One of the songs I first produced on record, I think was Xasteria, the song that was later to become a chant of the youth and the students1, in 1960 or 1961 with Manolis Perrakis and a young men's choir. Another song that was a great success was Dirlada with Pandelis Ginis, a captain from Kalymnos. I had heard it on some footage that we had received from Kalymnos for a program on which I was doing the musical supervision. I really liked both that song and the Aganda Gialesa, so when I heard that captain Pandelis had come to Athens, I approached him and proposed that we make a record. He accepted of course and that led to the entire stir later.
Between 1973 and 1974 I was working with Xylouris2 at the club 'Rizes' in Plaka. In parallel I started collaborating with the Columbia label and in 1974 produced the record Farewell Holy One. Following the Farewell Holy One, I produced the record Greek Carols , then Souravli with purely instrumental content, with the flute as the main instrument. Another record we produced with Columbia was By the flowering Oleander. At some point later on Columbia withdrew the Greek Carols. Since many people would ask me for the record, every year I would order five hundred copies and pay the company. I used to buy them wholesale and lug them like a kid to the shops. It was in constant demand, and so it was not by chance that since they saw that I was ordering and selling them, one year they decided to re-issue the record.
In 1976-7 I had a proposal from ERT3 to make the television program 'Musical Travelogues'. Fotis Mestheneos was by that time the managing director of the TV department.With two close collaborators, Fotos Lambrinos and Andreas Thomopoulos working as directors, we produced twenty fourty-five minute episodes. The idea was to venture into the countryside and to unearth what was there, and that we in the cities did not know about. So we found musicians, we found singers and we found dancers. And we would capture the people in their natural surroundings, with their tasks and their jobs and their homes. I think it was a good piece of work, which I probably can not do any more, and it remains in the archives of ERT.
1The song Pote tha kanei xasteria was to become one of the iconic chants of the struggle against the military dictatorship.
2Nikos Xylouris (1936-1980): prominent Greek singer from Crete.
3ERT: Greek state radio and television station.
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