It's very classical, this. Not classical as in classical music, but classical as in classical civilisation. But then Vangelis is Greek. I associate him with school and 1981/2, which was when I listened to him most. I didn't own many of his albums, but borrowed a few and taped them — I bought this compilation in October 2000 to remind myself of those albums and those days (£4.99 or 3 for £10, says the sticker).
In the wake of recent Warp albums that have cropped up here (1, 2), it's weird to think how little genuinely electronic music there was back in the early '80s. Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Jean Michel Jarre — Tomita I saw in the record shop racks but never bought, Kraftwerk who I didn't take to until much later; and then if you dug deeper you could find more obscure German stuff like Adelbert von Deyern and Robert Schroder (but I don't count people like Ash Ra Tempel as fully electronic).
The equipment was probably incredibly expensive, and it must have taken a lot of balls to make this music back in the '70s. I went off Vangelis as I came to find his style too bearishly Mediterranean (I remembered it as "melodramatic" last time I thought about it), but coming back to it later, what I like about it is that there is very little music from before or since that sounds the same. Perhaps the Beaubourg piece show traces of some of the "early gurus" of electronic music, but most of the rest is pure Vangelis. And the CD has So Long Ago, So Clear, his first (released) recording with Jon Anderson, which is wonderful and worth the £4.99 on its own.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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