France and all the other trappings of success. But he did not remain idle. In the early 1980s, while living in California, he went on a diet, shed more than 38 kg, then published A Question of Weight, which sold a million copies.