Adiexodo
In 1983, Sotiris Theoharis (singer and lyricist) and Dimitris Spyropoulos (guitarist) met by chance at "Dragon Fly", a famous meeting point in Athens. Both had practiced with several other musicians and were looking for members to form an unconventional punk band.
Following a few weeks’ search through friends and acquaintances, they met Stathis Papandreou (drums) and Mimis Alibrantis (bass). They started rehearsing and writing their first songs at the studios of friends, such as the band Genia Tou Haous. Later on, the band rented a decrepit, moldy house at the area of Exarchia, covered it with polystyrene and used it as a rehearsal studio until they disbanded.
They used borrowed instruments, hand-made amplifiers and guitar effects, stole power from electricity boxes and mixed their angry, almost nihilistic Greek lyrics with the razor-sharp chaotic guitar sound, the primitive, coarse bass and drum sound and voices screaming to be heard through chaos.
The band members, with ages ranging between 15 and 18 years, selected “Adiexodo” (Dead End) as their name, being the most accurate description of their adolescent perception of life, living in the “Greek dream” of the ‘80s, in a virtual democracy and a fake society of so-called equal opportunities and national reconciliation following the dictatorship’s fall.
Their first live performance took place on October 16, 1983 at “Anemoni” cinema in the area of Aghia Paraskevi together with Genia Tou Haous with whom they recorded a split cassette entitled “Good appetite”, produced by Art Nouveau.
Soon Mimis Alibrantis and Stathis Papandreou left the band and were replaced by 14-year-old Maria Vasilaki on bass (with whom they recorded two songs for the compilation “Diataraxi Kinis Isihias”) and Yiannis Venardis on drums. Later on, Maria Vasilaki was replaced by Nikos Zoumberis and, finally, by Nikos “Tsouloufis” Haralambopoulos
This line-up, the longest-living one, recorded the group’s one and only full-length album, under the title "38 millimeters", released by Enigma records in 800 copies in 1986.
Adiexodo preferred to perform live than recording. Throughout their short career they gigged several times in Athens and other cities, mostly in protest or solidarity concerts taking place in universities, technical colleges, high-schools and hangouts that supported the underground scene, such as “Rodeo” and “Kitaro”. On several occasions, their concerts were violent and turbulent, often resulting to clashes with the police. They even happened to perform on the very last minute without informing the concert organizers, who would hesitate to list Adiexodo for the fear of damages.
Adiexodo were more of a collective for activism and contestation, using music more as a weapon rather than as art, as a common form of expression. They lived and participated actively within antiauthoritarian movements of their time, in squats and confrontations with the police, whereas, at the same time, they kept clear of political formations refusing to fall under any label and rejecting all sorts of political correctness. Their noisy, violent, desperate and full-on-youth-adrenaline experiences were converted into word and sound.
By the end of 1986, while at their peak, Adiexodo realized that the explosion of punk in Greece was becoming a trend and they ran the risk of been labelled as the “kings of fools”. Thus, they all decided that they had nothing more to say and agreed that their most sincere decision would be to break up.
In a time of fake prosperity, deceitful socialism, “democratic” oppression, law and order, a time whenGreek upstarts first rose along with the cult of cheap pop songs, marked with the birth of the “enlightened right wing”, the “bourgeois left wing” and the bubble of the “contracts with the People”, Adiexodo dared to compose some of the most politically-charged and sharp songs ever recorded in the history of Greek rock.
Their raw, aggressive, dark, chaotic and primitive sound full of cynicism, irony, frenzy and wrath was unique and subliminally influenced the next wave of Greek punk. Enigma’s producer, Spyros Peristeris, managed to successfully capture their sound on the album “38 millimeters” through a live-in-studio recording without overdubs, as the actual image of the naked truth, with no attempts to polish or soften the result in any sense.
“38 millimeters” by Adiexodo is one of the most important documents of the mid ’80s Greek underground scene. A dirty diamond of spontaneous and sincere “artless” subculture that resisted “their art”.