‘In Cyprus you cannot live off music’

The story goes that the great rembetika player Markos Vamvarakis was walking the streets of Piraeus and Athens in the late 1940s with his fellow musicians on the lookout for a suitable place where they could do some busking.

Times were tough. Before the war the Vamvarakis quartet had been hugely popular, making lots of money but just as Greece changed after WWII so too did its music scene. The rembetika players were down on their luck.

“As one of his sons who was playing with him at the time once said...