Melbourne, Australia has the largest concentration of Greeks outside of Greece or Cyprus – a full five per cent of its residents – and 88 per cent of them still speak Greek. So it isn’t surprising that Melbourne has a rich Greek music tradition. Apodimi Company comes out of that. Fittingly, the Greek word αποδημη seems to mean emigrant.
Like a bunch of other Greek bands, and not just rebetiko revivalists, Apodimi Company was formed by musicians who met in university and discovered a shared love of music, in this case old rebetiko and Greek folk. That was in 1984 and the band is still going today, now based in Athens and having gone through a number of line-up changes over their 40-year history.
The original five members were Manolis and George Galiatsos, Takis Dimitriou, Nick Vergopoulos and Tasos Dimitiou. The Galiastsos brothers are still the core of the band, which now includes Yiannis Niarhos and Chrysoula Kechagioglou. (Nick Vergopoulos, who left the band to relocate in Athens in the late 1980s, is the father of Fotis Vergopoulos, a young bouzouki maestro and singer who seems to have an encyclopedic memory for rebetiko songs.)
Over the years, the band has recorded seven albums and although based in Athens since 1998 – at which time they added the santouri player and singer Marios Papadeas for a while – has regularly returned to Australia for tours, festival performances and short residencies at clubs.
Pikinos’s Beer is a tribute to a tavern, written and performed by Kostas Roukounas in 1935. It’s performed here by the current Apodimi Company line-up.
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