The guitarist and founding member of the Greek progressive rock band Socrates, Giannis Spathas died at the age of 69.

Giannis Spathas was born in Paxos in 1950 and before Socrates had formed together again with Antonis Turkogiorgis and the later founder of the 2002GR Elias Asvestopoulos the rock band Persons in the mid-60s.

Their album Phos was the top-selling Greek rock album throughout the 70s, selling more than 200.000 albums during a very difficult period for the country.

Among the highlights of Socrates career is opening for UFO at London’s Hammersmith Odeon.

According to Brent Lambert, sound engineer of Kitchen Mastering Studio, if Spathas had pursuit a career in the USA during the 1970s in the US, his name would have been known all over the world.

However, Spathas collaborated with all the great musicians of the Greek music scene (Theodorakis, Hadjidakis, Markopoulos, Faradouri, Dalaras, Savopoulos, Loizos, Karaindrou, Alexiou, Nikolakopoulou etc.) in orchestration and as a guitarist. At the same time, he released three albums with Vassilis Lekkas and one solo album “Secrets of the Road”.