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”.
