My only knowledge of the mega (European) singing sensation was from an appearance he made on Dina Shore’s talk show of the 1970s. I got the idea that he was pretty hot stuff in Europe, but for some reason he failed to attract an audience here.
Anyone with some old Demis Roussos 33s? How was he?
Having had to suffer listening to hit after hit by Demis in the early seventies on the radio: he was mindboggingly awful. Sugarsweet songs delivered in a high-pitch whiny voice. YMMV.
Oh this man used to scare the heck out of me as a kid! He was so big and hairy!
I am from France and some 15 or 20 years ago he was popular. Let’s say that, you like him or not, everybody knows who he is.
I personaly do not like him/his songs, he was popular among the “older” folks.
I spent a summer working in Dusseldorf in 1973, and if I never hear Roussos singing Goodbye, My Love, Goodbye again, it’ll be too soon.
I used to think of him as the bizarro-world Barry White. He had a song called, I think, “Ever and Ever”, which a friend of mine always played back to back with Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love”. Big fat white guy singing in a high pitched voice followed by a big fat black guy singing in a low pitched voice, it was bizarre, and I don’t think my friend ever got why I thought it was weird.
It appears I have the dubious distinction of having been the only person to have Demis Roussos in thread title here.
First off, this, of all things, has brought me out of the lurking woodwork…have been and am a quite frequent reader of this place over the last several months and a twenty year strong Dope advocate.
Anyways, I can’t say I am a Demis Roussos fan (although I’m sorry to learn that he passed on a couple of weeks ago…had no idea about that until reading this), as a progressive rock nut, I absolutely adore one thing he did with a trio called Aphrodite’s Child (which also featured a certain Vangelis). That one thing was a concept album called 666, about the Biblical apocalypse…and to be fair and specific, it’s not necessarily the entire album I dig as much as the one, two, three KO of “Babylon”, “Loud, Loud, Loud”, and “The Four Horsemen”; and the “Seventh Seal”/“Aegean Sea” segue*. Any prog and/or 70’s rock admirer should listen to any of those tracks at least once…far and away the best music Roussos ever did, at least IMO.
I love love love that record! Getting proggy wit it! Heard it referenced once or twice as the “ultimate Eurohippie LP.”
I remember seeing him on TV in Ireland back in the Seventies. I had no idea who this fat, bearded, horrid singer in the silk robes was, but he had a huge crowd and women were screaming as if it were the Beatles at the Cavern Club!
He had no discernable talent or sex appeal, but thousands of women obviously discerned SOMETHING I didn’t.
He seemed to be the male Nana Mouskouri (a bespectacled Greek female singer with no discernable talent or sex appeal who sold millions of records everywhere but the USA).
OK, I’m bumping my old thread because I just came across this gem:
Demis Roussos popping out of a champagne bottle and flying around on the cork singing
So Dreamy (@1975)
My brother - a midwestern American guy in his 40s - is absolutely obsessed with Demis. I don’t know why. He is a very strange fella. He does love prog rock, and over the top performances, so I guess Demis really scratches that itch for him. Plus he loves to torture his kids with random Demis video and photos via text.
I’ve seen the champagne video. I’ve seen a lot of Demis videos. They rarely disappoint!
Oddly enough, I have a friend who is Greek and her family is Very Greek and tend to only consume Greek media, and old school stuff at that, but she’s not familiar with Demis. Maybe they’ve been in America too long.
I remember Demis Roussos from the mid seventies when he was very successful in Germany and always on TV. I heard that he was also in the prog-rock band Aphrodite’s Child with Vangelis, but though I like prog and respect Vangelis, I never had the intention to check the band out because of the trauma Demis caused to my 6 year old self 
. When I now try to picture him, he always blurs into Luciano Pavarotti, they were basically two sides of a coin: two big fat black-haired singers with fuzzy hair and beards, one doing schmaltz opera in a black suit, the other schmaltz pop in a fluffy multi-colored robe.
This is Demis Roussos in his band Aphrodite’s Child. I really like this song.
