NME ad for the China album, April 1979. Via.
Farewell, Captain Nemo. In the past I’ve been known to describe Blade Runner as a very large and very expensive music video for a Vangelis album. (I mention this because so many of the headlines about the late musician are referring to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece and that boring film about athletes in big shorts.) Blade Runner is rather more than a music video, of course, but the viewpoint is a useful one if you’ve watched the damned thing so many times in so many different versions and formats that any re-viewing is almost enough to have you mouthing the dialogue along with the characters, like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man watching Woodstock for the 100th time. Vangelis recorded almost 40 albums under his own name, and many more as collaborations; he was much more than a soundtrack composer, which isn’t something you can always say about soundtrack composers.
He liked Outer Spacers. The composer accepts a chutney-flavoured cosmic snack, circa 1979.
All the same, film and score are so inextricably connected it’s impossible to imagine Blade Runner with any other soundtrack, just as it’s impossible to imagine Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy without Ennio Morricone’s whip-cracks, bells and whistles. The thing is—and this is the reason for my facetious music-video comment—Morricone’s Western scores were tailored to their content in a way that Blade Runner‘s music wasn’t at all. If Blade Runner had never been made, many of those musical cues would have worked perfectly well as another Vangelis solo album. Three of the albums he made before Blade Runner that feature his beloved Yamaha CS-80 keyboard—Spiral, Opera Sauvage and China—contain elements that coalesce in the film score; there you’ll find the same synthesizer timbres, filter sweeps, percussive crashes, Fender Rhodes solos and musical pastiche (Chinese rather than Middle Eastern). Another album, See You Later, is a patchy collection of songs, instrumentals and spoken-word pieces but it does contain the original version of Memories Of Green. That melancholy piano and all the bleeps, sirens and metallic square-waves that seem so intrinsic to the shots of Deckard moping around his apartment were recorded two years before the film soundtrack. For years I’ve been urging anyone who only knows Vangelis from his most famous soundtracks to listen to those earlier albums, especially Opera Sauvage (itself a soundtrack for a TV series that nobody ever mentions) and China.
Speaking of China, here’s a short film of Vangelis in his studio miming to pieces from the album. And I’m pleased to find that the Spanish TV film showing him in 1982 improvising on his CS-80 has resurfaced again. I linked to a copy years ago but YouTube is a useless archive so it vanished soon after. This clip seems to be better quality as well.
• “Vangelis wasn’t just a film composer – he blew apart the boundaries of pop”
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blade Runner vs. Metropolis
• Synthesizing
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
Sad to see another one of that great generation of late 60’s / 70’s experimental musicians go. I dipped in and out of his music over the years and to be honest found it a bit of a mixed bag, especially later. But thinking about his passing last night, I have to acknowledge that, actually, his music is probably a founding influence. “Pulstar” was used on the end credits of a children’s tv programme about horses (of all things). That and “Autobahn” (also used as tv credit music around the same time) told pre-teen me that great music could easily do without guitars. Goosebumps and electricity up and down the spine hearing “I hear you now” on the radio and the first 7 inch single I ever bought. And later on at college, a very late night, druggy showing of “Blade Runner” in a Dundee fleapit cinema that left me wide eyed. I guess a dive back into the interesting stuff – “L’apocalypse des Animeux” or “Opera Sauvage” – would be the best way to celebrate him. RIP.
And of course there’s Aphrodite’s Child’s LP 666
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/666_(Aphrodite%27s_Child_album)
with this video of their lead singer Demis Roussos and the track
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KCbqhJt16k
Graeme: Pulstar was the first thing I bought of his, on this EP which gave a somewhat misleading impression that he was a kind of Greek Jean-Michel Jarre (or Giorgio Moroder, going by the photo): https://www.discogs.com/release/1075951-Vangelis-4-Track-EP
After that I got the Heaven And Hell and China albums which were a surprise for having very little to do with typical synth music. China has subsequently become a great favourite but I like nearly everything he did in the 70s.
Joe: You won’t be surprised to hear that I own 666 as well; one of the old posts linked above is about Salvador Dalí’s ridiculous plan for an event to announce the album to the world.
Meanwhile, there’s the bizarre intersection between Vangelis and Cthulhu on the cover of this unofficial release: https://www.discogs.com/master/5859-Vangelis-The-Dragon Not a bad album, actually, although nothing to do with Cthulhu. That said, R’lyeh is located at Point Nemo, and Vangelis named his London HQ Nemo Studios so who knows?
I enjoyed the collaborations Vangelis did with Jon Anderson.
The strangest soundtrack work Vangelis did was for a series of microsurgery training videos in Greece sometime in the 90s. It’s unlikely to ever be properly released in any form but sometimes appears on unauthorized download sites where I found it. I’m happy to report portions of these works currently appear on Soundcloud which now sadly seems to have adverts.
Things like that have a way of getting released eventually. Since there won’t be any more new Vangelis music the pressure will grow to sort out the rights for the unreleased things. And the unofficial ones, like the Cthulhu album I referred to above.
The music from the microneurosurgey Tegos Tapes is up on Archive.org although I seem to remember seeing this with the actual surgery video too somewhere.
https://archive.org/details/VangelisTheTegosTapes1998
Good find, thanks!