Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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.

How to say broken in Greek - WordHippo How to say broken in Greek - WordHippo

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). 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. 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.” An exceptional coming-of-age story […] Pete Paphides may very well have the biggest heart in Britain’– Marina HydeThe 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. 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. So wonderfully written, such a light touch. Drenched in sentiment yet not in the least sentimental’– John Niven

BBC Radio 4 - Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides

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. 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).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!

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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? 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.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. 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.