Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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In appraising the 1979 Abba album Voulez-Vous, for example, he points out what he feels the critics at the time missed: that the wildly contrasting state of the relationships between the band’s two couples – one married and in love, the other heading towards divorce – had a great impact on the music. His lengthy thesis is so quietly profound that you will never listen to the Swedish supergroup quite so lightly again. Never have the trials and tribulations of growing up and the human need for a sense of belonging been so heart-breakingly and humorously depicted. Composer Horace Ott came up with the melody and chorus lyric of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood in 1964 after falling out with his wife-to-be Gloria Caldwell. Within a year, that argument had resulted in a song with which both Nina Simone and The Animals enjoyed huge success ( in 1986, Elvis Costello recorded a nice version too). So wonderfully written, such a light touch. Drenched in sentiment yet not in the least sentimental’– John Niven

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Waterstones Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Waterstones

you’ll be enthralled by Paphides’ funny, warm and sometimes heartbreaking account of how life-affirming music can be.” ★★★★★ Broken Greek isn’t all about the transcendent joy of discovering new bands. There are flashes of racism; and Paphides’s parents spend much of the time miserable, largely from working themselves too hard – in the case of Victoria, to the point of a hospital stay. But they clearly love their children (even if Dad isn’t always good at showing it) and incidents of kindness and friendship abound, despite economic and marital struggles. Paphides is a music writer and DJ (he is also married to the writer Caitlin Moran). I experienced the same feeling reading this book as I do when listening to his show on Soho Radio – you are in the happy, rewarding presence of an irrepressible enthusiast. He exudes a stubborn naivety, an insistence on locating the positive, that stands out in our era of social media snark and drive-by brutality. With every passing year, his guilty secret became more horrifying to him: his parents were Greek, but all the things that excited him were British. And the engine of that realisation? ‘Sugar Baby Love’, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, ‘Tragedy’, ‘Silly Games’, ‘Going Underground’, ‘Come On Eileen’, and every other irresistibly thrilling chart hit blaring out of the chip shop radio. Do you ever feel like the music you’re hearing is explaining your life to you?” asks pop critic and broadcaster Pete Paphides early on in his perceptive coming-of-age memoir. He goes on to do just that, explaining his Seventies and early Eighties childhood through the music of the period – and he writes so beautifully about it that you keep having to listen to it afresh yourself. Facing a series of childhood crises, he is rescued by Abba, the Bee Gees and most profoundly by Dexys Midnight Runners, who “rode into my interior world like the cavalry”.He fantasises about “kind, compassionate Sting” replacing his schoolteacher and taking a class about the latest Police hit Message in a Bottle. But if Paphides had written an SOS “it would have probably said that I didn’t feel very Greek at all. That all the things I seemed to love… were British.” He has a brilliant antenna for the Britishness of certain records. Food for Thought, the debut single by Birmingham’s UB40, showed “what happened to reggae when you deprived it of sunshine. It sounded damp and subterranean.” Shy and introverted, Pete stopped speaking from age 4 to 7, and found refuge instead in the bittersweet embrace of pop songs, thanks to Top of the Pops and Dial-A-Disc. From Brotherhood of Man to UB40, from ABBA to The Police, music provided the safety net he needed to protect him from the tensions of his home life. It also helped him navigate his way around the challenges surrounding school, friendships and phobias such as visits to the barber, standing near tall buildings and Rod Hull and Emu. Which two things connect Greek Cypriot immigrants Stavros Georgiou, Kyriacos Panayiotou and Christakis Paphides? I ADORE this utterly wonderful coming-of-age memoir. Joyful, clever, and a bit heartbreaking’– Nina Stibbe Growing up in Birmingham with Greek-Cypriot immigrant parents, Paphides is caught between two cultures. His parents have a relentlessly attritional existence running a chip shop, while trying and largely failing to assimilate to life in the UK. His father, in particular, an almost stereotypically repressed Mediterranean male, is desperate to return to Cyprus. Pete, feeling more British than Greek, desperately searches for an identity that accommodates both his own emerging, modern desires and those of his traditionalist parents.

BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, Thursday 7 May 2020 BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, Thursday 7 May 2020

The chapter that outlines the fateful evening you get to meet your heroes, The Barron Knights, is one of the most perfectly bittersweet things I’ve ever read. The sense that other people suffered the same hang-ups has been a revelation to me. Even today I got a tweet from someone who said they had a fear of being near tall buildings. She wanted to know if it still ever manifests itself in me. I’m 50 now so it feels like less of a gamble to go on the record with some of this stuff. If certain things happened to me, they must have happened to other people too. We’re scared a lot of the time when we’re little and it’s something you don’t want to admit, especially when you have children of your own. Some of it might seem trivial, but some of it might be psychically quite impactful. You know, it could be little Jimmy Osmond or it could be an emu. I mention not knowing the difference between Freddie Starr and Fred Astaire, but why would you? You don’t know anything! Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said: "We are heartbroken. We have a very tight-knit community and these are two fantastic young men with their lives ahead of them. I can’t tell you how good this book is. Incredibly, it’s Paphides’s first – I’d be amazed (and disappointed) if it’s his last.

Santa Esmeralda: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1977)

In Dolly Mixture’s hands, Will He Kiss Me Tonight? sounded like The Ronettes seizing the means of control and coming up with something just as good and truer to life than any Brill Building A-lister could have provided.

BBC Radio 4 - Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides - Episode guide

The book offers plenty of side dishes and B-sides: British class and racial history; the popularity of Blue Riband biscuits, a Proustian madeleine for anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s; the arrival of Pot Noodles, Channel 4 and VHS. (I am of a different generation, but can relate to taping songs off the radio and using gates as football goals.)

BBC Inside Science — Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan? Paphides is struggling to navigate a life in which he is no longer entirely Greek but also not yet quite British. In his confusion, he spends several months mute, and communicates mostly by nodding his head. Comfort is derived from the pop songs he hears on the radio. A young Pete Paphides (left) with his family in Birmingham Judging by the response on social media, Broken Greek has really touched a nerve. You have become, to use the vernacular, a legend.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides, review: a music memoir that Broken Greek by Pete Paphides, review: a music memoir that

The parents miss their homeland terribly. That two-month holiday makes them work even harder so that one day they will be prosperous enough to return for good. I admit to falling a little bit in love with Victoria reading this book. Her childhood ambition to be an architect would never be realised and, following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, she knew they would never return to her husband’s birthplace. Still, she hopes that their sons will marry nice girls from the Greek Cypriot diaspora and eventually take over the business. But the sons have no intention of complying. At primary school Pete unilaterally changes his name from Takis. Both sons prefer listening to Billy Joel than Mikis Theodorakis. They have no ambition to work in the chip shop. I can’t tell you how good this book is. Incredibly, it’s Paphides’s first – I’d be amazed (and disappointed) if it’s his last.” A perceptive writer, brilliant on bittersweet details… this is a plaintive account of cultural assimilation that is also brilliantly, honestly funny.” Pete Paphides’ memoir is a love letter to his Birmingham youth. It opens in 1977, when he is eight years old. His parents, who arrived from Greece a decade previously, have settled in the Midlands, where they run a fish and chip shop, and work all hours.As if to prove their own point about the power of the human will, Teach-In task themselves with the challenge of singing lyrics that lapse into unabashed nonsense as if their world depended on it (which, on the night it won them the Eurovision Song Contest, it sort of did). You pretty much debunk the whole idea of ‘guilty pleasures’. What is there to feel guilty about celebrating pop music that makes your day immeasurably better? If there’s a weak area of the book, it is in the rare moments when Paphides introduces non-music asides that involve a leap forward in time. There’s mention of Brexit and Boris Johnson, tangents that jar. But – to repurpose a joke from Paphides – it’s small fry. Because, as well as producing writing that conjures some visually stunning images (a mass of school pupils is a “murmuration of green blazers”), Paphides is funny: “I didn’t know who Lulu was, but I knew she was important, because like Sting, Odysseus and Kojak, she only had one name.”



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