Imaginary Tales
As Greek keyboard legend Manvukis prepares to release his 50th studio album, we look back at his career so far.
Manvukis Argyros emerged in the prog rock scene in Greece in the late 1960s, in the band ‘Manvukis and the 13 Seas of Temptation’.
The band soon realised that staying in their native Greece was probably not going to give them access to the scene they so needed to be a part of to achieve success and so they moved to Cumbria, on the advice of guitar player Rudy (West German by birth) Klanger who had heard from a touring British musician some years earlier that this is where ‘it was at’.
After 3 weeks playing Ludo in a damp cottage in the North of England, they realised their mistake and hired a van to move their equipment and belongings to Camden.
The band had yet to achieve any success and had very little money. Consequently they had to live together in a small 2 bedroom flat above a hardware shop on the Camden High Street.
Their neighbour, the owner of the shop who also lived in the building, Mrs Jenkins, was quite accommodating and didn’t mind their loud practice sessions. She even joined the band briefly, though not officially, playing the tea trolley on the track ‘Endless World’ (inspired by their local pub The World’s End.)
‘Manvukis and the 13 Seas of Temptation’, played the London circuit, slowly but surely gaining fans and one night Dennis Trout, an A&R man from Decca heard the band supporting ‘The Pretty Things’ at ‘The Bag O Nails’. He signed them on the spot but only on condition they changed their name to ‘Tears of the Angel’, which they did.
Endless World, with it’s blazing trumpets, heavy guitar and pounding drums (and tea trolley,) soon became a hit. Later Mrs Jenkin’s half- granddaughter Ootha would try and sue the band retroactively for royalties on the track. It was settled out of court with 12 thousand pounds and a lifetime supply of Malted Milk biscuits.
A full length LP ‘Lavender Aeternum’ released by Decca and a tour of Britain soon followed.
Their popularity grew as they trekked around the U.K. in a Zephyr Zodiac (psychedelically painted by dutch art group ‘The Moron’), with all their gear in a Commer van driven by young future music star Phil Collins, long before he would join Genesis.
There were a few notable events on the tour.
Singer Yiorgos went missing in Bristol and the band had to start the set without him, playing a long instrumental intro to the set and wondering how they would finish the show with no vocals.
Ten minutes into the three minute song ‘My heart is yours’, Yiorgos appeared through the fire escape, walked through the aisle and on to the stage in his Kaftan and right on cue began to sing the first verse.
When quizzed by the band and tour manager after the concert, he would only say that he had gone to have his tea leaves read and that ‘all would be well as long as the band didn’t go to Wales.’
Nobody ever worked out what this meant, but they agreed to cancel their one Welsh date in Newport and the strange event was eventually glossed over; Although the band biography “Nero’s Dreams’ notes that once in a bar in Paris, Yiorgos heard the song ‘Day Trip to Bangor’ by Fiddler’s Dram and was physically sick on Olivia Newton-John’s shoes.
In Leicester where they were booked to play DeMontfort hall, they were greeted by a local gardening club who had mistook the meaning of their album title, shown on the posters at the venue and thought a group of European botanists were due to give a lecture.
The band took pity and gave them free tickets. What the green thumbed Leicestarians made of the psychedelic Kaftan adorned band, isn’t recorded but it is surely no coincidence that Glynis Thatcher of Clarendon Park Leicester, who had attended the concert, was arrested later that summer for growing marijuana in her greenhouse.
Those incidents aside, the tour went well and the record company, management and the band, were happy. The band were getting invited to groovy parties, being recognized in the street and signing autographs for keen fans. They made several TV appearances and released 3 more singles from the album that year. A European tour followed. More adventures awaited the band in Europe and it is claimed by some fans that at a show in Utrecht, Yiorgos levitated above the stage for several seconds. Though no film or photographic evidence exists, an audible ‘gasp’ can be heard at one point on a bootleg audio recording.
When that tour ended, the band was under serious pressure from Decca to have another strong album that would sell just as well as the first.
However, TOTA didn’t want to make ‘Lavender’ 2. They had loftier prog shaped ambitions.
The resulting album took over a year to write and record. Recording in Studio 2 at Abbey Rd had become slightly easier now that the Beatles weren’t around to hog it all day but as a result of the Beatles success it had become more expensive and the band racked up a huge bill from the studios that took them years to pay back.
Manvukis was criticized by his bandmates for expensive whims, such as the time he insisted on hiring 1000 trumpet players and multi tracking them 10 x for the track ‘Ten Thousand Trumpets’ and the time he insisted on recording all the piano parts for the album at Stonehenge*, which was “a logistical nightmare” according to producer Adam Parsnips.
“Creativity and madness were constant neighbours then” Manvukis recalled in a 1982 Rolling Stone interview. In the same interview he recalled how one day in the studio canteen he saw “Roger Waters of The Pink Floyd* shortly after Syd Barrett had quit, talking to his dinner”. ”I remember it quite clearly, The Floyd bass man was sat alone in the corner having an in depth conversation with a pork sausage and Yorkshire pudding, with gravy. It was shortly before they released Meddle. The next day I saw Nick Mason pour custard into his bag when he thought nobody was looking.”
As soon as that album ‘Poseidon & the Fantastical Cornucopia’’ was released as a triple vinyl set, they were back to touring, this time to the USA for over a year on the road. The tour was only a partial success, selling out in big cities on the coasts but half full venues almost everywhere else and more debt mounted. They had a couple of television spots and got favorable reviews in most of the nascent rock press, such as Creem, but failed to make a huge impact like so many before them.
When they eventually got home they found that London had moved on in more ways than one.
Firstly, Mrs Jenkins had passed away from ill health, the shop closed and the building sold. They were literally homeless.
But also the fashions had moved on. Suddenly TOTA were out of step with the music scene that had stepped away from the psychedelic and prog and Britain had gone glam.
This really hit home when one afternoon, Yiorgos noticed that people on the High Street were now wearing boots with heels so tall, they could literally see into the first floor window of the flat, which previously had only been the privilege of window cleaners or those on the top deck of passing buses.
Faced with re-inventing their sound or fading into obscurity, Yiorgos suddenly quit and went back to Greece to pursue a solo career singing love songs in his native language. He said he couldn’t keep following the fashions and besides, they couldn’t afford to invest in glittery boots and stage suits just to see them go out of fashion again in a few years.
Rudy Klanger suggested they get another singer and adapt to Glam. He said he knew a woman called Maggie who worked behind the bar at The World’s End who would be perfect, but Manvukis decided that he too would go solo. And so the band split up.
Rudy, not wanting to go back to Greece or Germany stayed in Camden and took a bar job at the World’s End. He and Maggie fell in love, married and are still married today, still working at the pub and living in the same flat above the hardware shop which Rudy bought when it came back on the market in 1978. Rudy told Mojo magazine that “The occasional fan still rings the bell, or they graffiti fan messages on the wall outside” but unlike Abbey Rd with its endless fan messages on the wall, he “doesn’t find it is enough to warrant a weekly whitewash”.
Manvukis stayed in London and invested what little money he had left into building a studio. He could not afford a choice venue in Soho as he desired, so instead built a studio in an abandoned sewage works on the Isle of Dogs, which he called ‘Aqueous’ and started to create soundtracks for Film, TV and advertising. His first commission was for Timothy Whites Suncream TV commercial. Not exactly challenging for the virtuoso genius, but it paid the bills for the next year.
Things were going well, he was churning out music all day all night and started to get work scoring bigger films. He scored the Antonio film The Naked Tourist in 1975.
Unfortunately around this time it transpired that the sewage works sale to Manvukis was a scam and the title deeds given to him by the mysterious real estate agent, were in fact false and he had no claim of ownership.
The GLC recommissioned the sewage works and for a while Manvukis continued to record while the plant was in operation. Against all odds, one of his most successful albums “Moonquake’ was recorded during this period.
Leaving Aqueous to the GLC, Manvukis upped and left England for Paris, France. He bought an old studio from a French TV company, based on the outskirts of the city and called it ‘Eclipse’.
By the late 1970s time Manvukis was probably the world's most prolific synth user and undoubtedly had the biggest collection. For his 1980 album ‘SynthSpirals’ he had one of his Yamaha CS-80 keyboards wired directly into his mind. This produced some amazing music, some of which featured in the cult film ‘Mind Dancer’ but as Manvukis recalled in a 1986 Woman’s Own interview ‘Things got a bit scary when some capacitors blew and I couldn’t disconnect, if Jean Michel Jarre hadn’t been passing the studio at the time and heard my cries and knew what to do, I wouldn’t be here today.”
In the years since ‘SynthSpirals’, Manvukis has worked with everyone from Grace Jones who, legend has it, tried to set fire to the studio in the mid 80s, to Thomas Dolby to Pavarotti (who actually did set fire to the studio) He has played a concert under the sea, one on top of the Sphinx and sold 200 million records, all the while refusing to play the fame game.
He has described his new album as “A return to basics, no synth just piano, so, so much piano. So much piano.” We tried to secure an interview with Manvukis, but he rarely gives them and just sent us a message saying “Let the music do the talking.”
His new album ‘Night Pianos’ is out next week on Decca.
Editors Notes:
*After one session at Stonehenge, Wookey Hole was used as a compromise for the subsequent sessions.
*By this time ‘The Pink Floyd’ were of course simply ‘Pink Floyd’.
Disclaimer all names used are coincidental and all the above is completely made up for imaginary tales
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