Music fuels my inspiration to illustrate love stories. But finding the romantic tracks I liked has not always been easy.
Garry Cobb
During the sixties, the Musician’s Union imposed restrictions on the amount of recorded music you could hear on the BBC. These ‘needle-time’ restrictions forced the BBC’s Light Programme to replace hits in its Top Twenty countdown with live performances, so you might have heard the likes of Blossom Dearie trying to sing Cher’s ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’. I instead joined legions of teenagers listening to pop music on transistor radios from ‘pirate’ radio stations like Radio Caroline anchored off the British coast. Sadly, the Government soon put paid to that by introducing the Marine Offences Act in 1967. It was the year Vicky Leandros represented Luxembourg with ‘L’amour est Bleu’ and came fourth. (This was later remixed in 2011 as ‘C’est Bleu’ by Scooter).
After closing the free radio stations in 1967, the BBC reluctantly introduced Radio One to the UK as a pop music channel. They also turned the ‘Light Programme’ into Radio 2, the classical music Third Programme into Radio 3, and ditched the ‘Home Service’ for a more serious Radio 4.
I looked elsewhere for my listening pleasure.
After leaving school in the seventies, I went to Falmouth School of Art. Every evening, I tried to tune in to the Mike and Zaki Show on the Dutch service of Radio Luxembourg. I say ‘try’ because the signal from the transmitter at Junglinster on 208 metres in the Medium waveband would fade in and out for the whole of the show’s 45-minute slot. Nevertheless, I was charmed by the late Belgian singer, Art Sullivan singing ‘Ensemble’, and the door was opened for me to discover more beautiful music from Europe. I would also go on to illustrate love stories in Fab 208 magazine, the popular UK magazine named after Radio Luxembourg, a few years later.
In 1970 Vicky adopted her father’s Christian name to become Vicky Leandros when she appeared in her first TV show, ‘Ich Bin’. It was broadcast in 13 countries, but not the UK, so I didn’t see it until many years later. The bizarre post-psychedelic production of her ‘60s and ‘70s hits was groundbreaking at the time and won the Bronze Rose of Montreux. (Lodynski’s Flohmarkt Company won the Ros d’Or and Monty Python’s Flying Circus won Silver).
During the summer term break in 1972 I sold plastic dustbins in Selfridges. Chocolate brown walls, Art Nouveau, flared ‘Loon’ pants, platform shoes, puffed sleeves and long dresses were all the rage. Vicky Leandros won the Eurovision Song Contest in Edinburgh with ‘Apres Toi’ and joining other artists from across Europe on the 50th anniversary of the BBC, she sang ‘Auntie’, a tribute to the organisation that played a part in liberating Europe from fascism during World War II.
In 1975 I was lucky enough to see Vicky perform live at the Royal Albert Hall. I nearly wore a hole in her LP, ‘Across The Water’ which featured ‘The Man You Are in Me’, a track written by Janis Ian. At this point I only had her British LP releases.
Living in London there was a good reception of the Dutch free radio stations like Radio Mi Amigo, (broadcasting as Radio Caroline after 6pm), Radio Nordzee and Radio Veronica. The Dutch had yet to enact legislation to outlaw them. Such was my enthusiasm, I even did a short stint as a Europop deejay at the Spanish Steps, an old pub that once existed in the east end of London. Through the transmitters of these ships in the North Sea, I could not only follow Vicky’s burgeoning career but discover and enjoy so many other European musicians until 20 March 1980 when the last ship broadcasting from international waters, the MV Mi Amigo, broke its anchor in a Force 10 storm. The ship sank leaving only the 39-metre mast showing above the water.
In 1990 the UK extended its territorial waters and so ended an era of free music. That was a sad time for me.
But the music lived on. Vicky was releasing albums across the globe singing in French, Italian, English, Greek, German, Japanese, Spanish and Dutch. By this time, I had taken a ferry across the water to Hook van Holland and saw Amsterdam for the first time where I haunted the record shops and blew all my cash on anything I could seize by her on vinyl. Whilst others smoked weed and knocked themselves out with heavy metal, I came home with pop records, a bottle of Chocomel and a Smurf!
I fell in love with Europe and would return to Amsterdam many times in the future. But I also visited Paris to buy CDs by Mylene Farmer, and Madrid to see Alex Ubago in concert, and Berlin to see Vicky perform at the Friedrichstadt-Palast Theatre in Berlin. How wonderful it was to hear Vicky sing ‘Ich Fange Ohne Dich Neu An’. While waiting in the queue I met a lovely couple there who spoke English. We talked about how music reached across the world and united us in our hearts. We danced together as Vicky stepped off the stage and walked into the audience to within a few feet of us! What magic!
Thank goodness for music platforms like YouTube, Deezer or Spotify. Now, the likes of Wolfsheim, Marianne Rosenberg or Art Gardunkel Jr in Germany, Zalagasper from Slovenia, the late Geoffrey Oryema from Uganda, Röyksopp from Norway, Michele Zarrillo from Italy, Stanislavv from Poland, Darin or Rymdpojken from Sweden, Claudine Longet or Joshua Radin from the U.S.A. and many more of my international favourites, are never far away.
There are many British music artists singing and composing passionate, romantic music that inspire me too. In the early days, Colin Blunstone’s ‘Ennismore’ album and ‘Hazzard & Barnes’ captivated me too with their enchanting LP covers and sweet music. Later I would discover artists like Will Young and Andy Leek. My romantic pictures form the perfect backdrop to music and they did in the eighties when a youth TV programme streamed them to Foreigner’s ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’.
Every stroke of my brush, my pen or pencils would most likely be performed with my favourite tunes playing in the background. My tastes now extend from Electro Trance to Ludovic Einaudi. But Vicky Leandros has been there from the beginning.
Vicky Leandros always performs with an air of sophistication. Her political side is usually hidden. Except when she sang ‘Verlorenes Paradies’ in 1982, a save-the-planet anthem released at a time when the subject was more synonymous with Greenpeace and saving the whales. And when she collaborated on an album in 2003 with composer and political activist, Mikis Theodorakis.
Seeing Vicky perform or buying her music wasn’t easy living in Britain. There was no Amazon then. I never saw her TV appearances unless someone recorded it for me on a VHS video. A Dutch fan once gave me a video copy of Vicky singing the sweet and gentle ‘Mein Schweigender Freund’ in 1984, on, extraordinarily enough, a German sports programme, ZDF’s Sportstudio.
Before music was digitalised, I secured one of my favourite tracks, her passionate French single ‘À L’est d’Eden’ and bought another one in case I broke the first one through wear and tear. It set my heart alight and climbed the charts in Quebec to number one!
Vicky Leandros was performing my life’s soundtrack. From a broken romance with ‘Caught By A Lying Smile’, composed and intertwined with the beautiful piano music of Pieter Van Vollenhoven, to the celebration of love with the creative Spanish guitar of Roland Cabezas on ‘Me Quedaré – Ich Bleib bei Dir’.
I’m sure Vicky has been touched and haunted by the beauty of her own music. While she sang the enchanting and mournful ‘Frieden in den Bergen’ by James Last in 1984, her first marriage with Greek entrepreneur Ivan Zissiadis ended. He took their 4-year-old son Leandrakis to Greece leaving Vicky to fight for custody which she won after seven weeks in the courts. She later wrote: “The darkest time was the kidnapping of my son Leo by his Greek father. That was a real abduction! There have been some very scary moments. I really had to fight for my child.”
Vicky would go on to earn true diva status when, as early as 1978 she recorded a song with a gay theme. ‘Valentin’ is the story of a tenant with a passion for a young violinist she hears playing upstairs, but before romance could blossom, she knocks on his door and it opens with his lover standing beside him. In 1998 Vicky recorded dance remixes of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ in German, (‘Weil Mein Herz dich nie Mehr Vergisst’), and performed ‘Sieh das Licht in der Nacht’ to raise cash for an AIDS hospice in Hamburg in 2001.
Two of Vicky’s most popular songs that regularly feature in her concerts are ‘Ich Liebe das Leben’ in 1975, (Remixed in 2016 in a duet with Andrea Berg) and ‘Theo, Wir Fahr’n Nach Lodz’ in 1973. The latter was released as ‘Henry, Let’s Go To Town’ in Canada and South Africa, ‘Théo, On Va Au Bal’ in France and ‘Danny, Teach Me to Dance’ in the UK which was inexplicably released without the signatory sound of bottles being smashed in the introduction.
Hunting down collectable items is all part of the thrill of being a fan and am pleased to have found tracks like ‘Ella’ by Pharao which immerses itself in Vicky’s Greek roots.
I was a regular customer of Trehantiri, a Greek record shop in Harringay, North London that sold so many of Vicky’s Greek pressings. ‘Πυρετός Του Έρωτα’ (‘Pyretos tou Erota’) in 1989 is one of my favourites.
Vicky Leandros finished her farewell tour in 2024 after having released more than 400 albums in over 50 countries and selling around 55 million records worldwide. What a legacy! And thank you, Vasiliki Papathanasiou. The little girl we came to know as Vicky Leandros.
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