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Artist
Elias Zaikos
12+ albums
bluesGreekblues-rockblues rock
about
Elias Zaikos was born in 1960 in Thessaloniki , Greece , where he is permanently based. During his early teen years, he showed relatively little interest in music and listened mainly to Greek traditional and popular songs. Sometime around 1976, he was introduced to soul and to rock and roll music. Little by little he got so involved with music that being a listener just wasn't enough. A friend of local rock musicians, he followed them on to their gigs and got a first hand knowledge of the pleasures - but also the difficulties - that are all part of a musician's lifestyle. He soon found out what it really means to express oneself through an instrument. As he turned twenty, he picked up the guitar for the first time. The six strings became his constant companion and he devoted his time to practicing and playing. Around the same time he discovered the blues, the musical genre that had such a powerful and profound effect on him that he dedicated himself to it completely. A self-taught musician, Elias Zaikos developed a particular technique on the guitar, using a thumbpick together with the bare fingers of his right hand - something he saw for the first time on a live Muddy Waters video. In the early eighties, Elias Zaikos founded Blues Wire (or Blues Gang, as they were initially named). In 1983 the band recorded the first blues album in Greece , which paved the way for a long series of successful albums that followed. Performing an average of two hundred nights every year in a
