The short version
- On 29 March 1982, as Chariots of Fire won the Oscar for best original score, Vangelis was asleep in London. It was his birthday.
- His film work grew out of French wildlife documentaries in the 1970s. From the start, the films held more of his music than the records did.
- Blade Runner opened three months after the Oscar, and his own recording of the score took 12 years to reach a record. Missing and The Bounty still have no official soundtrack album.
- Vangelis himself said The Bounty was far more interesting than Chariots of Fire, his most successful work.
Los Angeles, 8 p.m., 29 March 1982. At the Academy Awards, Chariots of Fire won for best original score, and the man who wrote it was not in the room. In London it was 4 a.m. and Vangelis was in bed, having stayed out late celebrating his 39th birthday. A friend in Los Angeles phoned with the news. Over the line, he told People magazine, he could hear the television and a big party going on. "This incredible thing was going on and I was in bed."
The winning music had been in the shops for a year. And that spring, in his London studio, Vangelis was deep in his next film, Blade Runner. That music would take 12 years to come out on record.
It started with animals
Vangelis's film story begins with animals. His first work with the French director Frédéric Rossif was L'Apocalypse des animaux, a documentary series shown on French television in 1973. The music was older: he had recorded it in 1970, while he was still in Aphrodite's Child, without seeing any footage. He wrote a set of pieces around the idea of wildlife and handed them over, and the editors cut in whatever they needed. English Wikipedia notes that the series contains much more music than the album, and adds that this is a common theme with Vangelis soundtracks. That remark is the thread of this story.
The work with Rossif went on: La Fête sauvage in 1975, Opéra sauvage in 1979. La Fête sauvage also has more music in the film than on the record. Opéra sauvage reached number 42 on the Billboard album chart and stayed 39 weeks, his second most successful album in the United States.
There was one film he missed along the way. The producer David Puttnam told American Film in 1982 that while making Midnight Express in 1978 they collected all of Vangelis's albums and cut the film to his music. Then "contractual problems arose." Director Alan Parker took the cut, still carrying Vangelis's music, to Giorgio Moroder in Munich, and Moroder wrote his own score in about a month. The Oscar went to Moroder. A few years later Puttnam produced the film that won the same award for Vangelis.
- What
- Vangelis's film and documentary scores of the 1970s and 1980s
- 1973
- L'Apocalypse des animaux (Rossif documentary; music recorded 1970)
- 1975
- La Fête sauvage (Rossif documentary)
- 1979
- Opéra sauvage (Rossif documentary series; US number 42)
- 1981
- Chariots of Fire (dir. Hugh Hudson; Oscar for best original score, 1982)
- 1982
- Missing (dir. Costa-Gavras; Palme d'Or), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott)
- 1983
- Antarctica (dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara)
- 1984
- The Bounty (dir. Roger Donaldson)
Chariots of Fire, and a loudspeaker on the beach
Puttnam signed Vangelis for Chariots of Fire in 1980. According to People, he had never scored a major feature before. The director, Hugh Hudson, had worked with him on commercials in Paris in the 1970s and chose him after hearing Opéra sauvage and China.
Hudson's first choice was "L'Enfant" from Opéra sauvage. When they shot the opening scene of the athletes running on West Sands at St Andrews, "L'Enfant" played over loudspeakers and the actors ran to it. Vangelis talked Hudson into letting him write something new. What he wrote is listed as "Titles" on the album, and the whole world calls it "Chariots of Fire". According to English Wikipedia he wrote it at the same tempo as "L'Enfant". The older piece did not vanish from the film either: when the athletes reach the stadium in Paris, a brass band marches past playing it.
The record and the film parted ways from the start. The album was almost entirely re-recorded, with richer arrangements, and it sounds different from what you hear in the cinema. "A record is something other than a film," Vangelis told the magazine Neumusik in August 1981. Some themes from the film never made the album, among them "Hymne", the music for Eric Liddell's race in the Scottish Highlands, a new arrangement of a piece from Opéra sauvage.
The record moved fast. The film premiered in London on 30 March 1981, and the album entered the UK chart on 18 April, peaking at number 5. In America it spent four weeks at number 1, and the "Titles" single reached number 1 on the Hot 100 for a week in May 1982. Vangelis dedicated the score to his father, who had been a sprinter.
The Oscar spring, already on to the next film
Two films passed through his studio around the time of the Oscar. One was Costa-Gavras's Missing, about an American journalist who disappeared after the coup in Chile. People reported in April 1982 that Vangelis had scored it in his London studio, and it went on to share the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year. Its piano theme turned up in countless commercials, but no soundtrack album has ever been officially released. The theme first appeared on the 1989 compilation Themes.
The other was Blade Runner. In May 1982 Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone reported that Vangelis was hard at work on the score. In the same interview Vangelis said he had an incredible amount of music in the studio that he could not release, because nobody can put out ten albums a year. "I have to wait five or ten years." He was talking about experimental records like Beaubourg. The words fitted the film score he was making even better.
The film opened in American cinemas on 25 June 1982, and his score stayed off the shelves. The first record that year was an orchestral version by the New American Orchestra, disowned by both Vangelis and Ridley Scott. According to English Wikipedia, a tape believed to come from the film's mixing sessions was already doing the rounds at science fiction conventions in 1982. A bootleg CD followed in 1993, and it held more music than the official release would.
That official release came in 1994. In the booklet Vangelis wrote briefly that he had found himself unable to release the 1982 London recordings at the time. Even then the album was not the film: it added pieces the film never used and left out some that it did. It still reached number 20 in the UK. The three-disc 25th anniversary set of 2007 added more unreleased material, and there is still music in the film that is on no record.
What became a record, and what did not
Antarctica (1983) sits at the other end. Koreyoshi Kurahara's film tells the story of the sled dogs left behind by a Japanese Antarctic expedition in 1958. It was a huge hit in Japan and held the country's box office record for a domestic film for 14 years, until Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke in 1997. Vangelis recorded the score at his London studio, and it came out worldwide the same year as the album Antarctica.
The Bounty, released in May 1984, was not so lucky. A retelling of the mutiny on HMS Bounty with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, it has a Vangelis score that has never been officially released. A two-disc bootleg appeared in 1995, and only the opening and closing titles were remade for Themes in 1989.
This is the score Vangelis rated above Chariots of Fire. In 1991 he told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that composers rarely think of their most successful work as their best, and he was no exception: he found his music for The Bounty "endlessly more interesting." What appealed to him was using synthesizers in a film set in the days of sailing ships. The producers did not care that synthesizers had not existed in the Bounty's day. Vangelis decided he was among adventurers and took the job without seeing a single frame.
Chariots of Fire remained the best-selling instrumental film score until Titanic came along in 1997. The music Vangelis liked better stayed in the cinema.
How to listen
- Play "L'Enfant" and then "Titles". The actors on the beach ran to the first; the audience heard the second.
- Play the 1994 Blade Runner album straight through. The first four tracks run together as one piece, and so do the last five.
- Next time you watch the films, listen for what is not on the records. The Highlands race in Chariots of Fire is the easiest place to start.
The one track to send a friend
Send "L'Enfant", especially to a friend expecting the Chariots of Fire theme. Add this: the famous opening on the beach was filmed to this piece. It was "L'Enfant" coming out of the loudspeakers on set. What cinemagoers heard was the new piece Vangelis wrote later, at the same tempo.
Where to get it
For Chariots of Fire, look for the 2006 CD, remastered by Vangelis himself. For Blade Runner, start with the 1994 album, and if you want more of the unreleased music, the 2007 three-disc Blade Runner Trilogy. Opéra sauvage has the original "L'Enfant" and "Hymne". Missing and The Bounty have no official albums, and we do not point to bootlegs. For the order in which to explore the rest of his records, see our Vangelis guide. Those two scores live in their films, heard with the pictures, like footsteps on wet sand.
