World famous Greek singer Demis Roussos passed away at the age of 68. According to Greek media, the reason of his death in the early morning hours of Sunday is unknown, but the singer has been suffering from various health problems in the last years. He died in private hospital Ygeia in Athens.
Demis Roussos had 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 Vangelis. He has sold over 60 million albums worldwide.
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Demis Roussos was born June 15th 1946 in Alexandria, Egypt, in a family where his father George (engineer Yorgos Roussos) was Greek and mother Nelly Mazloum was Egyptian of Italian origin. His parents lost their possessions during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and consequently decided to move to Greece.
At the age of 17, Demis Roussos participated in a series of musical groups beginning with The Idols where he met Evangelos Papathanassiou (later known as Vangelis) and Loukas Sideras, his future bandmates in Aphrodite’s Child.
Roussos 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 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 operatic vocal style helped propel the band to international success, notably on their final album 666, which became a progressive rock cult classic.
After Aphrodite’s Child disbanded, Roussos continued to record sporadically with former bandmate Vangelis. In 1970 the two released Sex 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, while Roussos also guested on the soundtrack to Blade Runner (1982), with a song entitled “Tales Of The Future”.
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For years Roussos struggled with his weight. In June 1980 he weighed 147 kg. He then began a diet in which he lost 50 kg in 10 months. Roussos suffered a fallow period during the 1980s in terms of hits and his output dried up as he battled clinical depression. (more details on Demis Rousos in Wikipedia)
He live many years in France.
The last album of Demis Roussos dated back to 2009. Retired for several years, he had made one of his last public appearances in September 2013 in Athens when he received by the title “Knight of the Legion of Honor” by the French Ambassador.
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Rest in Peace, Demis – We had a great time with you when we were young….
