Two music videos today: one for the lyricist and one about the lyricist.
Nikos Mathesis may have been the prototypical manga: a rough-and-tough occasional brawler, who also played a key role in making rebetika what it is. Not only did he write the lyrics for many of the popular songs of the day (and of the modern-day repertoire), he’s also credited with taking Markos Vamvakaris to Odean records for his first recordings, and then introducing Yiannis Papaioannou to Columbia Records.
Mathesis, nicknamed Nikos the Crazy One, was born 1907 and went to work in the Piraeus fish market, a harsh place to work among tough men, in 1915. He established himself as a rugged and popular mange.
In the late 1920s and early ’30s, he began working with such Piraeus-based rebetiko composers as Anestis Delias and Stellakis Perpiniadis. He continued writing lyrics with the younger rebetiko and laiko stars into the 1950s and ’60s. The Cat, with lyrics by Mathesis, is one of the classic rebetiko songs of the inter-war period.
The second song is not by Mathesis, it’s about him. Anestis Delias wrote and recorded Nikos the Crazy One in 1933. It, too, is a well-known classic rebetiko song.
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