Vangelis is a world-renowned Greek composer, keyboardist, and multi-instrumentalist. He mainly composes instrumental and film music and he performs all the music by himself. During his career he has flirted with many genres and his music proved to be very hard to categorize. His music has been filed as "synthesizer music", "electronic music", "new age", "progressive rock", "symphonic rock", "space music", "electronic music", etc. etc. None of those terms is spot on and his output is too varied to catch in one word.

He was born as "Evanghelos Odyssey Papathanassiou" on March 29th 1943 in a small town near Volos, Greece. He started playing the piano at the age of 4 and gave his first public performance of his own compositions at the age of 6. During his student years he was the founder member of a successful Greek pop band called the "Forminx". In the late 1960s he moved to Paris and formed the band "Aphrodite's Child", together with singer Demis Roussos and drummer Lucas Sideras. They scored many hits all over Europe. In 1970 the group broke up and Vangelis started a solo career. In 1975 he moved to London where he set up his legendary Nemo studio that he used to record many of his famous albums and soundtracks. Most legendary are perhaps the Oscar winning score to "Chariots of Fire" and the ever popular score to Ridley Scott's landmark film "Blade Runner". In 1987 he left London and subsequently recorded music in Athens ("Direct", "Voices"), Rome ("The City"), Paris ("1492") and Athens again ("Voices").

Apart from creating music, Vangelis also exercises in other forms of art including painting and sculpting, which he has been doing throughout his life. Only recently has Vangelis come out of the limelight as a painter, showing his work on a small number of exclusive exhibitions.

Besides releasing albums he records music whenever he likes. Sometimes he composes music for films, stage plays, special events, etc. He rarely performs in public and allows very few interviews.