Phoenix or Nicu Covaci’s legacy

Nicu Covaci, the founder of the band Phoenix, a Romanian musical phenomenon, dies aged 77.

Roxana Vasile, 05.08.2024, 14:00

Nicu Covaci, the founder of the much-loved Romanian band Phoenix, died on Friday night, aged 77. The news was given wide coverage by the Romanian media.

Born on 19 April, 1947, in Timişoara, Nicu Covaci was a composer, guitar player, singer, painter and graphic artist. When he was very young, he took piano, accordion, French, English and German lessons. He played the harmonica and the guitar. He attended the Arts High School and the Arts Institute in Timişoara. He loved athletics, rowing, boxing, swimming and motorbikes. Together with a school mate, he founded Phoenix in 1964 and for the next two years they played in local student bars and clubs, but mainly the songs of famous bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees and The Animals. The band became famous when they were invited to Bucharest to appear on TV shows. After their first concert in the capital city, in 1965, at the concert venue of the Theatre and Film Institute, the band were invited to record songs for the public radio.

In 1974, at the peak of their ethno-rock phase, Phoenix were banned by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime. “I realised I had to leave the country. As soon as I arrived in Amsterdam, I started inquiring with the different recording studios about how the band could continue abroad. The only solution was to get the other members out of the country illegally. I did it out of desperation. I got them to squeeze into the Marshall speakers and made for the border”, Nicu Covaci wrote on his personal blog, recounting how the band members fled Romania. They settled in Germany and in time the band split, before uniting again, with Nicu Covaci and older and newer band members using the stage name the Mad House and Transsylvania Phoenix. After the anti-communist revolution of 1989, the band returned to Romania, giving their first concert here in May 1990.

Asked how he explained the band’s success, Nicu Covaci said: “We still have a public, aged 7 to 70, who can sing our songs syllable by syllable. We are now neither young nor beautiful, but we are still convincing.” Phoenix will go down in the history of Romanian rock music with folk-inspired songs like Times, They who named us and In the shadow of the great bear, to name but a few.