Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. A perceptive writer, brilliant on bittersweet details… this is a plaintive account of cultural assimilation that is also brilliantly, honestly funny.” It's exactly the nightmare that every parent dreads when group holidays and big groups of children go away.

BBC Radio 4 - Broken Greek, by Pete Paphides - Episode guide

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. 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. 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”. 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”. So wonderfully written, such a light touch. Drenched in sentiment yet not in the least sentimental’– John NivenThen there’s your fixation with Abba. I found your description of them as almost proxy parents moving and hilarious in equal parts. Judging by the response on social media, Broken Greek has really touched a nerve. You have become, to use the vernacular, a legend. 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. 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.

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

I was surprised how much I missed the world you describe in Broken Greek . Inevitably, it seems like a more innocent time. 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). Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy NewmanI 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. Exactly. Some of those pop records are really smart – there’s nothing accidental about them. 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. And the people who bought those records knew what they were getting, they were allowing themselves to be moved in that way. So the book allowed me to be protective of that relationship. It also let me celebrate unusual entry points into someone’s work. I was able to write about how much Wings meant to me, for example, and the relative lateness with which I realised that John Lennon had actually been a member of The Beatles. There’s this idea that we’re in a critical world, there’s a “canon” and that’s the stuff we’re supposed to like. 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.” An exceptional coming-of-age story […] Pete Paphides may very well have the biggest heart in Britain’– Marina Hyde