Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. Do you sometimes feel like the music you are hearing is explaining your life to you?” he asks early on. Paphides clearly does, and so while he struggles to fit in, and looks up in envy to an older brother already consumed with a bustling social life, he gets lost in music, which he analyses with scientific brio. For the longest time, you risked getting yourself into a comparable argument if you declared that the epic 1977 Latin reinvention of the song by French producers Nicolas Skorsky and Jean Manuel de Scarano trumps all the others. Victoria works in the shop alone to give her increasingly tetchy husband Thursdays off. When pensioners, unable to afford a full portion, ask for a few chips she shovels some extra in for free. When word gets around it leads to many more pensioners coming to the shop on Thursdays, “slowly advancing” towards it “like turtles on a moonlit beach”.

Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides, Part One - 10 BBC Radio 4 - Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides, Part One - 10

Pete’s sensitivity certainly wasn’t inherited from his father. When Victoria has to go into hospital her husband, a typically macho Mediterranean, can’t even manage to hoover the carpet. Expecting him to do even the simplest household chores is like “expecting a guide dog to round up sheep”. As Paphides deftly records, the closest Chris can get to telling his wife he loves her is to admit that he needs her. The principal of St Michael's, Tim Kelleher, said the school community is "absolutely devastated" over the deaths. Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy Newman Appropriately, then, there is something of the everyman in Broken Greek. Many of the challenges faced by young Paphides – building and maintaining friendships, figuring out his sexuality, developing cultural tastes, trying to work out how to be cool and to avoid getting beaten up by the local toughs – are standard childhood fare. It is in the telling that the author elevates his story to something rather beautiful. 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.So wonderfully written, such a light touch. Drenched in sentiment yet not in the least sentimental’– John Niven

Pete Paphides

An exceptional coming-of-age story […] Pete Paphides may very well have the biggest heart in Britain’– Marina Hyde 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! 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 Twenty-three years later, Edwyn Collins recorded an even more impassioned version as part of Channel 4’s A Song For Eurotrash TV special. Anyone who underestimates the power of walking along with their ding-dang-dong does so at their peril. Santa Esmeralda: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1977)

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. you’ll be enthralled by Paphides’ funny, warm and sometimes heartbreaking account of how life-affirming music can be.” 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.

Broken Greek - Incredible books from Quercus Books Broken Greek - Incredible books from Quercus Books

Musically, the 1970s is the decade of David Bowie , Roxy Music , Kraftwerk , Sex Pistols , but you write lovingly about the stuff that was actually in the charts and on the radio: Boney M, Brotherhood Of Man, Racey…I was surprised how much I missed the world you describe in Broken Greek . Inevitably, it seems like a more innocent time. 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. 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.”