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Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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You gaze at the pictures in your sticker album, watch them on TV and see something of yourself reflected in them. She wore tight roll­-necked jumpers and, after Christmas, she got a perm which transformed her super­-straight hair into a sensational Afro.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides review: a warm, heartbreaking

We’d waited outside Preedy’s three years earlier when Tom Baker came to Acocks Green to sign copies of the first ever Doctor Who Weekly. It is, for me, a study in kindness, borne of a lifetime of listening - to records, to his parents' stories of their past, to others, to everything.Ostensibly, Broken Greek begins with the young, timorous Takis (our protagonist, who only later will decide to become Pete) going through a prolonged mute phase. 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. Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said the Irish Embassy in Athens is providing consular support and a consular officer is "on the ground" in Ios. Still, she hopes that their sons will marry nice girls from the Greek Cypriot diaspora and eventually take over the business. 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.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Book review | The TLS Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Book review | The TLS

Her torso was flat and bendy like one of those fruit bars that middle­-class parents give to their children instead of Kit Kats. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. Which two things connect Greek Cypriot immigrants Stavros Georgiou, Kyriacos Panayiotou and Christakis Paphides? In a song about putting on your best happy face on days when it’s all a bit too much, the rumbustious vaudevillian arrangement finds its equal opposite in the way touchingly precarious way Doolittle sings the line “I’m trying to care a little less”.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. Clutched in my sweaty palm was the handle of a carrier bag containing assorted Barron Knights albums and singles.

Broken Greek: WINNER OF THE RSL CHRISTOPHER BLAND PRIZE 2021

His eyes, oblivious to the cameraman’s lens, were narrowed in concentration, but not so much that you couldn’t see the August sun twinkling in them. Paphides’ parents moved from Cyprus to Acocks Green, Birmingham, in 1963 in the hope of building a better life, not realising that it would be a permanent move. I loved trying to ramp up the grubbiness of the whole evening and I’m right in the middle of it, a steadfast vessel of hope.They weren’t trying to be TS Eliot in the studio that day, but they’re a knowingly constructed fantasy for people who might be living difficult lives.

BBC Radio 4 - Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides

But decades later, when our paths crossed again, Miss Haylor confirmed all of them: the single-­file line of pupils snaking out of the classroom and into the corridor which ran alongside the school hall; the waist-­high bookshelves with large windows above them which allowed you to see the photographer summoning the next child in the queue to have their picture taken; the position you were expected to assume, which was right at the front of the stage with your little legs dangling off the side. The rest of them had been photographed face on, usually smiling obligingly for the Panini photographer. Unusually among the great man’s fans, we’re both keen adherents of 1989’s Avalon Sunset, a comparative makeweight in the Van canon, yet an album he says he’s increasingly turning to in these benighted times. When you see Agnetha in the video for “The Winner Takes It All”, she looks exactly like your mum does when she’s just had a row with your dad.

Chris(takis) and Victoria (from Athens) Paphides married young and wanted more than his small village in Cyprus could offer.

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