Vangelis
Everything we have written about Vangelis: the listening guide, then each record in release order.
Start here
Vangelis: where to start
He never used a sequencer, never played a twenty-minute piece, and belongs here anyway. Five records, in order, and why the two you know come last.
Heaven and Hell
Vangelis called the studio he was still building Hell. The 1975 record he made in six weeks on that building site, and the four minutes Carl Sagan's Cosmos took from it.
Albedo 0.39
On the last track, the recording engineer reads out the numbers of the Earth. Vangelis's 1976 space record, every instrument his own, drums included, and what became of the number in its title.
Spiral
The first Vangelis record with the Yamaha CS-80, a synthesizer that weighs close to a hundred kilos. A 1977 album with a line of the Tao Te Ching on its sleeve, and the unlikely place one of its tracks ended up.
China: the country Vangelis had never visited, 1979
Made almost single-handed at Nemo Studios in London in 1978, it was Vangelis's first album under his new Polydor contract after leaving RCA. He said he had never been to China.
Opéra sauvage
Vangelis's 1979 music for Frédéric Rossif's television documentary series. A Yamaha CS-80 at Nemo Studios in London, Jon Anderson on harp, and a record that reached the American chart seven years later on the back of a wine commercial.
Blade Runner: the Vangelis soundtrack that took twelve years
The 1982 film promised a soundtrack album in its credits. The music Vangelis recorded in London finally came out in June 1994.
Vangelis's Nemo Studios, London
The top floor of an old school building near Marble Arch, where Vangelis made almost everything from 1975 to 1987. A studio nobody else could book, and the records that came out of it.
Vangelis at the Movies: Chariots of Fire to Blade Runner
Vangelis slept through his Oscar. From wildlife films to Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner and The Bounty: why the cinema held more music than the record.