Demis Roussos

Vocation

Greek singer and performer who had a string of international hit records as a solo performer in the 1970s after having been a member of Aphrodite's Child, a progressive rock group that also included the well renowned Vangelis. He has sold over 60 million albums worldwide. After settling in Greece, Roussos participated in a series of musical groups beginning with The Idols when he was 17, where he met Evangelos Papathanassiou (later known as Vangelis) and Loukas Sideras, his future bandmates in Aphrodite's Child. After this he joined We Five (not the San Francisco, California folk-rock group), another cover band which had limited success in Greece. Demis came to a wider audience in 1967 when he joined progressive rock band Aphrodite's Child, with Vangelis and Sideras, initially as a singer but later also playing bass guitar, achieving big commercial success in France and other parts of Europe from 1968 to 1972. They set off for London to break into the international music scene but as a result of bad weather, the plane landed them in Paris - and they decided to stay there signing a record deal with Philips S.A. His distinctive operatic vocal style helped propel the band to international notoriety, notably on their final album 666, which became aprogressive rock cult classic. After Aphrodite's Child disbanded, Roussos continued to record sporadically with former bandmate Vangelis. In 1970 the two releasedSex Power (although the album has also been disputably credited to Aphrodite's Child), also recording the 1977 album Magic together. Their most successful collaboration was "Race To The End" (also sung in Spanish as "Tu Libertad"), a vocal adaptation of the musical theme from the Oscar winning film Chariots of Fire, whilst Roussos also guested on the soundtrack to Blade Runner (1982), with a song entitled "Tales Of The Future". Link to Wikipedia biography