If The Rolling Stones’ notorious free concert at Altamont in December 1969 signalled the end of the ’60s’ hippie ideal, then Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 is the sacrificial ceremony where the hopes and dreams of that decade are finally turned to dust in a beautiful, cacophonous, ridiculous melange of progressive rock, psychedelic folk, Greek myth, Christian scripture, Monty Python surrealism and countercultural conspiracy. The victims at this ceremony? Aphrodite’s Child themselves, whose four members went their separate ways long before this controversial 83-minute double-album based on the Book of Revelations was released 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 Fire 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 Child began life as Athens’ answer to The Byrds or The Beatles. Drawing on psych-rock, flower power and the lush balladry of Mikis Theodorakis, they achieved notable success in Europe with their first two albums, End Of The World (1968) and It’s Five O’Clock (1969), and singles “I Want To Live” and “Rain And Tears”.
But Vangelis, the driving musical force, soon tired of that charade and sought new challenges to match his colossal ambition. Based in Paris to escape the right-wing dictatorship in Greece – like the rest of the band – he’d experienced the riots of May ’68 and, though not political, sensed something in the air. An encounter the following year with the writer and filmmaker Costas Ferris, who’d touted a script for a film called Aquarius to an unimpressed Pink Floyd, led to Ferris proposing a theme for an Aphrodite’s Child concept album based on either a modern-day Passion Play or the Revelation of St John (known as Apocalypse in Greece), set in the here and now. The idea of Apocalypse – renamed 666 – appealed to Vangelis, who felt the need to compose music not as a celebration of the Swinging ’60s but rather as an almost violent reaction to it. On jazz freak-out “Altamont”, for example, the gods view the unfolding chaos from a mountain: “We saw a lamb with seven eyes/We saw a beast with seven horns,” intones the album’s English narrator John Forst. He also mentions “the rolling people”, which The Verve would use for Urban Hymns.
To that end, Vangelis composed a Tommy-style rock oratorio based on Ferris’s script in which an audience at a circus watches the animals and performers act out a diabolical ritual while the real Armageddon whips up chaos outside the big top. While the audience thinks this is part of the show, the all-seeing narrator becomes more and more exasperated. When the two scenes collide, all hell breaks loose – realised by Vangelis in the penultimate 20-minute jam “All The Seats Were Occupied”, which weaves excerpts from the whole album into a frenetic finale. Much like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s contemporaneous film The Holy Mountain, which also blends religion and magical realism, the more you think you understand 666, the less sense it makes.
Vangelis and his bandmates spent 10 months in Europa Sonor studios in Paris, burning through $90,000 in the process and forbidding their paymasters to hear the works in progress. If Mercury had come to terms with the fact that Aphrodite’s Child no longer produced chart-topping romantic pop, they struggled with the potentially blasphemous nature of 666 – not helped by the four weatherbeaten musicians who, with their flowing locks and furrowed brows, resembled fallen apostles. Yet there are some sublime songs, such as “The Four Horsemen” and “Loud Loud Loud”. In the end, the one track that most vexed the label was “∞” (Infinity), in which the Greek actress Irene Papas chants, “I was, I am, I am to come” as an improvised, orgasmic a cappella, becoming increasingly hysterical as Vangelis rattles percussion approvingly. Intended to convey the Second Coming of Christ through the pain of birth and the joy of sex, its X-rated content vexed Mercury who, fearing a “Je T’aime”-style backlash, asked Vangelis to cut it from the album. He refused, and so the label sat on the record for two years, only then releasing it via their new leftfield Vertigo imprint. On the one-year anniversary of the album’s completion, a miffed Vangelis threw a party in the studio where it was recorded and played it in full to his guests. One admirer in attendance, Salvador Dali, proposed a lavish stunt in Barcelona to promote it, which didn’t happen.
The original recording of Papas apparently lasts 39 minutes, which Vangelis cut to five, and some fans might feel short-changed that this fabled onanistic odyssey has been omitted from this 50th-anniversary boxset. In addition to the video of a rare 1972 Discorama documentary and a Dolby Atmos revamp, what’s of interest here are the new remasters – overseen by Vangelis before he died in May 2022 – of both the Greek pressing of 666 and the one released in the rest of the world. On the more desirable Greek version, several songs are longer and mixed differently; “Battle Of The Locusts” features extra Hendrix riffing from Koulouris, while the bluesy groove of “Hic Et Nunc” plays on for two further minutes.
Heavier than Led Zeppelin, saucier than Serge and wilder than The White Album – in these secular times, every home should have a copy of (i)666(i).
