Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. I ADORE this utterly wonderful coming-of-age memoir. Joyful, clever, and a bit heartbreaking’– Nina Stibbe 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. Then there’s your fixation with Abba. I found your description of them as almost proxy parents moving and hilarious in equal parts. 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.

Greek island Post-mortems due on Irish teenagers who died on Greek island

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. Hello sunshine! ’Nothing.‘ ‘What’s your name, then?’ ’Nothing. Maybe a conciliatory shrug.‘ ‘All right. Are you going to give me a smile, then?’Nothing.‘Come on, you silly sausage!’ lbs Ab beef & pork burger, brioche bun, red cabbage slaw, arugula, tomatoes, gruyere cheese, tzatziki Like so many groups who rose to fame with the 60s beat boom, The Hollies needed to survive by adapting. Of course, The Bee Gees managed to do that with spectacular results. And The Hollies? Well, comparing their 1977 album Russian Roulette and Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever songs is like comparing Studio 54 to singles night at Manchester Rotters. The legend of the former precedes it to such a degree that you can almost convince yourself you’ve been there. But The Hollies’ take on disco evokes a more elusive innocent segment of pop-cultural history. 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).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). A key moment in Pete Paphides’s memoir Broken Greek takes place when our young protagonist hears The Rubettes’ Sugar Baby Love for the first time and realises that, more than any other song in the world, this slice of bubblegum pop totally reflects his inner turmoil. 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. Bright, sporting, academic men who had their whole life ahead of them and looking forward to this particular trip for months on end and the planning had been ongoing, not just in our school but in lots of other schools. I was surprised how much I missed the world you describe in Broken Greek . Inevitably, it seems like a more innocent time.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides review: a warm, heartbreaking

Cherry tomatoes, mixed greens, cucumbers, red onions, peppers, olives, feta, cucumber & parthena olive oil dressing Once availed of these facts, listen to it and it’s like you’re listening to the saddest Wombles song of all time. 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”. 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.” Judging by the response on social media, Broken Greek has really touched a nerve. You have become, to use the vernacular, a legend. 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 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.

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

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 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.Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy Newman Post-mortem examinations are to be carried out on Tuesday on two teenagers from Dublin who died on the Greek island of Ios. And yet Santa Esmeralda’s debut hit – in particular, the full 15-minute version – is an astonishing synergy of handclaps, keening mariachi trumpets and deeply funky flamenco guitars, piloted to stratospheric heights by vocalist Leroy Gomez.

Pete Paphides

Braised short rib romanoff. Braised short ribs, shallots, garlic, green pepper corn, vodka, tomato sauce creamDo 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. 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.” Golden beets, grilled artichokes, figs, feta, green leaves, red onions, balsamic and parthena olive oil dressing 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. 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.