P. O. Box Ghaxra fixture dies
Published:
January 26, 2015 at 6:07pm
Demis Roussos is no more. The fat long-haired king of beads and kaftans is gone. Hard to believe he was just 27 in 1973. He looks at least 20 years older than that. His songs are forever associated in my mind with the tedious voices of those DJs on Radju Malta, reading out a litany of ‘requests’ ghall-mama u l-papa u hija Tony u ohta Maria u z-zija Gejta & c & c. Talk about the soundtrack to my childhood…the first bars of My Friend The Wind, and I’m right back in Miss Paris’s class at primary school. The plaintive Rain And Tears from 1970, when he was still with Aphrodite’s Child – I love that into the present.
63 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
Pardon my ignorance, but what does ‘& c & c’ mean please? Thank you.
[Daphne – Et cetera, et cetera, abbreviated as etc or as & c, ‘et’ meaning ‘and’, and ‘cetera’ meaning roughly ‘more of this’, hence the substitution of ‘et’ with &.]
There’s a certain Malteseness about the 1970s.
I’d always thought the 80s are more like that: neon colours, hairstyles which in Malta persist to this day…
We’re deep into Jozef territory here. The 1970s styleme, with its deliberately excessive glitz right next to that hairiness (today they’re all shaved – Jozef, desist), and the weirdness-by-design, and the colour palette, and the not-knowing-wtf’s-coming-next, is in many ways the essence of Malteseness.
There’s a certain low class about the 70s.
[Daphne – Rather the opposite. The early 1970s were super glamorous, though not in Malta.]
There was nothing nice or ascetically well designed in the 1970s.
It was the decade of “ugly”.
[Daphne – I absolutely do not agree. The real decade of ugly was the 1980s. My generation is possibly the only one alive that isn’t nostalgic for its ‘coming of age’ clothes, hair, make-up and jewellery. HORRIBLE.]
Yes of course. Malta was worse than Libya in those days.
Absolutely agree with you, Daphne. Teen years: shoulder-length hair, colourful shirts, flares and a gorgeous American girlfriend. Happy memories indeed. Then came disco music, tightening of the belt and KMB.
[Daphne – Disco was the mid to late 1970s, co-existing with punk for a while (1976 to 1978). The 1980s began with New Wave music (Adam Ant and so on, 1981) and moved into Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984) and after New Wave of the first two years (the pirate look, ruffles, tartan, which were fun) the clothes became hyper-awful, designed to make anybody look bad. Batwing sleeves, those little boots, horrid stark colours, bad hair, bad make-up, plastic jewellery, all culminating in ‘power suits’ worn with black tights. So help us God.]
Candy>Then came disco music, tightening of the belt and KMB.
Sounds like the plot of a bad BDSM movie.
il-Ginger: throw in Anglu Farrugia and you’re just about there.
What an anti climax.
A Greek singer who charmed the world passes away.
An extreme left wing government takes over in Greece on the same day.
The end of an era.
Well timed. His heirs might be able to pay off the Greek debt.
Maybe he died because he wasn’t happy of the result of the election. He was an avid supporter of PASOK … the socialists. By the way, is Alexis Tsipras younger than Joseph Muscat?
He’s as old as him – born in ’74.
Yes, by a few months: Muscat was born in January 1974 and Tsipras in July 1974.
Ha! Bromhead wins over Chard!
H.P You are a legend for remembering that.
That was exactly ten years earlier.
Muscat, Stanley Baker? In his dreams.
Conchita prototype.
[Daphne – Not in the least. He looked like a ranchero who’d taken a break and overdone it on the food after years of rough living on horseback. Nothing remotely effeminate despite the beads and kaftans.]
Lovely voice colour which steered our ears away from his goaty vibrato; some nice lyrics – not in all songs and certainly not in his French songs.
Nice timing too, with the start of package holidays in the 70s – no one other than a Greek popstar could sing the beauty and the myths associated with his homeland.
Wiehed mil-akbar kuncerti li qatt attendejt: Demis Roussos f’Ta’ Qali.
“His songs are forever associated in my mind with the tedious voices of those DJs on Radju Malta” – I feel exactly the same way when I hear Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.
I never liked him and his weird songs serve to remind me about those horrible years in the 80s. There is not a single song I like.
I never understood what Maltese women saw in him.
He died of some illness which diagnosis cannot be revealed. Vangelis helped him to probably improve his songs but to me he remains just another cabaret type of singer turned famous for the sound of his voice and his easy songs.
Miaow miaow, Skype. Check out how many albums he sold and that will tell you how much he was liked.
He had a lovely voice and many of his songs are still played on the radio to this day. One cannot say the same of today’s songs. Most are forgotten a year or so after.
It was not just Maltese women who liked him. Women all over the world were his fans.
Although he was rather overweight he still attracted women as he was not at all effeminate unlike some of today’s male singers. You will have gathered by now that I was a fan.
I like to compare this singer with people whom we’ll often hear saying: Malta Sabiha u mkien m’hawn bhalha fid-dinja. That’s because they haven’t looked.
It was one whole package. Attractive, beautiful voice, charm, intelligence (he spoke various languages) and he is also considered as a very good musician.
When he joined the Aphrodite’s Child he was rather slim, but by time he started accumulating weight.
My favourite. I still love listening to his songs.
I could not stand his reverbed echo-ee voice.
Try “my friend the wind”.
I couldn’t either, then.
But now, in retrospect, one note recalls a flood of memories.
The first thing I did when this post came up was Skype a relative, play one song after the other, and go down that lane – remembering one relative in particular, together.
Nostalgia. Different days. A certain type of well-being still around in the early 70s.
Before the horrors began in earnest.
His voice had a particular timbre which you could either love or hate.
His songs will live on forever.
His songs should die forever. The only people he must have attracted in Malta are the Labour supporters.
Skype, OK so you dislike Demis Roussos – just stop there. I could insult fans of other singers but do not do so as I do not like hurting anyone’s feelings. I am a great fan of Demis and I am definitely not a Labourite.
I had totally removed those dedications – lil ohti Mary, ommi Giovanna. True – my God, was that Rediffusion (or however it was spelt) or radio?
[Daphne – That Rediffusion box with the knob on that had two settings. The Rediffusion company had gone by then but Xandir Malta kept the system for Radju Malta and we kept calling the box ‘Rediffusion’.]
It was not Radju Malta. “Ir-Reddyfusion” became Cable Radio when Mintoff government drove out the Redifusion company (never mind that it is either a cable service or a wireless service, but that it cannot be both).
Radju Malta, the proper wireless service came on line some while after – anchored by Norman Hamilton and his trusty, squeaky, repulsive, rubber mascot Antenninu.
I remember also l-Ghazla tas-Semmiegha b’Angela Agius tokrob.
@cat. Thats it. Was trying to remember the name, we also had at some point in time, Norman Hamilton, Charles Saliba and Mario Laus, but P.O. Box 10 definitely takes the biscuit.
This reminds me of the only three available mega car cassettes at the time: Demis Roussos, Nana Mouskouri, Abba. Listened to over and over, and over and over. Turned into memories.
Reflect a moment, if you will dear readers: twee or not, no deaf person ever heard his music. Ditto and likewise for (insert your favourite band/singer here).
He reminds me of that Gensna festival.
It was a rock opera, and a musically good one in her category, for that matter. The original one I mean, recorded abroad mostly by foreign band musicians.
I’m afraid few of your bloggers really understood that “P.O. Box 10” as a request programme on Radju Malta way back in the ’70s and early ’80s.
I adored Demis Roussos and still do. He was all the rage in the early seventies when I was a teenager.
Not sure but were two of those DJ Leo Brincat and Francis Zammit Dimech.
I thought I’d help Kleenex sales a bit.
http://youtu.be/Q2sX_SI_kJ4
I really enjoyed that, Baxxter. Thank you.
O zmien helu kif ghaddejtli – the golden years
Thank you, Baxxter! Evoked a lot of memories – my favourite was “My Friend the Wind” Where have the years gone?
1978/79?
The fountain tritons are damaged and the basin has been removed, so definitely after March 1978.
Sad to learn that Demi passed away at 68. He undoubtedly was one of the top singers Greece has ever produced. He had a lovely voice and interpreted the songs with passion.
Listening to Maltese radio is such a chore. To get to some nice songs you have to sit through endless birthday shout-outs, requests, readings of inane text messages and so on.
Then they start playing the song while still talking and, to rub salt in the wound, they ruin that lovely instrumental solo at the end of the song by talking over that too. Apparently, they think that songs are all about the lyrics.
As if that were not enough, when they do say something interesting, they play loud background music. If you have a good radio voice, you don’t need background music.
Then they run a competition (pizza għal tnejn) which instead of lasting all of two minutes goes on for a quarter of an hour. Clueless individuals call in and demand that the DJ helps them answer the question.
And it goes on and on. You listen to an hour of radio just to get a few snippets of good music. So many DJs are completely useless.
Noel Mallia is one of the exceptions. His rock music shows always used to be well presented and informative.
Campus FM generally has good shows too.
Maybe they can use our very own Xarabank cowboy to star in the biography movie. Talk about doppelgänger.
Whether one liked him or not, he was a human being who made a lot of people happy. Some of his commercial songs were good, a mixture of pop rock with Greek folkloric accompaniment.
Though a prog rock fan, I never heard any Aphrodite’s material.
Listen to the 3 albums by Aphrodite’s Child (End of the World, It’s 5 O’Clock and 666) and his solo album “Fire and Ice”. It’s excellent, non-commercial material.
Demis Roussos in my mind, will always be associated with the dismay on my dad’s face every time my mum would switch the 8 track tape in our old Cortina, from Ziggy Stardust, to ‘that obese tramp’.
If Demis Rousseau were still alive, he’d be the next of Labour’s *Star* candidates.
When this old chap was around in the 70’s, the Maltese population regarded his songs like it was only thanks to Labour that they could enjoy such good music.
Cliff Richard was also a favourite.
The 1980s were my childhood years. Overall they were happy days except those memories when we were held at home missing school thanks to KMB’s marmalja running wild in large shipyard trucks.
Ghalkemm Demis ifakkarni fi zmien Mintoff ifakkarni ukoll f’ missieri li kien ihobb idoqq hafna d-diski tieghu, allura bil-fors joghgobni.
Nippreferi nisma lil Demis li jfakkarni f’ Mintoff minn Lou Bondi` bil-gitarra.
Demis Roussos is unfortunately remembered for the excreble music he produced in the mid-seventies.
He was undoubtedly a housewife favourite on Rediffusion and Radio Malta.
His best period was the late sixties and the early seventies as vocalist with Greek prog rock band Aphrodite’s Child. Their double album 666 is hailed as one of the best prog rock albums of all time.
At that time Demis definitely had left-wing sympathies. The band had fled Greece during the time of the fascist military junta and settled in Paris.
Thank you, Matthew S, for describing me as “öne of the few exceptions”. I was the last DJ on Rediffusion. The takeover took place at 7.38 am, while I was hosting the breakfast show. I can’t remember whether it was 14 February 75 or 76. The last song played was “When A Man Loves A Woman”, the great soul classic by Percy Sledge.
Maltese broadcasting, both radio and television, are in a terrible state. The Malta Broadcasting Authority has done nothing at all to raise standards and has allowed mediocrity to rule OK.
I suggest, if I may, an alternative “‘AllRock Radio”, a 24-hour Maltese rock station broadcasting on DAB + radio or allrock.malta.com
Bring back Rocknet FM.
I don’t think that the Malta Broadcasting Authority is to blame for most of the transgressions.
The biggest problem is that radio stations don’t choose DJs wisely. People think that if they are not shy about speaking in public and know a few songs, they can be DJs.
Some things should be basic and innate to people in broadcasting:
Good enunciation and pronunciation skills
A pleasant voice
An excellent grasp of the language being spoken (so many mish-mash Maltese and English without any rhyme or reason)
An encyclopaedic knowledge of the music being played
The common sense not to speak over songs and not to play music over one’s own voice
Keeping disruption by sponsors and callers to a minimum (dealing with most phone calls off air)
Only reading emails and messages on air when they interest the general listenership and when the messages are legible and concise. The rest can be placated with “Thanks for writing in. There’s not enough time to read all the messages.”
And so on.
Language usage aside, I don’t think the Broadcasting Authority can do much about all the other transgressions.
Sure, some of the things can be learnt and improved but most should come naturally. Some DJs are so amateurish that you get the impression that they have never listened to a professionally run, foreign radio station.
Daphne has outlined the problem quite clearly in a different medium: newspapers employing columnists whose expertise is simply being able to string a few legible sentences together. Sorry, but that’s just not good enough.
Radio stations, television stations and newspapers should all be more picky about who to employ. That’s the only way to really raise standards. Obviously, there must be radio station managers and editors who know what they are doing for that to happen.
Keep up the good work, Noel. I have listened to AllRockRadio a couple of times and it’s fine. The problem is that the station is not available on FM so it’s less accessible.
Standards on Radio 101 have plummeted since you left.