Polydor 6335
Producer: Vangelis
Track listing: Titles / Five Circles / Abraham’s Theme / Eric’s Theme / 100 Metres / Jerusalem / Chariots of Fire
April 17, 1982
4 weeks
On March 25, 1982, Greek-born Evangelos Papathanassiou celebrated his 39th birthday in London and then went to bed. Hours later, at 4 a.m., he received a phone call. The keyboardist/composer, better known as Vangelis, had just won an Academy Award for his majestic soundtrack to Chariots of Fire. Less than a month later, Vangelis also had a Number One album.
Although Vangelis was a relatively new phenomenon in America, by 1982 he was a seasoned veteran of the music business, having experienced his first success as a teenager as a member of the Greek band Formynx. “I was very fortunate that I tasted success early with Formynx playing in front of 10,000 people in stadiums, all the hysteria. It was great fun, but I wasn’t interested in that,” Vangelis told Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone.
His next project was a collaboration with Demis Roussos called Aphrodite’s Child, a group that scored a 1969 European hit with “Rain and Tears.” After that combo broke up, Vangelis went the solo route, scoring such films as L’Apocalypse des Animaux and recording solo albums like Heaven and Hell, which gained exposure on Cosmos, the PBS series hosted by Carl Sagan.
In 1974, veteran progressive-rock act Yes asked Vangelis to replace keyboardist Rick Wakeman. He declined the offer, but his friendship with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson led to the release of several collaborative albums, including The Friends of Mr. Carlo, which yielded the top 10 British hit “I’ll Find My Way Home.”
The composer, who does not read or write music, explained his composing method to People’s Jerene Jones: “I work like a bridge between nature and what comes out through my fingers,” he said. “With my synthesizers, I have a lover relationship.”
Vangelis’s early success allowed him the freedom to build his own recording studio in London near Marble Arch. “In order to do what I’m doing today, you have to go through this music business to make enough money to build your own studio and then do whatever you like,” Vangelis told Loder. “Which is much more healthy, more creative, than to go through singles and chart positions. I’m not against that, but it’s not my target.”
Chart positions were likely the furthest thing from Vangelis’s mind in 1980, when producer David Puttnam signed him on to compose his first score for a major motion picture. The film, Chariots of Fire, chronicled the true story of two long-distance runners training for the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. “It’s a nice, healthy, pure film,” Vangelis told Jones in People. “I like the Olympic Games and I did it for fun.” Vangelis dedicated the soundtrack album to his father Ulysses.
When the film became a hit, so did Vangelis’s soundtrack. But Chariots of Fire didn’t exactly sprint to the pole position of the album chart — it took 27 weeks for the album to reach the peak. On May 8, 1982, the album’s opening track, “Titles,” which was renamed “Chariots of Fire” for its release as a single, climbed to Number One on the Hot 100. The charts may not have been Vangelis’s target, but with Chariots of Fire he hit the top anyway.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of April 17, 1982
1. Chariots of Fire, Vangelis
2. I Love Rock-n-Roll, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
3. Beauty and the Beat, The Go-Go’s
4. Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, Rick Springfield
5. Freeze-Frame, The J. Geils Band