Artemios Venturis Roussos

Demis Roussos
Roussos in Baku, 2013
Background information
Birth name	Artemios Ventouris-Roussos
Born	(1946-06-15)15 June 1946 Alexandria, Egypt
Died	25 January 2015(2015-01-25) (aged 68) Athens, Greece
Genres	Pop, world music, pop-folk, soft rock, progressive rock
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, bass, trumpet
Years active	1963–2015
Associated acts	Aphrodite's Child, Vangelis, The Idols

Artemios "Demis" Ventouris-Roussos (/ˈruːsoʊs/; Greek: Αρτέμιος "Ντέμης" Βεντούρης-Ρούσσος, 15 June 1946 – 25 January 2015) was a Greek singer and performer who had international hit records as a solo performer in the 1970s after having been a member of Aphrodite's Child, a progressive rock group that also included Vangelis.

Roussos sold over 60 million albums worldwide and became "an unlikely kaftan-wearing sex symbol".

Roussos was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, in a Greek family where his father George (Yorgos Roussos) was a classical guitarist and an engineer and his mother Olga was a singer; her family originally came from Greece. As a child, he studied music and joined the Greek Church Byzantine choir in Alexandria. His formative years in the ancient port city's cosmopolitan atmosphere were influenced by jazz, but also traditional Arab and Greek Orthodox music. His parents lost their possessions during the Suez Crisis and consequently decided to move to Greece.

After settling in Greece, Roussos participated in a series of musical groups beginning with The Idols when he was 17, where he met Evangelos Papathanassiou (later known as Vangelis) and Loukas Sideras, his future bandmates in Aphrodite's Child. After this he joined the Athens band, We Five, another cover band which had limited success in Greece.