Thanos Mikroutsikos

Mikroutsikos was born in Patras on 13 April 1947. He studied piano and music theory at the Hellenic Conservatory and mathematics at the University of Athens. He came of age politically in the years of the military dictatorship of 1967–1974, and his first important works were born of that experience: songs of resistance, of prison and of exile, written in a musical language that drew on avant-garde composition as much as on Greek popular song.

After the fall of the junta, his records of political songs made him one of the voices of the Metapolitefsi generation. In the late 1970s and the 1980s he moved closer to the mainstream without giving up poetry, with records such as Εμπάργκο (Embargo, 1982), on poems by Alkis Alkaios, while continuing to compose for the theatre and the concert hall.

He was also active in public life. In 1993 he joined the PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou as deputy minister of culture, and after the death of Melina Mercouri in 1994 he became Minister of Culture, until 1996. He then returned to music, performing his own songs in concerts across Greece. He fell ill with cancer in his last years and died in Athens on 28 December 2019, aged 72, mourned by musicians and politicians of every side.

His work falls into two broad periods. The first is that of the Πολιτικά τραγούδια (Political Songs, 1975) and the Καντάτα για τη Μακρόνησο (Cantata for Makronisos, 1976), on poems by Yannis Ritsos about the island prison camp of the Civil War years. Here Mikroutsikos set Ritsos, Mayakovsky and other poets to a music that was sharp, dissonant at times, and closer to Kurt Weill than to the bouzouki. The Πολιτικά τραγούδια were sung by Maria Dimitriadi, whose voice became one of the sounds of the years after the junta.

The second period begins with Ο Σταυρός του Νότου (Southern Cross, 1979), in which he set the poems of the sailor-poet Nikos Kavvadias: ports, tropical nights, opium and lost loves sung over driving, rock-tinged arrangements. The album found a huge audience and made Kavvadias, until then a poet for connoisseurs, a household name. Then came Εμπάργκο (1982), on poems by Alkis Alkaios, and in 1996 the album Στου αιώνα την παράγκα (In the Shack of the Century), sung by Dimitris Mitropanos, whose song Ρόζα (Rosa), on words by Alkaios, became one of the singer's signature tunes. Throughout, Mikroutsikos kept the same principle: popular song could carry demanding poetry without losing its power to move a crowd.

Start with Σταυρός του Νότου: put on the album, follow the Kavvadias poems in print, and you will have read a major poet without noticing. Then listen to Mitropanos singing Ρόζα, still a favourite in Greek music clubs. His political songs are often heard at commemorations of the Polytechnic uprising every November. When he died in 2019, tributes came from across Greek music and politics, and his native Patras mourned him as one of its own. The site's page on Dimitris Mitropanos leads on from his songs to the voice that sang them.

• He studied mathematics as well as music.
• He followed Melina Mercouri as Minister of Culture, from 1994 to 1996.
• His album Σταυρός του Νότου did more than any book to make Nikos Kavvadias' poetry popular.
• His first major records came out within two years of the fall of the junta in 1974.