Bouats: The legendary nightclubs of the 60’s

Let’s open the “box” (bouat) and discover together the surprises hidden in the nightlife of Athens’ legendary nightclubs of the ’60s and ’70s.

The small space with a piano, a guitar and a voice on the small stage, placed at a stone’s throw from the patrons, owes its inspiration to George Boukouvalas, who in 1960 opened “Tipukeito” on Nikodimou Street in Plaka. There, where the rents were cheap, the apartment buildings were blocked by law and the people were hard-working. The young Lakis Pappas and Kostas Hatzis appeared there in succession and people began to gather to listen to the songs “naked”. Two years later, the venue closes, and its owner opens the “Symposium”.

As described by Dionysis Savvopoulos in the CD “Recordings” of the magazine Echos & Hi-Fi: “Athens had never seen a more underlit shop; people were sitting down on the floor, on ancient cushions, drinking wine through copper glasses and listening to the new songs. Within a short period of time, bouquets begin to spring up like mushrooms in the area. “Apanemia”, “Avlaia”, “Doma”, “Esperides”, “Erotokritos”, “Zodia”, “Karyatis”, “Catacomb”, “Ark”, “Leonidas”, “Lethi”, “Limerie”, “Lychnari”, “Nebfeles”, “Roulota”, “Scorpion”, “Susuro”, “Attic”, “Attic”, “Lodge”, “Banquet”, “John’s Shack”, “School”, “Ceilings”, “Ceilings”, “Notebook”, “Fireplace”, “Beads”, “Golden Key”, the list is endless. Most of them are concentrated in Plaka, on Mnisikleous and Tholou streets. And outside Athens, in Mykonos, in Thessaloniki, in Patras, in Hydra, since the beginning of the 1960s, the venues open one after the other.

“You had to make do with nothing. With a guitar, maybe a piano.”
Indicative of the acceptance of the bouats was the up to three performances that the schedule included: 8-10, 10-12, 12-2 after midnight. Their main feature was the direct communication between the artist and the audience. Marisa Koch attempts a definition of these spaces. A car spotlight on the stage, no embellishment, bare truth. The bouquets have been the naked truth of our music.” Savvopoulos, who grew up musically in the boutiques, points out. With a guitar, maybe even a piano.

The patrons sat half a metre from the singer and the last ones at most five or six metres away. You had to be simple and direct and ready to improvise.” And reminiscing he continues: “At the “Lodge”. 1964-65. 1964. With Maria Farantouri and Manos Loizos. Incredible program. I remember it and I can’t believe it. At “Roulota” in ’65-’66. Voulis Street. Plaka. With Katie Homata and Thanos Mikroutsikos as pianist”. “In June 1968 I went down to Athens for the first time and Patsifas made sure to put me next to George Zographos and he took care to introduce me to the excellent audience that filled the courtyard of the “11” boudoir every night, which was located at number 11 of Kydathinaion Street. I sang in front of the cream of the spirit and made acquaintances with great people. For me it was the courtyard of heaven. I couldn’t wait until nightfall to relive the magic.”

Marisa Koch attempts a definition of these spaces: ‘For me, the boulevard defines a time when there are small chairs and a big cramped room. A car spotlight on the stage, no embellishment, naked truth. The bouquets have been the naked truth of our music.”

In 1964, the music that was heard in the bouats got a name: “New Wave”. Godfather Alekos Patsifas and the newly founded record company Lyra. “New Wave” according to the French “nouvel vague”. Its musicians had either just graduated from school (Katie Homata, Poppy Asteriadis) or were students (Arleta and Nikos Houliaras were studying at the School of Fine Arts, George Kontogiorgos was studying medicine and Michael Violaris was a student of literature). A prominent figure among them was the recently deceased George Zographos who had started as an actor, a graduate of the Koun School. He first sang in the “Thalami” bouat in Mykonos and then made his home for two decades in the Plakiotian bouats.

Yannis Spanos writes some of the most recognizable melodies, inspired also by his Parisian memories. Other well-known composers who associate their art with the New Wave are Yannis Glezos, Linos Kokotos, Nikos Mamagakis and Notis Mavroudis, while poetic personalities such as Akis Daskalopoulos, Kostas Georgousopoulos, Dimitris Iatropoulos and Kostas Kotoulas offer lyrics. The ballad is the basic morphological core of the New Wave, but it also generates islands of folk sound, traditional admixtures, or rock experimentation. All with an aura of carelessness, innocence and well-meaning amateurism. Savvopoulos, again in the CD “Recordings”, leaves cryptic questions about the essence of this current. We did not lack talent, nor the desire of the unknown. And yet, all that’s left of all this is only the breeze of a lightness. Why? Was it because what we achieved was nothing compared to what we dreamed and wanted? Or did we experience this huge difference as something light and fun?”

The existential questions surrounding the New Wave and its legacy do not negate the importance of this song’s encounter with the bouats. Nikos Mamagakis generously assesses the character of these venues. The nights at the bouquets were a kind of musical liturgies. Young people went who had an imagination and a vision, and they listened predominantly to high, melodic poetry. And they were also affordable, cheap, you didn’t have to have a lot of money to go.” Manolis Rasoulis (“Hier ist des Rassoulis”, published by Janos) aptly describes the feeling expressed by the bouats. You went in whatever clothes you wore.

We sat side by side and all together in a common fate and a common desire to communicate, to splash like infants in our collective unconscious and in a new national consciousness.” This consciousness is also defined politically, through a youth and a boiling time. Savvopoulos identifies the sources of the bouat movement as follows: “It was the era of hope internationally. Here in Greece, the student movement 1-1-4 was autonomous and unconnected to the political parties. We spoke and they listened. The youth needed their songs. There were pop groups, of course, but their art did not go beyond the narrow confines of dance fashions. They pretty much monkeyed around with outsiders, while the youth wanted something that would allow them to feel modern without losing their soul. That’s what they were looking for in the bouats.”

“The bouats were a priesthood of good singing. The nights at the bouquets were a kind of musical liturgies.”
A place to meet, then, the bouats and a place to meet. Not just simple musical venues, centres of entertainment and amusement. This is what Yannis Kouklis, who has been living and doing business on Mnisikleous Street for 50 years, emphasizes and in 2010 he is going to open a new bouat there, a music café, as he calls it:

“The bouats, if they didn’t have progressive messages, couldn’t stand. They were meant for young people and for ordinary, poor people. They came to them and drank their vermouth, their wine, their orange juice and paid a cheap ticket. Poets would come to the bouquets and present their poems. I remember the poet Dimitris Christodoulou as a regular patron. There were discussions about singing, art, politics…”.

New songs were played and tested live in the bouats, and there were even chance meetings between composers and songwriters, which in turn gave birth to new collaborations. Indicatively, in his biography of Manos Loizos (“Manos Loizos … his own story”, published by Synchronous Epoch), Thanasis Sylivos notes: “In 1964, together with Savvopoulos and Farantouri, Manos worked in a boutique in Kolonaki, the “Stoa”. There he met Kostoula Mitropoulou (…). A few months later, Manos met Lefteris Papadopoulos in a boutique where Zographos was singing.

The bouats movement – because it was a movement – was stopped, like so many other aspects of popular culture, by the Colonial Junta. But its political dimension intensified. In his unpublished autobiography, edited by Kostas Nella, Vangelis Dickos, the owner of Apanemia, stresses: “The bouquets were haunts of people of usually left-wing political affiliations. When the dictatorship came, these people continued to come here. (…)
Many times someone or one of the singers or customers would keep a lookout at the door when we were singing a forbidden song, in case a security man or the SSA showed up.” In the basement of one of these boutiques, in 1973 – “Agrypnia” was its name and twenty days of “life” during the dictatorship – Nikos Xylouris went down to hear Christos Leontis’ performance himself, for which there had been a lot of noise. As the composer tells us, it was there that he met Xylouris and it was there that one of the most important Greek albums of all time was born: the “Smoky Tsoukali”, i.e. the poems of Yannis Ritsos set to music.

“In Plaka after the post-independence era, in ’74, a group of people with a lot of money, who were from the Lachanagora, showed up. They financed the “Foundation”, the “Archontissa”, three or four boutiques that grew and became “like barges”. They came in with pockets full of thousands of dollars, bundles.”

After the Junta, the rise of political singing also passed to the bouats, with Panos Tzavela and his “Limeri” as the main exponent, where every night the Antartika was played. Promoted initiatives, such as that of Nikolas Asimos and Yannis Zouganelis with the “Sousuro” of Adrianou Street, a kind of political cabaret, are brought to an inglorious end. The obvious legacy of the dictatorship and the invisible homogenization processes of the post-opposition period have already contributed decisively to the beginning of the end of the boutiques in one way or another. Since the mid-1970s, their journey has continued, but with the gears down.

In the ’90s things got worse, given the absence of the corresponding song that could potentially support such spaces.

The area of Plaka starts to change, the bouat become taverns and social clubs, new bigger stages are created (which by definition cannot revive the atmosphere of the boathouses), singers “increase” their demands, and the song follows the path of the EEC… Marisa Koch doesn’t mince her words: “In Plaka after the post-revolution, in ’74, a group of people with a lot of money, who were from the Lachanagora, turned up their noses. They financed the “Foundation”, the “Archontissa”, three or four boutiques that grew and became “like barges”. They came in with pockets full of thousands, bundles.

The chairs changed, they became café seats, the big paychecks came in, the new artists came in, the new artists, the celebrities of the time.” In the 1990s things got worse, given the absence of a corresponding song that could potentially support such spaces. The music scenes born in that period as a reaction to the big dancefloors carry some of the flavour of the boutiques, but their decline continues unabated. This brings us to the early 2000s, when the traditional bouquets are reduced to the following three: ‘Esperides’, ‘Apanemia’ and ‘Frogs’. It is worth mentioning all three separately, the last two of which are still in operation.

The “Esperides” was the place of Yannis Argyris, the “patriarch of the bouquets”. A singer and lyricist himself, a brilliant mime and satirical actor, he gave his voice to songs that were milestones of the New Wave: ‘Come with me’, ‘There goes this Sunday’, ‘Someone is celebrating’, ‘Don’t get tired of loving me’. In a conversation with the late Panos Geramanis (“My life is a song”, published by Kastaniotis), Argyris recalled the following: “I fought real battles with the commercial music establishment and with populism to get the concept of the bouats through in the early 60s.”

In those battles, Argyris emerged victorious, keeping the ’60s flame alive at Esperides from 1964 until 2004, when the venue closed. Today, Yannis Argyris, absent from the music scene due to a serious illness that has plagued him since the beginning of the decade, remains present in the consciousness and in the hearts of both the singers who passed through “Hesperides” (Maria Farantouri, Dimitris Mitropanos, Yannis Poulopoulos, Vasilis Papakonstantinou, Yannis Zouganelis, Sakis Boulas, etc.) and the public.

His fans even express themselves on Facebook, in the group “Hesperides”. Its inspiration is an amateur musician of the last generation who played in “Hesperides” in the early 2000s, Vassilis Galliakis conveys fragments of moments from those evenings. Together with Alexandros we tune the guitars, drink raki and have fun with Giannis…

The crowd slowly gathers. You see all ages… The speakers are old, as is our booth, but people sing along with us and the more daring ones take the stage. Applause, “disgrace” shouts Yannis Argyris. Many times from laughing we can’t sing! (…) The time is almost 03:00. We accept orders and dedications. Vangelis is buying. We sing Katsimichaios, Kilaidoni, Germanos, Parios, Papakonstantinou, Savvopoulos, Pyx Lax, Thalassino, Ioannidis, Sidiropoulos and Thevaios”.
Vangelis Germanos and Dionysis Savvopoulos
And yet the “Hesperides” closed when it was thirty-five years old and the owners of the venue evicted the dream by asking for a higher rent. Today the space remains bare. Looking through the bars one can see the faded photos that used to decorate the walls, slogans on the walls, the famous stairs grassed over…The “underground sky” as Yannis Argyris tells us today has turned into a dirty basement.

And yet it did not deserve such a future. In a place where every night for so many decades young men and women met to breathe in the songs and the funny numbers, where, as Argyris remembers, “even Orson Welles, the great American actor and director, who was even confused by a lady with Manos Hadjidakis, had come.” where “Onassis had come several times” and where “the audience did not distinguish between green, red or blue”, “the indifference of the state and more specifically of Dora Bakoyannis when she was Mayor of Athens” continues to be ostentatiously characteristic. Not even at the level of an honorary pension…

“Even Orson Welles, the great American actor and director, who was even confused by a lady with Manos Hadjidakis, had come”

Squeezed into Tholou Street, the historic alley of Plaka and next to the abandoned “Esperides”, the “Apanemia” with Vangelis Diko at the helm still holds high the flag of “bohemian” entertainment. The venue was opened in 1964 by the actor Artemis Matsas, and from the 70-71 season it passed into the hands of Dikos. In 1977 Dikos released “Songs of the Apanemia” on Columbia, an album with 12 representative songs of the venue and its audience. Today, this particular boutique is a popular entertainment venue, against the grain of the times, and hosts a mix of new and older artists..

With fifteen years of experience on the Apanemia stage, Theophilos Mitsis observes the audience: “I’m excited that there is so much youth coming, the majority are aged 16-17 to 27-30. In the 90’s there was less youth, more collected… Youth knows the songs, even songs that are not heard on radio stations”. While Vangelis Koromilis describes the goal served by his presence in Apanemia: “to commemorate and support the songs and poets who wrote healthy things. The ‘Apanemia’ bouquet is an oasis, an art house. A hidden school. And it’s going to come back here again. These small spaces are the most humane.”

The “Frogs” in Solonos are younger than “Apanemia”, they have been going on since 1983 under the leadership of George Arapakis, and from this year onwards they continue at the helm with songwriter Michalis Kleanthi. Kleanthis has a long tenure in the business since 1989, having passed through the schools of “Hesperides” and “Apanemias”. The “Frogs” call themselves an “independent space of expression”, a space that immediately exudes a little bit of the bouquet of the boats. Thanasis Gaifillias, Vassilis Kazoulis, Dimitris Panagopoulos, Stamatis Mesimeris, Yannis Yokarinis, Nikolas Asimos etc. have played there from time to time.

Kleanthis describes the stigma of the space: “We don’t hide behind the lights and the sound terrors of the time. We tell the truth exactly as we feel it. We express the fresh, restless mind as much as we can. The kids who play don’t make their living exclusively from music, but they have such a musical level that they could easily play in any musical group. Nowadays in our performances we play contemporary songs (mostly by songwriters) but also older ones… Generally speaking, however, a bouquet for me is like when someone comes to your house and you buy them a sweet grape and give them a glass of water. Not treating listeners as customers.”

The bouats, then, were one of the healthiest, liveliest and most direct expressions of Greek song as a way of entertainment and communication. The revival of the bouat climate, not as a memorial and obituary but as a modern proposal with a point of view and reason for existence, is a possibility that gives us joy and optimism.

If anything, the spontaneity and simplicity of musical “boxes” are elements missing from our song, and from its nightly wanderings on big dance floors and music scenes. The noise of plates, glasses and the raucousness of the patrons is an element contrary to the logic of boutiques. The survival of those that still operate and the dissemination of their aesthetic to a wider audience is a bet that can and must be won. As long as the meeting points with the current times are found. In the words of Dionysis Savvopoulos: “If you find the common element that unites a hundred people, then you can appeal to a hundred thousand people. That’s what the bouquet taught me. To look for the common element”.

Original Article in Greek in αthensmagazine.gr