If The Rolling Stones’ infamous free live performance at Altamont in December 1969 signalled the top of the ’60s’ hippie superb, then Aphrodite’s Youngster’s 666 is the sacrificial ceremony the place the hopes and goals of that decade are lastly turned to mud in a fantastic, cacophonous, ridiculous melange of progressive rock, psychedelic people, Greek fantasy, Christian scripture, Monty Python surrealism and countercultural conspiracy. The victims at this ceremony? Aphrodite’s Youngster themselves, whose 4 members went their separate methods lengthy earlier than this controversial 83-minute double-album primarily based on the E book of Revelations was launched 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 Fireplace 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 Youngster started life as Athens’ reply to The Byrds or The Beatles. Drawing on psych-rock, flower energy and the plush balladry of Mikis Theodorakis, they achieved notable success in Europe with their first two albums, Finish Of The World (1968) and It’s 5 O’Clock (1969), and singles “I Need To Stay” and “Rain And Tears”.
However Vangelis, the driving musical drive, quickly bored with that charade and sought new challenges to match his colossal ambition. Primarily based in Paris to flee the right-wing dictatorship in Greece – like the remainder of the band – he’d skilled the riots of Could ’68 and, although not political, sensed one thing within the air. An encounter the next 12 months with the author and filmmaker Costas Ferris, who’d touted a script for a movie referred to as Aquarius to an unimpressed Pink Floyd, led to Ferris proposing a theme for an Aphrodite’s Youngster idea album primarily based on both a modern-day Ardour Play or the Revelation of St John (often called Apocalypse in Greece), set within the right here and now. The concept of Apocalypse – renamed 666 – appealed to Vangelis, who felt the necessity to compose music not as a celebration of the Swinging ’60s however reasonably as an virtually violent response to it. On jazz freak-out “Altamont”, for instance, the gods view the unfolding chaos from a mountain: “We noticed a lamb with seven eyes/We noticed a beast with seven horns,” intones the album’s English narrator John Forst. He additionally mentions “the rolling individuals”, which The Verve would use for City Hymns.
To that finish, Vangelis composed a Tommy-style rock oratorio primarily based on Ferris’s script by which an viewers at a circus watches the animals and performers act out a diabolical ritual whereas the true Armageddon whips up chaos exterior the massive prime. Whereas the viewers thinks that is a part of the present, the all-seeing narrator turns into an increasing number of exasperated. When the 2 scenes collide, all hell breaks unfastened – realised by Vangelis within the penultimate 20-minute jam “All The Seats Had been Occupied”, which weaves excerpts from the entire album right into a frenetic finale. Very like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s contemporaneous movie The Holy Mountain, which additionally blends faith and magical realism, the extra you assume you perceive 666, the much less sense it makes.
Vangelis and his bandmates spent 10 months in Europa Sonor studios in Paris, burning via $90,000 within the course of and forbidding their paymasters to listen to the works in progress. If Mercury had come to phrases with the truth that Aphrodite’s Youngster not produced chart-topping romantic pop, they struggled with the doubtless blasphemous nature of 666 – not helped by the 4 weatherbeaten musicians who, with their flowing locks and furrowed brows, resembled fallen apostles. But there are some elegant songs, equivalent to “The 4 Horsemen” and “Loud Loud Loud”. In the long run, the one monitor that almost all vexed the label was “∞” (Infinity), by which the Greek actress Irene Papas chants, “I used to be, I’m, I’m to come back” as an improvised, orgasmic a cappella, turning into more and more hysterical as Vangelis rattles percussion approvingly. Meant to convey the Second Coming of Christ via the ache of start and the enjoyment of intercourse, its X-rated content material vexed Mercury who, fearing a “Je T’aime”-style backlash, requested Vangelis to chop it from the album. He refused, and so the label sat on the document for 2 years, solely then releasing it through their new leftfield Vertigo imprint. On the one-year anniversary of the album’s completion, a miffed Vangelis threw a celebration within the studio the place it was recorded and performed it in full to his company. One admirer in attendance, Salvador Dali, proposed a lavish stunt in Barcelona to market it, which didn’t occur.
The unique recording of Papas apparently lasts 39 minutes, which Vangelis lower to 5, and a few followers may really feel short-changed that this fabled onanistic odyssey has been omitted from this Fiftieth-anniversary boxset. Along with the video of a uncommon 1972 Discorama documentary and a Dolby Atmos revamp, what’s of curiosity listed below are the brand new remasters – overseen by Vangelis earlier than he died in Could 2022 – of each the Greek urgent of 666 and the one launched in the remainder of the world. On the extra fascinating Greek model, a number of songs are longer and blended in another way; “Battle Of The Locusts” options further Hendrix riffing from Koulouris, whereas the bluesy groove of “Hic Et Nunc” performs on for 2 additional minutes.
Heavier than Led Zeppelin, saucier than Serge and wilder than The White Album – in these secular occasions, each residence ought to have a duplicate of (i)666(i).