The force behind AfroBanana tells THEO PANAYIDES how he was named after his grandpa and, through a life of chaos and interaction, is best known for creating narratives on the dancefloor
Now it can be told. ‘Cotsios o Pikatillis’ (real name: Constantinos Kyprianou) – DJ, activist, leading light behind the AfroBanana festival, oenophile, architect, local celeb and all-round dynamic person – isn’t actually named after Piccadilly, the legendary arcade in downtown Nicosia. (That story is “completely mistaken,” he affirms mock-vehemently. “It’s the biggest misconception.”) For a start, he was born in 1985, so he wasn’t really there for Piccadilly’s heyday – but in any case he took his stage name from his paternal grandfather, who owned the Piccadilly restaurant and cinema in the village of Yerolakkos.
“Grandpa was cool,” notes his grandson. “He even did some time in jail.” That’s not why Constantinos adopted the moniker – though at one point, speaking of AfroBanana’s troubles with finding a venue this year, he complains of being made to feel like a criminal – it was more their other commonalities. Grandpa was an innovator, the first in Cyprus to perform on the electric bouzouki. He was socially liberal, running a bar for “illicit couples” in a eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of the village. (AfroBanana, meanwhile, found a home at the last minute, and is taking place – on July 13-16 – in a eucalyptus grove outside the village of Dali.) And there’s also the fact that everyone was welcome at Piccadilly, it was a meeting point for Left and Right, Cypriots and Brits: “There was no division. That’s the same thing I’m trying to do now – to unify people through my music, through my festivals and so on”.
It’s a noble aim, though it sounds a bit flat and we-are-the-world-ish; it doesn’t do justice to his expansive charisma. Some may recall him with a microphone at Save Akamas protest marches, leading the crowd in chants of ‘Na sas fan i shelones’ (‘May the turtles eat you’) to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’. (He didn’t come up with the chant but has made it his own, supplementing the turtles with additional native species like seals, gnats and vultures.) Others may know him from DJ sets, both as Cotsios o Pikatillis and one half of Afrofox (the other half is Andreas Stylianou; they own Sousami in Limassol together) who’ve played all over the world, from ‘Burning Man’ in the US to Vietnam, Japan, and regular stints in Berlin, Belgrade, Athens, Amsterdam. “A DJ set is an intention,” he explains. The point is “to create a narrative on the dance floor,” using songs as building blocks. “Mixing is really important, it’s a spiritual process… A good DJ set, when it’s over people are crying, people are hugging and they’ve been united on the dance floor. You’ve created a collective experience.”
There we go again, talk of unifying people and creating collective experiences. Constantinos is all about community, rabidly and passionately so – yet he’s also a powerful personality with a healthy ego, that’s the paradox. At one point he mentions Magma Architecture in Berlin, an award-winning practice where he spent a year as a trainee: “They saw something in me – just as, throughout my life, someone’s always seen something in me – and, out of 650 applications, they chose me”. They appear to have chosen wisely; there were only four people in the whole office – yet they won two building projects for the 2012 Olympic Games, specialising in sustainable architecture, during his time there.
That ‘something in him’ is easy to see; it positively spills out of him. “I was always a really fun person,” he recalls of his time at school. “I’m really extroverted, I’d always talk really loud”. Emphasis comes naturally to him; every adjective is preceded by ‘really’, or sometimes ‘really, really’. School was the Falcon in Nicosia, known as the strictest school in Cyprus – mostly because he was born in Geri, which at that time had one of the highest rates of juvenile delinquency in Europe (around half of his primary-school classmates are either dead or in prison, “those are Mexico City numbers!”), so his parents felt a corrective was in order. Constantinos was dyslexic, but didn’t realise till he went to university; all he knew was that he never did well in exams (“I’d skip lines, it was really hard for me”), and he was also such a handful that feared headmaster Nikos Ierides would often come out on his balcony to yell at him personally for being too loud during breaktime – yet Ierides had a soft spot for the lad, even asking him to come and visit years later, when he lost his wife, “because I could always make him laugh. He really loved me”. Like Mary in that old 90s comedy, there was something about him.
He beams at the memory, smiling beneath a mop of curly hair and little round glasses. We’re at Katakwa, the vegan café and meeting point near his home in Acropolis. He devours a slice of banoffee pie as we talk, and gulps down a dark-green spirulina smoothie; it’s 3pm, but it’s the first thing he’s eaten all day – partly because he’s so busy (he arrived straight from a meeting about a new podcast that’s being planned, in between trying to find a venue for AfroBanana) and partly because he never has breakfast, “it’s really important for your energy”. Alexis Karkotis, the sometime anthropologist who runs Katakwa with his wife, is part of his ‘bubble’, says Constantinos, the two dozen people with whom he collaborates and exchanges ideas: “My bubble is very, very strong”. Community again.
Social interaction is important, indeed it’s vital. All experience is important, in fact (he says) a creative is merely the sum of their lifetime’s experiences; he actually gave a TEDx talk three years ago called ‘When you get hit by a ripple’, a ‘ripple’ being any experience that “lifts you up in excitement” and inspires you to try something new. “I don’t believe in the egotistical way of creating ideas… I always exchange, I’m very open about projects”. After work, he’ll always try to “get together with people to talk, usually around a dinner table with good alcohol”. (He adores wine, which he credits with unlocking the subconscious.) “I also throw legendary parties,” usually just after Christmas, “and the point, again, is to make people exchange information. That’s how great ideas come into being”. He always cooks a seven-course meal for his guests, and – unlike many amateur chefs, who’ll blush and stammer when asked for details – talks up his famous avgolemono soup, “the best in the world… I could talk to you for 45 minutes about the process”.
Constantinos’ friends play an outsized role in his life – led, of course, by Martha Georgiou, his partner of the past 13 years, whom he met “on a magical sunrise in Protaras” (they already knew each other, but that was the first time they’d spent time together, “then I went home and told my mum ‘I’ve found the woman of my life…’ Sometimes you just know”). He and Martha complete each other – he’s an extrovert, she an introvert; “I’m chaos, she’s organised” – and go travelling together for one or two months a year, consciously looking for experiences.
Constantinos’ enemies, I suspect, also play an outsized role, though he probably wouldn’t call them that – but it’s fair to say he’s not universally popular. “Every single action has a reaction,” he shrugs. “If you don’t want to get criticised, then don’t do shit.” Some claim he’s money-driven, using his festival to rake in the dosh, others bristle at his dynamic personality: “Because I’m really, really hard-working, they’re like ‘Why should Cotsios always get his way around here?’”. He claims not to care, but he certainly used to; for years – before he became so famous that it was no longer viable – whenever he heard of anyone saying something bad about him he’d make it a point to go and confront that person, “not to fight” but just, as he says, to “demystify” the situation by his presence: “I’d say to them ‘Explain to me. Let’s communicate’”. Interaction, always, is the key; that said, his charisma can sometimes turn explosive. “So I get up and I bang on the desk as hard as I can, and I say ‘Guys, are you even serious? Is Stavrovouni monastery the authority on whether my festival gets to happen now?’.”
That’s a quote from his recent troubles with AfroBanana – though in fact they were nothing new: the enemies (naysayers, reactionary forces, call them what you will) have always lined up, making the festival a struggle. The only difference this year was that “they were stronger than us” – and perhaps also that he faced outright hostility, instead of the usual sluggishness and incompetence. Stavrovouni monastery was indeed among the obstacles, leaning on Larnaca District to deny the fest its usual venue; “The reason – and we’re planning to put this on T-shirts – was that we’re ‘demonic junkies’. Obviously. I mean, look at me, I’m obviously a demonic junkie”.
It’s true that you find drugs at AfroBanana, though, I note, trying to play devil’s advocate.
“You find drugs in society, you mean,” he shoots back. “In the army, in schools, in football most of all. I don’t see anyone trying to cancel the football… Look, if 361 days a year they’re out there doing drugs, I’m not responsible for the four days when they come to my festival.” He has security, Constantinos points out; it’s not like drugs are out in the open. They’re also the only festival that works with the National Addictions Authority, offering safe spaces and counselling – which is more than the government does, he adds pointedly.
AfroBanana is indeed a very special beast, not just a music festival but (inevitably) “a community type of festival” (its full title is AfroBanana Republic, the ‘republic’ being the community). The plan, from the first edition in 2011, was always to “create an environment out of context”, so that people come together as they seek to explore the new environment; the first two Afros took place in Grandpa’s deserted Piccadilly in Ayioi Trimithias (where he’d relocated after the invasion), the third in a former army camp transformed into a kind of spectral village.
Above all, Constantinos has deployed all his talents – his gift for people, his connections, his creative flair, his organisational nous (he’s head of an event-management non-profit called ABR, Alternative Brains Rule) – to produce a big festival, drawing 1,500-3,500 people (around 500 also camp there), with top international names, on a very low budget. This year, for instance, one reason why the scramble for a last-minute venue was so urgent was because the lineup was already set: “BCUC are playing this year, they’re the most important world-music band alive! And these people [government officials] were going to humiliate us.”
There’s a clash here, the clash of an idealist and incurable visionary – a seeker of experience, a builder of communities – with a small-country system that makes everything small, uninterested in experiences outside its small relationships and narrow parameters. “Who are you to decide about culture in Cyprus?” cries Constantinos Kyprianou, addressing his plea to the self-righteous monks, the Larnaca District Administrator who employed his power so capriciously, the head of the Forestry Department who refused them a permit by decreeing AfroBanana to be a “business activity”. Never mind that it’s non-profit, never mind that it was funded by the culture ministry, never mind that the state has no problem making exceptions for businessmen building golf courses – the larger issue is that music shouldn’t be in the grip of bureaucrats and tinpot tyrants at all. “The aim is the production of culture,” he tells me. “A culturally cultivated society is a more civilised society.” At the very least, it’s outrageous that a world-class musician who’s played Burning Man and Berlin should be stymied by civil servants whose only vision involves retiring on a fat pension.
And what of his own vision? “My worst enemy is my ambition,” he admits at one point – but what’s he ambitious for? What drives him? “I want things to change.” So not personally ambitious, then? “Yeah, I’m personally ambitious about changing things. My therapist would say I’m also looking for recognition – but not anymore. I solved that a couple of years ago.” He did experience a kind of awakening recently (he won’t say more), which also helped with his fear of death – death being of course the one thing that’s impossible to change. Constantinos had been organising his own funeral since his late 20s (“I have a playlist, I’ve booked DJs”), but he recently decided that it actually makes more sense to have the party while he’s still alive. Death too, it seems, can be demystified.
In the end he’s surprisingly slippery, for such a heart-on-sleeve person. His sense of self is strong, but so is his sense of community. He’s ingratiating, yet also combative. Is he angry? “I’m not angry, I’m passionate. It’s different.” Well then, would he call himself a workaholic? “I’m not a workaholic. The word is ‘ambitious’.” Creative energy bleeds into activism. Love him or hate him, there’s something about him.