Demis Roussos Dies at 68

Demis Roussos died in a Greek hospital after a long illness. He was 69.

Roussos was and performer who had 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 Vangelis. He has sold over 60 million albums worldwide.

Roussos was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, in a family where his father was Greek and mother was Egyptian of Italian 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.

Roussos 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 commercial success in France and other parts of Europe from 1968 to 1972.

After Aphrodite's Child disbanded, Roussos continued to record sporadically with former bandmate Vangelis. In 1970 the two released Sex Power (although the album has also been disputably credited to Aphrodite's Child), also recording the 1977 albumMagic together. Their most successful collaboration was "Race To The End" (also sung in Spanish as "Tu Libertad"), a vocal adaptation of the musical theme from the Oscar winning film Chariots of Fire, while Roussos also guested on the soundtrack to Blade Runner (1982), with a song entitled "Tales Of The Future".