CONCERT: REMBETIKA – A NIGHT OF GREEK BLUES

Rembetika is a night of music and culture at The Factory Theatre featuring some of Sydney’s most talented Greek-Australian musicians. The show, which includes music, dance and performance, aims to recreate the experience of being in a rembetika hangout in Athens in the 1920s.

“Rembetika has always had an air of danger about it,” says organiser Frank Zervas. “It was the music and style of the Greek urban underground – jailhouses, taverns, brothels and drug dens – performed by quasi-criminal elements and frowned upon by mainstream society. For much of its history it was banned by the government, so a lot of myths have grown up around it, and there is still a lot of misunderstanding today.”

It emerged in the population exchange between Asia Minor and Greece in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The returning Greek refugees brought a subculture and music that was both Greek and foreign at the same time.

They found themselves outsiders in a country still recovering from the Great War, and drifted to the poor areas around Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki.

Rembetika were the songs of the hipsters and lowlifes, down but not out. Like the American ‘blues’, the songs had themes like unrequited love, hate, loss, heroism, hardship, poverty, bad luck and imprisonment. They were sung in the back rooms of smoky cafes, around water pipes filled with tobacco and hashish.

After many years of suppression for its association with criminal elements, rembetika was eventually adopted by mainstream musicians in the 1950s, and is today considered a key influence on Greek popular music.

The show aims to transport its audience back to the start. “We want to expose rembetika to a non-Greek audience, and to people who have grown up in Australia and don’t know about it.” There will be theatrical subtitles explaining the songs, the themes and the history of the music.

The band, led by maestro Peter Kalandranis, features bouzouki, accordion, acoustic bass, percussion, violin and vocals. Almost 1000 people turned up to the debut show at the Marrickville festival earlier this year. With that kind of excitement from the local community, the show is likely to sell out, so get in early. More details at www.greekblues.com.

Rembetika – The Greek Blues
5 July 8pm
The Factory Theatre,
105 Victoria Road, Enmore
Tickets: $35, 9550 3666 or www.factorytheatre.com.au