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Vangelis
Chariots Of Fire
(Polydor, 1981)
All hail Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, creator of astonishing electronic arias, from the empurpled prog-dread of Aphrodite’s Child’s Noel Gallagher-endorsed 666 to landmark film scores for Blade Runner, Alexander and beyond. In the early ’80s there was no escaping his Chariots Of Fire music, and it’s still hard, even in 2009, to separate from Colin Welland’s refreshed “The British are coming!” Oscars speech and the myriad slo-mo sports sequences it has since been plastered all over. But if it’s a cliché (OK, it’s a cliché) it’s a cliché because it works: or at least the spine-tingling tinkle-a-thon of the title theme works. The rest is more problematic; Five Circles’ verdant English reverie is a cheesy version of something already quite cheesy enough, although Abraham’s Theme is the poppy end of Eno and 100 Metres is brilliantly febrile and anxiety-laden. The absurdity, or audacity, of soundtracking a film set in the 1920s with something as alien as a synth opus is still striking – and it was Vangelis’s theme that helped turn a typical little-Britain filmic snob-fest into an international phenomenon unmoored from time and place. That’s the power of music, in a nutshell. DE
What’s the 10th? Your nominations for an album to enter MOJO’s Neo-Classical Rock pantheon please!
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