'Do you sometimes feel like the music you're hearing is explaining your life to you?'
Broken Greek
When Pete Paphides’ parents moved from Cyprus to Birmingham in the 1960s in the hope of a better life, they had no money and only a little bit of English. They opened a fish-and-chip shop in Acocks Green. The Great Western Fish Bar is where Pete learned about coin-operated machines, male banter and Britishness.
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.
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.
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“I couldn’t stop looking at Kenny Dalglish. He was just beautiful. His face, captured in profile, was pink and smooth. 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. Behind him, out of focus, was the crowd that had turned out to watch Liverpool’s latest signing. I guess this must have been near the beginning of the game because his straight golden hair looked cleaner than any man’s hair had ever looked. He looked serious and clever, more so than any other footballer in Panini’s Football ’78 album. The rest of them had been photographed face on, usually smiling obligingly for the Panini photographer. Birmingham City’s Trevor Francis looked like David Essex’s excitable younger brother; Arsenal’s David O’ Leary bore an expression reminiscent of Gunner Nigel ‘Parky’ Parkin in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, which suggested he was the blinking beneficiary of preferential treatment from team manager Terry Neill; Queens Park Rangers’ Phil Parkes bore the faithful grin of a beloved Afghan hound. In fact, compared to Kenny Dalglish – who projected the purposeful acuity of an Icelandic sheepdog – all the other footballers looked like pets on parade.”
“Jimmy Greenhoff had chosen me as much as I had chosen him. I think that’s the case with all children and their favourite footballers. You gaze at the pictures in your sticker album, watch them on TV and see something of yourself reflected in them. In the Football ’78 album, Jimmy Greenhoff looks just a touch confused, like he accidentally walked into the first-team photo shoot and, by virtue of some admin error, ended up being chosen to play against Southampton the following Tuesday, electing not to say anything for fear that the resulting inconvenience would spoil things for everyone. While most centre forwards could be assured a centre spread in Shoot! weekly, Jimmy Greenhoff was strictly single-page fare. Unlike his brother Brian, who played in midfield, he never won an England cap. Speaking to Shoot! in an article which I, naturally, kept and stuck to my wall, he said, ‘Brian tells me it’s the greatest thrill you can imagine to learn you’ve been chosen to play for England,’ before adding, ‘Well, I wouldn’t know.”
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“When I saw an ad in the Evening Mail for some Barron Knights shows at a cabaret club in Solihull called the New Cresta, I lobbied hard. It was a run of nights in mid-November which included a Sunday. That meant we could all go as a family. I showed my mum the ad. Other acts booked to play the New Cresta in the coming weeks were future EastEnders star Mike Reid and (‘Tonight/Tomorrow, the outrageous . . .’) Bob Monkhouse. That sort of place.
It wasn’t unreasonable to hope that my parents might yield to my overtures. About a year previously, we had started going to the occasional show at another cabaret club called the Kings. In the previous months, we’d seen Karen Kay, mother of Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay belting out standards in front of the Kings’ house band, and we’d seen Charlie Williams, the first black British comedian to appear on British prime-time television. Every visit to the Kings was a portal into an aspect of British life I had never really seen. So this was what you did on a Sunday night if you weren’t Greek. You sat four to a table on red velour upholstered seating and you ate hot food from a basket: chicken, fish or scampi, all with chips of course. Spaced equidistantly on either side of the aisles between blocks of tables and chairs were floor lights which served the same purpose as cat’s eyes in fog. If the cigarette smoke got too thick, you just followed them back to your table.
Because everyone had to go back to work the following morning, value for money was a paramount consideration, which meant that the Kings was packed within minutes of the doors opening. Opening acts would play to a packed house. Warming up the audience for Crackerjack comedian Stu ‘I could crush a grape!’ Francis, the first thing that singer Rod Allen did was tell the throng that he used to be in a group called the Fortunes who reached number 2 in 1965 with ‘You’ve Got Your Troubles’. It sounded more like a plea than a boast. I’d never heard the song before, but it sounded great. Sad-faced Rod quickly brought the audience onside by opening with his hit. Then, after another four songs, he told us we’d been a smashing audience and closed with it too.
The New Cresta was a lot like the Kings, transplanted to a slightly more well-to-do area. If the Kings audience was eighty per cent dressed-up factory workers and twenty per cent middle management, the New Cresta reversed the ratio. Not just Ansells bitter and Embassy cigarettes but scotch and Hamlet cigars, with Babycham or Britvic for the ladies. As we walked in, I was oscillating at a higher frequency than I had thought possible. Clutched in my sweaty palm was the handle of a carrier bag containing assorted Barron Knights albums and singles. I had attended enough shows at the Kings to know that there’d most likely be some sort of signing afterwards. In the bag there was also their debut hit, 1964’s ‘Call up the Groups’, a medley based around the idea of what might happen to certain groups if national service were reintroduced. This was my secret weapon in the bid to make them see that I wasn’t like any other twelve year-old fans they’d met on tour – my loyalty to the Barron Knights predated even my own existence.”
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“My recall of that episode is so, well, photographic, that I have come to assume that I must have embellished some details along the way. 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. Just a couple of shutter clicks and that was it. Off you go.
You had to smile. That was the problem. But my front tooth was still missing and there was no way I was going to oblige. Convinced that any refusal to smile was going to land me in deep trouble, the anxiety became overwhelming. The walk from the front of the line, past the photographer, to the stage seemed to go on forever.
‘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!’
That was it. The laughter came twice: first from the line of children queuing in the hall, and then from the line of children snaking out into the corridor, who were told about it by the line of children in the hall. Silly sausage! The photographer knew his audience all right. In 1975, the one accusation an adult could level at a child, secure in the knowledge that it would be considered the funniest thing ever, was ‘silly sausage’.
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“When you live outside London and a major chain opens in your town, you feel flattered. You’re proud that your town has finally been deemed worthy of a McDonald’s. And because you have been deemed ready to receive this honour, you’re keen to step up and prove yourself worthy of it. So, really, on the morning of 24 April, I wasn’t just electing to spend most of that week’s pocket money on a Big Mac, fries and vanilla milkshake for me. I was doing it for Birmingham. I was doing it to show that we were just as capable of enjoying a Big Mac as Noel Edmonds, the Emanuels, Spandau Ballet, Ian Ogilvy, Tracey Ullman and all the other comparably glamorous London people who could no doubt be found sitting in the Trafalgar Square branch of McDonald’s at any given time.
There wasn’t much discussion about who would come with me. William Osborne was just as excited about the new McDonald’s as I was. Wimpy had seen me through some key moments in my life, but even Mr Wimpy had to admit that his staid Beefeater getup was no match for the thrilling red-and-yellow branding of his American usurpers. It wasn’t even midday by the time we got there, but the queues already extended out of the shop and onto the ramp on Stephenson Street leading towards New Street station. There was no debate about what we would order. We were going to have a Big Mac because that was the famous one. And surely the famous one must be the best one.
We didn’t mind the wait because the waiting merely confirmed the importance of the occasion. William and I had a history of waiting for important things. 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. We’d waited years before our respective parents capitulated to our requests for Soda Streams. Half an hour for a meal that effectively put Birmingham on the map was a mere blink.”
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“ Kindness and gentility were dyed into the fabric of school life….
Next to our classroom was Miss Zimnovodski’s class. She was thin in a way that only people in the seventies were. Her torso was flat and bendy like one of those fruit bars that middle-class parents give to their children instead of Kit Kats. She wore tight roll-necked jumpers and, after Christmas, she got a perm which transformed her super-straight hair into a sensational Afro. After that, very little of her face was visible except for her enormous round glasses. She always wore trousers which went high up over her waist and her flares covered her shoes entirely. Taken as a whole, all these attributes conspired to make it look like she’d just stepped out of a forgotten HannaBarbera cartoon. Every Friday, when the lunch time bell rang, Miss Zimnovodski would discharge her children, cross the few steps past the communal clothes pegs and peer into our classroom to collect Miss Haylor. The two would then proceed to the pub a few doors away from our chippy, where they would drink half a pint of beer each and eat a cheese roll. Years later I learned that Miss Zimnovodski would usually put the two class gerbils in her pocket and bring them with her too, often letting them out for a run in the pub.”
“…you’ll be enthralled by Paphides’ funny, warm and sometimes heartbreaking account of how life-affirming music can be.”
★★★★★
Jon Dennis, Telegraph
Reaction to ‘Broken Greek’
“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.”
Alan Johnson, New Statesman
“Lip-lickingly, dance-around-the-living-room good… A smash hit.”
Hannah Jane Parkinson, Observer
“Masterful.”
★★★★★
Jamie Atkins, Record Collector
“Like the very best pop songs, it gets under your skin, and stays there.”
★★★★★
Nick Duerden, Independent
“A perceptive writer, brilliant on bittersweet details… this is a plaintive account of cultural assimilation that is also brilliantly, honestly funny.”
★★★★★
Andrew Male, Mojo
“…you’ll be enthralled by Paphides’ funny, warm and sometimes heartbreaking account of how life-affirming music can be.”
★★★★★
Jon Dennis, Telegraph