Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. 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. 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. 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.

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

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.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.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides review – a smash hit

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. 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). 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)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.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Waterstones

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. 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 Popsand 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. 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.An exceptional coming-of-age story […] Pete Paphides may very well have the biggest heart in Britain’– Marina Hyde

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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. This coming-of-age story set in the Great Western Fish Bar in a Birmingham suburb is wonderfully told, but the meat in this dish is his parents’ tale. I’ve never read anything that tells the immigrant’s story with such clarity and tenderness. 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… 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.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. 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 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!