With Electric Voices: Why Savvopoulos’ “Zeibekiko” Is Heavy Metal

 

There are songs that aren’t born simply to fill silence, but to crack open the walls of their era. The “Zeibekiko” (also known as “With Airplanes and Steamships”) that Dionysis Savvopoulos carved into Vromiko Psomi in 1972 is not a typical laiko tune for the nightclubs of oblivion. It is a ritual, an otherworldly bridge. Drop the needle into the vinyl’s grooves and scrape the surface of history, and you uncover a startling truth: this piece — in its soul, its structure, and its destiny — pulses with the dark, uncompromising DNA of underground heavy metal and punk rock.

The Cellar of Smyrna and the Birth of the Outsider

To grasp the weight of this anthem, you must return to its roots. The zeibekiko was never a cheerful dance; it was the secret rite of the Zeibeks — rebel warriors of Asia Minor who lived in the mountains under their own unwritten laws, defying Ottoman authority. Their dance was a solitary, heavy confrontation with death before battle. Pure, primordial heavy‑metal thematics, centuries before electricity existed.

In 1922, uprooted and hunted, these people arrive on Greek shores. Official society treats them as foreigners, as contamination. Isolated, they retreat into “secret cellars” and turn their pain into rebetiko. Rebetiko became Greece’s first authentic underground — the music of outcasts who refused to assimilate into the polished lifestyle of the time.

[1922: Asia Minor Refugees / Rebetiko] ───► Resistance to Alienation ◄─── [1972: New Generation / Rock]

1972: The Junta’s Paranoia and the Electric Voices

Fifty years later, in 1972, history repeats itself in another form. Greece is trapped under the Dictatorship. Savvopoulos, having tasted the brutality of the Security Police cells, locks himself in a suffocating hotel room in Thessaloniki. The internal pressure, the fear, and the thirst for freedom distort the musical form. He tries to write a laiko song, but the era’s rage mutates it into something mournful, unbearable, experimental.

In this darkness, the new generation also feels foreign in its own homeland. It thirsts for democracy, is hunted, and searches for its own refuge. This time, the weapon is not the baglamas, but the electric voices of rock.

“With airplanes and steamships, and with our old friends / we wander in the darkness, yet you still don’t hear us / with electric voices.”

Savvopoulos realizes that the scream of rock is the direct continuation of the refugees’ lament. When, in 1975, he invites Sotiria Bellou to perform the piece, he stages a brilliant artistic contradiction: a granite voice, shaped in prisons and the rebetiko underworld, comes to sing about the electricity of the new generation. The old underground hands the torch to the new.

When Bellou left the studio muttering, “They told me to sing a zeibekiko and you made me sing pop,” she couldn’t imagine that what had just been born was a raw, electric dirge — a rock mentality disguised in 9/8.

The Musical Anatomy of Darkness: 9/8 and the Modes

If we break down “Zeibekiko” musically, we see why it touches the deepest veins of extreme underground metal.

Its rhythm is asymmetrical, “limping,” heavy. The 9/8 meter — common in progressive, doom, and sludge metal — creates a sense of threat, instability, and existential mud.

At the same time, its Asia Minor origins bring the Eastern modes (makams like Hijaz). These scales carry inherent darkness and a ritual, epic melancholy. They are the very same musical foundations used today by global underground metal bands — from Greece’s own Rotting Christ and Villagers of Ioannina City to the broader oriental and folk‑metal spectrum — to evoke a sense of ceremonial catharsis.

“Underground Tunnels” and Vromiko Psomi as a Global Manifesto

“We wander in the darkness… inside underground tunnels.” “In this land, those who love eat dirty bread.”

Here lies the song’s most prophetic, literary gesture. The “underground tunnels” are the very definition of the Underground — the vital space where freedom of expression survives. Far from the spotlight, censorship, and the sterility of the mainstream, art remains free, wild, authentic. In the absolute darkness of the basement, the new is always conceived.

This is where “Zeibekiko” meets Heavy Metal and Punk Rock on a global scale. These movements were born in the margins and the working classes. They were hunted down by every kind of authority:

• Democratic systems, through moral panic, court cases, and public outrage (Punk in ’77 Britain, Metal in ’80s America).
• Authoritarian regimes, where metalheads were arrested behind the Iron Curtain.
• Religious establishments, which saw the electric distortion as the devil himself.

Yet underground Metal and Punk remained the uncompromising voice of youth refusing to conform. “Dirty bread” became their ethos — the choice of the difficult, independent path. They don’t sell lifestyle. They don’t get bought. They survive with teeth and nails, isolated in basement rehearsal rooms and tiny clubs, screaming their own truths while official culture simply chooses not to listen.

The Final Catharsis

Whether you’re thrashing in the mosh pit of an underground metal show, sweating in a punk gig, or closing your eyes as Bellou’s crushing voice tears through the air in 9/8, the feeling of catharsis is the same — unified and indivisible. It is the need to exorcise your demons, to stand tall against the hardships of your era, and to find your own “old friends” — your own “hard generation.”

Savvopoulos’ “Zeibekiko” was, is, and will remain Heavy Metal. Because metal is not defined by how loud you turn up your guitar amp; it is defined by how proudly you stand before the darkness, singing from your own underground.

Nick Parastatidis