Jon & Vangelis

Lancashire prog-rock singer Jon Anderson and Greek synthesiser maestro Vangelis made a potent pair when they teamed up to record four albums in the ’80s and early ’90s, crafting a luscious brand of art pop that presaged later innovations in electronic and new-age music. The two worked together occasionally in the ’70s and became a proper duo in 1979 when they entered the studio to record a series of spontaneous improvisations that became their 1980 debut, Short Stories. Anderson, best known as the lead singer of Yes, quit that band around the same time that the album came out, and he enjoyed his easy chemistry with Vangelis so much that they teamed again for 1981’s The Friends of Mister Cairo—an opus of luminescent electronics, soaring vocal melodies and baroque Hollywood references that earned the duo a radio hit in the form of the chiming “I’ll Find My Way Home”. (Donna Summer would rise up the charts a year later with her cover of the duo’s chugging dance jam “State of Independence”.) Anderson and Vangelis recorded two more albums before their collaboration fizzled out after the 1991 release of Page of Life, but Vangelis’ death in 2022 brought renewed attention to their one-of-a-kind sonic alchemy.