Demis Roussos

Artemios (Demis) Ventouris Roussos (Greek: Ντέμης Ρούσσος, born 15 June 1946) is a Greek singer and performer who had a string of international hit records as a solo performer in the 1970s after having been a member of Aphrodite's Child, a progressive rock group that also included the well renowned Vangelis. He has sold over 60 million albums worldwide. Roussos was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, in a family where both father George (engineer Yorgos Roussos) and mother Olga were of Greek origin. His parents lost their possessions during the Suez Crisis and consequently decided to move to Greece. After settling in Greece, Roussos participated in a series of musical groups beginning with The Idols when he was 17, where he met Evangelos Papathanassiou (later known as Vangelis) and Loukas Sideras, his future bandmates in Aphrodite's Child. After this he joined We Five (not the San Francisco, California folk-rock group), another covers band which had limited success in Greece. He came to a wider audience in 1967 when he joined progressive rock band Aphrodite's Child, with Vangelis and Sideras, initially as a singer but later also playing bass guitar, achieving big commercial success in France and other parts of Europe from 1968 to 1972. His distinctive operatic vocal style helped propel the band to international notoriety, notably on their final album 666, which became a progressive rock cult classic.

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