ON ACHILLEAS

 

The first time I realised that Achilleas Yiangoulli was not quite like other people was when I watched him stop a rehearsal dead, mid-song. This did not take place because someone had played a wrong note, but rather because someone had played a note too earnestly. He paused, looked up slowly, and said, with perfect serenity: “This song has suffered enough.”

Then there was the time I brought my Chinese erhu to the Pontian Club and joined with Achilleas and the rest of the members of his band in playing rebetika. Soon after an elderly member of the club approached me:

-        Τι είναι αυτό;

-        Κινέζικη λύρα, I responded.

-        Μιλάς πολύ καλά ελληνικά για έναν Κινέζο, the man observed.

Achilleas, not being able to contain himself, smiled and asked: - Καλά, Πόντιος είστε;

I was gutted by the news of his death. Achilleas was a dear friend and a teacher in ways he may never have realised, or if he had, admitted. He was truly unique, a person who taught without instruction, corrected without humiliation, and mocked without cruelty. Truly, he possessed that rarest of talents: the ability to puncture pretension while leaving the human being intact.

Achilleas and I shared a birthday, and every year, without fail, he was the first person to call me to wish me happy birthday. He treated birthdays the way he treated music: miss the opening beat and the whole thing collapses. The call was never cliché in the conventional sense, but aways meaningful, invariably involving an obscure reference, a deadpan observation, something faintly absurd, and then laughter that appeared without warning, like a Shostakovitchian dissonance that unsettles the ear and takes a while to be resolved.

We also shared a fondness for the obscure and the absurd, and the deep privilege (mine, not his) of making music together many times. Achilleas was a quiet force for good in the world, though he would have visibly recoiled at the word “instrumental” for he despised puns unless he was the one using them, in sustaining the life of our community music scene. This he achieved without preaching, without seeking to draw attention to himself or big-noting his many achievements (he was, among other things, ‘instrumental’ in bringing about the first ever performance of Elytis’ Axion Esti in Australia,) but by showing up, at so many events around Melbourne and broader Australia, week after week, armed with a guitar, an impeccable ear, and an internal alarm system that activated instantly at the presence of nonsense, although he tended to employ a more strident term.

Achilleas had an innate ability to detect insincerity and hypocrisy. It was almost scientific. He could sense it before it had fully formed. To some, he may have appeared cynical or detached, but everything he did was driven by a fierce loyalty to his own beliefs, his moral code and the people who he loved. He had no patience for people who were insincere, though he was invariably kind to everyone. This apparent contradiction was, in fact, his genius. He understood that kindness does not require agreement, and honesty does not require brutality. At his funeral Irine Vela likened him to Simon the Likeable, the Kaos agent from Get Smart, in his innate capacity to have people warm to him. Unlike her, I am firmly of the belief that my friend was an agent of Kaos, in that he was innately subversive and refused to accept the tropes, ideologies, assumptions and buzzwords that frame our lives without interrogation.

I was constantly astonished by the breadth of his musical knowledge, which encompassed all spheres. Achilleas didn’t merely play music. He inhabited it. To sit with him and play was an overwhelming experience because he was the exact opposite of a tape recorder mechanically reproducing songs. To the contrary, his interpretations came from a deep, life-long engagement with lyrics, history, and the social conditions that produced them. Music, for Achilleas, was not nostalgia, or merely a means of earning a livelihood. It was life itself

I once argued with him about his version of Ραγίζει απόψε η καρδιά. Instead of singing Τυχαία δήθεν αν τη δεις, φέρ’ την στο ταβερνάκι, he sang στον Ταβερνάκη. When I objected, he laughed and said, “Imagine Tavernakis as the personification of all tavernas.” It was absurd. It was brilliant. It was completely correct. Achilleas had an uncanny habit of being right in ways that initially sounded wrong. He was always inserting fragments of himself into his art. That was what made it so intimate, so alive, so unrepeatable.

I will never forget his nonchalant, devastatingly precise remarks during the Canberra Greek Festival in 2009. Delivered deadpan as I struggled on stage, stoically attempting to introduce the band, they reduced me to helpless laughter. Those remarks are as unprintable as they were hilarious. Achilleas understood timing in the deepest sense, not just musical timing, but most importantly human timing. He knew exactly when silence should be broken and when it should be allowed to do the work.

He and the rest of Rebetiki Compania let me join them on Friday night rebetiko nights at the Pontian Koinotita for two years and it would not be an exaggeration to maintain that he played an intrinsic role in transforming Melbourne into one of the most important centres of the genre in the world. He lent me his preamp to give my violin more sound, delicately obscuring the fact the real problem was not the amplification but the violinist. Quietly, behind the scenes, he offered guidance, because he was gentle. He knew that ego is a fragile instrument and should never be played loudly. We ate much κατσίκι στο φούρνο together in those days and merely basking in his company was an education in itself.

After two years, I stopped playing, though I continued to follow him wherever he performed. One day he asked, “Have you still got my preamp?” I said yes and arranged to return it. When we met, I found I couldn’t hand it over. He noticed, smiled, and said: “It’s okay. Just give it back. It’s time to let go. Time for others to continue on.”

That was Achilleas in a sentence. We hold things only long enough to pass them on. We borrow sound. We borrow stages. We borrow one another. What matters is not what we accumulate, but what we release with grace.

Achillea, it was not time for you to hand over your preamp. You had so much more to give. But as always, you were right. It is time for us to let you go, and time for us to continue along the path you marked out: truthful, curious, allergic to pretension, generous with our gifts, and unafraid to laugh at the world when it mistakes seriousness for depth.

I close my eyes and I can see you winking at me, the way you used to whenever I would miss a note, or not get a joke. We will not miss you in the ordinary sense, because you are already everywhere we learned to listen more carefully. But our community will feel poorer, lonelier, and a little less sharply tuned without you.

Just a week before you left us, I purchased my daughter a guitar and when she asked which songs she should learn, I told her that this should invariably be your Beatles favourite, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ To her I related my memories of you arguing over which Beatles song is the most technically perfect and I promised her that once she mastered the song, I would get her to play it with you. This is why I teared up at your funeral, walking into the chapel, only to hear ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ playing gently in the background. And this is why, when I returned home, I taught the song to my daughter, just as you taught it to me.

And somewhere, I like to think, the great Tavernakis in the sky is pouring you a drink, all tavernas condensed into one, while you correct his rhythm gently, and tell him kindly, with that twinkle in your eye, that the song has suffered enough.

Καλή αντάμωση φίλε.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 31 January 2026