The ‘devil-worshipping’ album that nearly finished off Vangelis

Helped by Salvador Dali and ‘pornographic’ sound effects, the composer tried to recreate the apocalypse with his band Aphrodite’s Child

In late 1971, the members of Aphrodite’s Child threw a party in honour of their latest album. At Paris’s Europa Sonor studios, the Greek band laid out their new opus, a double-record themed around the apocalypse and The Book Of Revelation, with the lofty title 666, to a gathering of journalists and other influential notables.
Among their number was Salvador Dali. So taken with the album was the painter that, after digesting the full thing, he declared to the band’s leader and keyboardist Evangelos ‘Vangelis’ Papathanassiou, singer Demis Roussos, and film-making collaborator and lyrical contributor Costas Ferris, that it was “une musique de pierre” (“a music of stone”). He then went on to compare it, even more abstractly, to 16th-century woodcut master Albrecht Dürer.
A strange assessment, but 666 was a strange record. Comprising 24 tracks that take in psychedelic pop, jazz, funk, raga, tinges of Greek folk, experimental noise and touches of religious music to tell its story, with lyrics based largely on passages from The Bible, Aphrodite’s Child’s third album was unlike anything else on Earth, much less anything else the band had done before. Now their most well-known and venerated work – it was also an exhausting, ruinously expensive project that would serve as an artistic calling card at the same time as nearly killing them. Roussos and Vangelis would, of course, go on to have their own successful solo careers.
But back to Dali, whose interpretation of the music would only get stranger. Asked if he’d be interested in overseeing the album’s premiere proper, with some delight he presented a bullet-pointed list of ideas he felt would work with the record’s tale of an exotic circus performing the Biblical tale of Revelation with animals, while the actual Apocalypse raged outside the big top.
“Martial Law shall be ordered on a Sunday, in Barcelona,” it began, adding that no cameras were to be permitted, and the only witnesses would be a handful of shepherds, who would recount what they saw orally. Anyone breaking the law would be arrested by “soldiers dressed in Nazi uniform [walking] in military march”.
Further down the list, Dali outlined that: “Hundreds of swans will be left to move in front of the Sagrada Familia, with pieces of dynamite in their bellies, which will explode in slow motion by special effects,” as the album blared from a PA.
All this was to be an aperitif to the main event, which would see huge military aircraft laying an assault on the church at noon sharp. “Instead of bombs, they shall throw elephants, hippopotami, whales and Archbishops carrying umbrellas.” When asked by Ferris to clarify if he meant some kind of mannequin in Papal robes, Dali is said to have replied like a patient teacher to a dim-witted student: “No, young man. When I say Archbishops, I mean real, living Archbishops. It’s about time to finish with the church!”
Somewhat disappointingly, Dali’s plan didn’t come to fruition. But the failure to realise his grandiose vision was not the first trouble with the release of 666. Having spent a fortune on making it, the band’s label Mercury then sat on the work for more than a year, locked in a stalemate with Vangelis over some of the material, on which he refused to compromise.
“It was my first experience of coming across the gulf that exists between the way a record company thinks and the way an artist thinks,” Vangelis explained to writer Mark Powell, who helped put together the deluxe reissue of the record, reissued this month. “The record company said that 666 was not at all commercial and they couldn’t understand what I was trying to achieve.”
Originally formed in 1967 in Greece as the country came under military dictatorship, Aphrodite’s Child had been signed after moving to Paris the following year. Their first single, Rain and Tears, a dreamy bit of psychedelic pop based on Pachelbel’s Canon, quickly became a smash in Europe, while its parent album End of the World established the band as the continent’s answer to The Moody Blues or Procol Harum. Meanwhile, in 1969, the title track of their second album It’s Five O’Clock hit number one in France, foreshadowing Roussos’s later career as a solo soul singer.
But on 666, Vangelis threw such commercial considerations out of the window. “I did not leave my country to become a pop star, nor did I do what I wanted to do,” he told Greek-Canadian composer Christos Hatzis in 1982. “The decision was to make 666 a completely different work, which was the swan song.’”
There are conflicting accounts of where the 666 idea came from. Some report it coming from a proposal by Costas Ferris to do the soundtrack to an apocalyptic movie, others that it was simply a notion he and Vangelis came up with between them. For Powell, it was a reflection of the times in which it was made.
“Vangelis never alluded to the fact to me that it was anything to do with the film,” he says of what he gleaned from time spent with him before his death in 2022. “I think it was just taking in various things that were going on at the time, possibly even going back to the upheaval in France in 1968 with the students and the civil unrest in Paris. The impression I got was that the concept was essentially the difference between Woodstock and Altamont.”
In one interview, Vangelis expanded on its origins somewhat cryptically: “In Greece, we played pop music, but today we return to our first sources with a repertoire inspired by The Apocalypse according to Saint John. We have chosen the Apocalypse because time is cancelled there. Each of us lives the Apocalypse.”
Beginning work in late 1970, recording sessions in Paris were marked by long flights of improvisation – often the only form of communication between band members. Yet all this noodling soon added up. After months in the studio, the eventual bill for recording 666 came to a staggering $80,000 (almost 750 grand now) – considerably more than The Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a few years previously.
“The band wasn’t worried about expenses, but the record company was,” says Vangelis’s longtime engineer Philippe Colonna. “They were against the direction their music was taking, and had sent a representative to monitor the recording sessions. To free themselves from this surveillance, they spoke to each other in Greek and continued their experimentation without taking him or his remarks into account.”
It was on the track ∞ that this lack of regard for the label or their commercial interests reached its zenith. A freeform jam clocking in at a little over five minutes, the original recording went on for almost three-quarters of an hour.
Its drawn-out length wasn’t the only issue. As the track builds to a cacophony, the Greek actress Irene Papas repeats the mantra “I was, I am, I am to come” with increasing lusty breathiness, to underline what Vangelis called the song’s representation of “the pain of birth and the joy of intercourse”.
The label hated it. It was, they told the keyboardist, “pornographic”: similar filth to Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’aime – Moi Non Plus. When asked herself, Papas declared that, “It was above all satirical. This kind of thing was fashionable at the time. Instead of nice knowing sighs (as on Je T’aime), I wanted to do something more critical, of making fun of this perception of an orgasm.”
This scandal fed into wider worries about the album’s “blasphemous” concept. “There was this whole association with it supposedly being satanic because of the 666 connotations,” notes Powell. “But it has nothing to do with the dark arts. It’s literally bits from The Bible – you’re not getting some sort of devil worship album at all.”
Even so, upon completion, 666 was hobbled. By the time it was eventually released in June 1972, following hype in the press from those who had heard it, Aphrodite’s Child had split up, and Demis Roussos and Vangelis had diverged into their individual solo careers.
Yet 666 remains a fascinating record. There is a joyous liberation to it that matches its ambitious subject perfectly, vivid in its artistry, unrestrained in its jazzy movements and incorporation of raga and funk elements. Like Sgt. Pepper or The White Album, it only really makes true sense if digested whole, and a track like The Beast, brilliant in its place, is almost comical out of context, particularly Roussos’s vocals that sound like Fozzy Bear.
Though moderately successful upon release, in the years since its release, 666 has become a cult hit. Speaking about it years later, Roussos reflected on its mixed legacy: “The public expects and demands what they know. They don’t necessarily want to find beer in a Coca-Cola bottle.”
For Vangelis, it remained an artistic statement that resisted expectation and commercial possibility for the sake of art. Even if he would declare that 666 was “too sophisticated for the group”, Vangelis would also insist that the work was far more simple and less artistically conceited than it seems.
“I don’t believe that 666 is a complicated album. It only becomes complicated when you want to make it complicated,” he mused to French writer Jean-Paul Commin. “In fact, it is a record that is intended to be listened to. It is not made for dancing with a girl, it is a complete entity that we can either like or not.
“666 is not an intellectual record,” he continued. “We wanted to make a ‘whole’ that can be listened to. But we didn’t masturbate intellectually.”
But with its two key members gone, and conflicting stories about much of its creation, half a decade after its creation the truth about 666 will forever remain obscured by rumour and legend. One imagines that would suit Vangelis just fine.
666 is reissued today via UMR