Archive · Journalism & Reportage

The Stelios Kazantzidis interview

The interview of 1 November 1997 on the Antenna news bulletin, which was talked about for years and ended in legal disputes. And the acquaintance it opened, as far as a second interview in a taverna in Korydallos at the start of 1998.

The interview Stelios Kazantzidis gave to Argyris Dinopoulos, for the Antenna news bulletin, on 1 November 1997, was talked about for many years, since it also provoked legal disputes following lawsuits filed by a well-known composer.

It is telling that even fifteen years after the interview, and with Stelios Kazantzidis dead since 2001, Argyris Dinopoulos was still receiving extrajudicial notices obliging him to withdraw contested portions of that interview, which had been reposted on various sites.

So while the original interview of 01/11/1997 ran 13'42'', the video of it on the internet runs 11'24''.

Argyris Dinopoulos had no personal acquaintance with Stelios Kazantzidis before 01/11/1997 — he met him then for the first time, after information from a journalistic source that on that day Stelios Kazantzidis would be recording his new album in a small studio in the Acharnes area.

The interview, that is, was the outcome of the «free reporting» Argyris Dinopoulos did, since never until then — nor afterwards — did he take up «arts reporting»

The broadcast of the interview on the Antenna news bulletin, and in two instalments at that, provoked reactions and fed the news for several days, quite apart from the judicial developments that followed in the years after.

It is telling that Argyris Dinopoulos received, in those days, an angry telephone call from an associate of a woman singer Stelios Kazantzidis «had gone after», who remarked in passing: «But he» — Kazantzidis — «doesn't even know how the new sound equipment works any more».

The interview was, in any case, the beginning of an acquaintance between Argyris Dinopoulos and Stelios Kazantzidis which, although it stayed at a «professional» level, let him come to know better the singer he had in any case grown up hearing, in his childhood in the 1960s.

At one of their later meetings, at the start of 1998, at Koumbouras's taverna in Korydallos, Stelios Kazantzidis gave a second «interview-outburst» to Argyris Dinopoulos, over a long evening on which he was surrounded by close friends.