China: the country Vangelis had never visited, 1979

A man is swimming on the front cover. He has his arms spread in blue-green water, and the ripples have melted the edges of his body. It is Vangelis, and the pool is not in China. It belongs to the Hilton in Athens. In June 1979 the French magazine Rock & Folk asked him about the record. He had never been there, he said. He had the idea long before the news put China on its front pages, and he had been passionate about the Chinese for years. Not the politics. The old China, and the new one too.

Where it sits

Where to begin with Vangelis is in Vangelis, where to start. The guide left this record out of its five and put it among the ones to hear next. Here it gets its own page.

His RCA years opened in 1975 with Heaven and Hell, ran through Spiral in 1977 and closed with Beaubourg in 1978. By June 1979 he put it in a sentence: he had left RCA and was at Polydor now. China was the first album of the new deal, and Opéra sauvage followed on Polydor the same year.

He recorded it in 1978 at Nemo, his studio on Hampden Gurney Street in London. The sleeve calls it "A Spheric Production" and gives the composing, arranging, every instrument and the production to one name. Three engineers are credited: Keith Spencer-Allen, Raphael Preston and Andy Hendriksen. The studio changed that year too. The 16-track machine and desk from Beaubourg went out, and a Lyrec 24-track and a Quad Eight console came in, for a much cleaner sound. English Wikipedia takes that from a 1997 biography of Vangelis.

Tracks

These are the timings of the 1983 Polydor CD. The original LP labels print different times, and they split the first two tracks in a different place. The LP gives "Chung Kuo" only the opening effects (1:43) and calls everything after it, the slow sequence, the melody and the piano, "The Long March" (5:50). The CD calls the long piece "Chung Kuo" and leaves only the short piano ending as "The Long March". Same music, two sets of names.

Through the record

• "Chung Kuo". The Chinese name for China. It opens on clashing percussion and sound effects, and then a melody rises over a slow sequence. Wait for the moment the effects settle and the sequence takes its first step.
• "The Long March". The piano at the end. Listen for the point where the synthesizers pull back and a single piano is left.
• "The Plum Blossom". 2 minutes 36 seconds, and the only piece on which someone other than Vangelis plays. Michel Ripoche's violin sits on top of the piano. Notice how close the bow on the string sounds among the synthesizers.
• "The Little Fete". Yeung Hak-Fun and Koon Fook Man read a poem by Li Bai, with the English translation taken from J. C. Cooper's book Taoism. Listen to the voices and the instruments sharing the beat.
• "Himalaya". The longest piece, 10 minutes 53 seconds. The sleeve ties it to the 52nd hexagram of the I Ching: mountain, ascent, solitude, the immovable. Layers of sound wash in and draw back. Leave it to the end.

How to listen

• One side at a time, without a break. Side one has six short pieces, side two three long ones.
• At night, on headphones. The distance between the effects and the piano is clearer than on speakers.
• If you have heard Spiral, play this straight after it and hear what changed in two years.

In his own words

Talking to John Diliberto for the American magazine Polyphony in 1983, Vangelis explained the record. He had felt close to Chinese music since he was a child. "I didn't try to do Chinese folk music. I'm not Chinese, but I did something that I felt had this characteristic color of Chinese music." Asked whether the synthesizer suited that kind of music, he said absolutely: with touch-sensitive synthesizers, if you know the technique, you can get the same results.

What happened next

"The Long March" came out as a single on 1 June 1979. Its B-side, "The Long March Part 2", was sung by children from Orleans Infant School in Twickenham, and the proceeds went to UNICEF. English Wikipedia puts the album at number 31 in the Dutch chart. It did not make the British one.

The music travelled further than the record. Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos used "Himalaya" and "The Little Fete"; "Himalaya" is in the second episode, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue". Ridley Scott put "The Little Fete" under a 1979 Chanel No. 5 commercial, and Vangelis remixed and edited it to fit. In the early 1980s Ford used the opening of "Chung Kuo" to sell the Mercury Lynx.

The one track to send a friend

"Himalaya". 10 minutes 53 seconds. Tell them this: when it played on Cosmos the next year, the man who made it had never been to the country, never mind the mountains.

Where to get it

The 1979 Polydor LP is the record as it first appeared: POLD 5018 in Britain, 2310 658 and 2344 131 on the Continent. The first edition came in a gatefold sleeve with a booklet carrying a long essay. From the 1983 CD onwards the first two tracks are named differently from the LP. Put side two on with the lights off and let it run. When the last piece ends, only the swimmer on the cover is left.

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