Nana Mouskouri - Life Outside Greece

Life Outside Greece

In 1962, she met Quincy Jones, who persuaded her to travel to New York City to record an album of American jazz titled The Girl from Greece Sings. Following that she scored another hit in the United Kingdom with My Colouring Book.

In 1963 she left Greece to live in Paris, where she formed close friendships with the singer-songwriter Barbara and other leaders of French chanson. Mouskouri performed Luxembourg's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1963 that year, À Force de Prier. The song achieved success, and helped win her the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France. Mouskouri soon attracted the attention of French composer Michel Legrand, who composed for her two major French hits Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and an arrangement of Katherine K. Davis' Carol of the Drum, L'Enfant au Tambour (1965).

In 1965 she recorded her second English-language album to be released in the United States, entitled Nana Sings. American calypso musician Harry Belafonte heard and liked the album. Belafonte brought Mouskouri on tour with him through 1966. They teamed for a duo album entitled An Evening With Belafonte/Mouskouri. During this tour, Belafonte suggested that Mouskouri remove her signature black-rimmed glasses when on stage. She was so unhappy with the request that she wanted to quit the show after only two days. Finally, Belafonte relented and respected her wish to perform while wearing glasses.

Mouskouri's 1967 French album Le Jour Où la Colombe raised her to super-stardom in France. This album featured many of her French songs, Au Cœur de Septembre, Adieu Angélina, Robe Bleue, Robe Blanche and the French pop classic Le Temps des Cerises. Mouskouri made her first appearance at Paris' legendary Olympia concert theatre the same year, singing French pop, Greek folk, and Hadjidakis numbers.

In 1968, five years after her appearance at the Eurovision Song Contest which had been produced by the BBC, Mouskouri was invited with her backing group, the Athenians, to host a BBC TV series called Presenting Nana Mouskouri. The next year she released a full-length British LP, Over and Over, which reached number 10 and spent almost two years in the UK charts. This was the first of a series of English-language albums which sold extremely well in the UK and Ireland during the early 1970s, including The Exquisite Nana Mouskouri, Turn On The Sun, A Place In My Heart and Songs From Her TV Series. Her British TV series, which continued until 1976 (with various television specials until the early 1980s), featured many world music stars of the time, and it went on to be sold by the BBC to television stations around the world. At the same time, Mouskouri was also regularly hosting her own shows on French and West German TV, and her popularity as a multilingual television personality certainly helped to increase her global profile. Throughout the 1970s, she expanded her concert tour to the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan and Australia, where she met Frank Hardy, who followed her to the south of France in 1976. Always a prolific recording artist, the mid-to-late 1970s saw her record several LPs in German, including the hit album, Sieben schwarze Rosen, while in France, she released a series of top-selling records, such as Comme un Soleil, Une Voix Qui Vient du Cœur, Vieilles Chansons de France, and Quand Tu Chantes. Meanwhile, Passport, a compilation of her most popular songs in English, reached number 3 in the UK album charts in 1976 and won for her a gold disc. During the decade, she also recorded several Japanese songs for the Japanese market.