“George Michael’s Greekness had the immediate effect of getting my back up. He looked like the Greek I knew I could never be.”

The thing to remember about Top of the Pops was that it wasn’t a slick production. There was very little directorial instruction from the people who make the show. The impression you made on Top of the Pops was down to how much you prepared for it. Given that you were being piped straight into over ten million homes, it was crazy that most bands didn’t give this a second thought. 

In his memoir, Black Vinyl White Powder, Simon Napier­-Bell – who later went on to manage Wham! – recalled seeing George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s prime­time TV debut: ‘When Wham! came on to do “Young Guns”, they com­pletely changed the way the programme looked. It was as if they’d rehearsed with the TV crew for days.’ 

It was also the first time my dad had taken an interest in Top of the Pops and, indeed, any pop music since his unpleasant encounter with ABBA’s The Visitors almost a year previously. 

‘You should record Top of the Pops so your mother can see it,’ he declared gnomically. 

‘Why would my mum want to see Top of the Pops?’ I replied. 

‘They’ve got a Cypriot singer on there tonight. Yiorgos.’ 

Yiorgos?! There was no Yiorgos in the chart. I knew every record in the top 40, and there was no way I would have forgotten a Yiorgos. I patronisingly informed my dad that his information was poor. Or perhaps someone had played a joke on him. 

But he wasn’t having any of it. His friend Stratis, who owned a chip shop in Tottenham, knew Yiorgos’s dad personally. The way my dad was carrying on, you’d have thought he’d known Yiorgos’s dad personally too. ‘His father is from Patriki,’ he told me, as if this might mean anything to me. 

‘Whose father?’

‘Yiorgos,’ he said.

‘Yiorgos, the singer?’

‘That’s right. Patriki in Famagusta. Yiorgos’s father moved over here and opened a restaurant in Watford.’ 

‘So Yiorgos’s father is a friend of yours?’ 

‘Kyriacos?’

‘Is that what he’s called?’ 

‘Yes. Kyriacos Panayiotou. Of Patriki.’

‘You know him?’

‘Well, I’ll almost certainly know some of his family.’

‘Right. Well, anyway, I think you’ve made a mistake. There’s no Yiorgos on Top of the Pops.’ 

I showed him that day’s Evening Mail with a full list of the artists performing on that night’s show.

‘See? Where does it say Yiorgos?’ 

My dad took the paper into the hallway where the phone lived and started dialling Stratis’s shop in Tottenham. What was already becoming a tortuous and seemingly pointless process became even more protracted when someone who wasn’t Stratis answered the phone. Stratis had gone home, presumably to watch Yiorgos the son of Kyriacos from Patriki on TV, leaving someone who was: (a) British; and (b) unaware of the Yiorgos thing to run the shop and answer the phone. 

All I could hear from the living room was my dad’s voice booming, ‘It’s Chris! Tell him it’s Chris from Birmingham! He’s . . . pardon me? Oh. Yes. Yes, please. Do I want Stratis to call me back? Yes. Tell him it’s an emergency!’ 

Tomorrow’s World was coming to an end. Top of the Pops was maybe two minutes away, and all we knew for sure about Yiorgos the singer was that he was the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. It was still far from clear whether Yiorgos the singer would be on tonight’s Top of the Pops and, if so, in what capacity. However, as instructed, I pressed ‘play’ and ‘record’. As I did so, the phone rang. It was Stratis – Stratis who was friends with Yiorgos’s father, Kyriacos from Patriki. The call lasted half a minute at the most. There was no time to spare now. ‘TAKI, IT’S JUAN! IT’S GEORGE MICHAEL AND JUAN!’ 

I was sure that George Michael and Juan were no more a presence in the top 40 than Yiorgos, the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. But, as it turns out, I was wrong and my dad was right. 

‘Oh, Wham! Wham!’ 

So, Yiorgos was George Michael and George Michael was one of our lot. 

Simon Napier­-Bell had been right. These guys had left nothing to chance. They cared far more about wowing you with their crisp dance moves than pretending to play their instruments. The gene pool from which George Michael had grown would have been enough to make my dad take proprietorial pride in the success of Wham! But the look sealed it for him. With the slicked back quiff, it was as though George had taken a picture of the young Chris Paphides to the hairdresser. And the combo of leather waistcoat and jeans merely completed the comfortable familiarity of George’s look. As the performance finished, the on­screen graphics flashed up to tell you what you’d just seen. My dad instinctively ignored them. In his mind, there was no Wham! – only Yiorgos, the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. 

George’s Greekness had the immediate effect of getting my back up. He looked like the Greek I knew I could never be. Thin. Handsome. Confident. Masculine. Outgoing. Normal. Successful. Attractive to girls. It took me years to realise that we had more in common than I could have ever imagined. The erstwhile Yiorgos Panayiotou, son of a Greek­-Cypriot restaurateur, had been a pudgy teenager with unmanageable curly hair, stuck in the suburbs, using pop music to try and establish for himself the cultural identity that his parents could never truly give him. 

But if pop music was what gave George Michael his cultural identity, he needed to look elsewhere when it came to establishing a pop star identity. Over time, we all came to realise that the per­sona he invented for himself in Wham! was that of the other guy in Wham! – Andrew Ridgeley. But George had gone about the process so thoroughly that it seems he even fooled himself. How could it be that his entire adolescence came and went without activating the realisation that he might prefer men over women? I couldn’t speak for George, but I can remember, as 1983 approached, feeling such a disconnection between my emotions and my body that I didn’t have a clue what needed to change for me to truly know what I was. 

While George Michael had yet to articulate that disconnection either to himself or to anyone else, I’d just discovered a song that managed to distil it perfectly. The irony was that the same song – Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’ – had once made such an impression on George himself that, at Wembley in 1992, he delivered a fearlessly perfect rendition of it, locating pockets of melody in it that had even eluded its creator. 

All these years later, it isn’t difficult to see what the young George Michael might have seen in Freddie Mercury. Even if George had yet to untangle his own sexuality, he would have seen in Freddie plenty to help him map his own route to pop stardom. Here was a singer in a band who had so totally detached his identity from his background that even most Queen fans didn’t seem to know or care that their favourite rock star was a homosexual Parsi Indian whose birth certificate had him down as Farrokh Bulsara. By the force of his personality and his songs, Freddie Mercury seemed to suspend all speculation concerning his background and sexuality. You could be forgiven for failing to spot the signs if you just listened to the records, but the videos made it clearer. 

Pre­-recorded videotapes were far too expensive to buy, but we had the Video Man, a guy with an upholstered blue nylon anorak and a wiry Gene Wilder comb­over who had posted six stapled­-together sheets of A4 paper with the titles that we could ‘book’ for the fol­lowing weekend. Newly released feature films were £2 to rent, but on the final page there was a selection of music titles which you could rent for £1. For a month, I repeatedly selected Queen’s Greatest Flix – the VHS complement to their massively successful Greatest Hits LP. Every Sunday morning, while Aki and my parents were still in bed, I enjoyed the music in a way that wasn’t possible with just the album. 

With music alone, it’s hard to work out who your favourite member is or to get a handle on the interpersonal dynamic of the band. That was what television and magazines were for. But Queen didn’t seem to figure much in the magazines that Aki and I used to buy. In my head, they were a logo sewn onto a denim jacket next to Status Quo and Saxon. I had needed to file Queen somewhere, and so I had filed them under heavy rock, subconsciously viewing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Under Pressure’ as mere aberrations. 

But you couldn’t watch all of Queen’s videos back-­to-­back and continue to hold that view. They were at least as much pop as rock. Their use of multi-tracked harmonies was outrageous. On ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘You’re My Best Friend’, there was absolutely no attempt to create something that could be replicated live. Even choirs didn’t sound like this, because a hundred individual voices couldn’t sound like this. By multiplying the same three­ or four-­part harmonies dozens of times over, the effect was to create a noise of such density that it felt like it might break apart in mid­-flight. Hearing the rest of Queen swoop in to fill the space around their singer was an early form of augmented reality, as startling in its way as seeing cartoon birds fly out of a tree or waking up to see two animated feet poking out of the duvet. The studio-­based videos of ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘You’re My Best Friend’ seemed to authenticate the sentiments of songs that hymned the glories of tenderness and companionship. Here were four grown men being soft around each other, close­-huddling around overhead mics, separated only by the cotton of their shirts. Their hair was long, their body language bordering on effete. This was a vision of male adult friendship I had never seen before; a version of manliness in which, alone in my front room on a Sunday morning, I had become a vicarious participant. 

Even the rock songs seemed to draw from a different well than those written by other rockers. Queen’s camp theatricality wasn’t a smokescreen; it wasn’t an ironic device to keep you at a distance. It was quite the reverse. It was as if, while you were asleep, someone had installed an emotional subwoofer inside you. ‘Save Me’ amplified the sadness of separation to near­-apocalyptic proportions and, of course, the results were breathtaking. There’s a chunk of a boy’s psyche that corresponds closely to the way Queen records work. ‘We Are the Champions’ was a supersized version of the playground chant – nyer- nyer-nyer-nerrr-nerrr! – deployed by boys when taunting other boys. Because Queen found it impossible to scale down, ‘Save Me’ was an emotional inversion of ‘We Are the Champions’. The ingredients were the same, but the result was not. It was as though the vast sonic soufflé of the latter had collapsed under its own weight. 

To be able to watch Freddie Mercury as I listened to him was, at times, a source of mild torment. How do you get to be like that? How do you become so unafraid of the reactions of those around you that you can write and inhabit a song like ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’? How do you get that brave? How do you stop caring? When he sang, ‘I’m a rocket ship on my way to Mars on a collision course’, he sounded excited about the fact. Stuck with a bunch of friends who seemed to think I was something other than what I was; guilty about growing up British in a Greek family; terrified of change; terrified of its opposite; terrified of scrutiny; bewildered by my own body; avoiding the cracks in the pavement because that was the only thing left to control. I was also a rocket ship on my way to Mars on a collision course. And it frightened me. 

This is an extract from Broken Greek, which is published by Quercus. For more details: https://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/titles/pete-paphides-2/broken-greek/9781529404425/

Pete will be live in conversation with Auriel Majumdar at 7.30pm on Sunday October 18 as part of the Off The Shelf literary festival. For more details: https://www.offtheshelf.org.uk/event/broken-greek-pete-paphides/