Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. 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. 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) Post-mortem examinations are to be carried out on Tuesday on two teenagers from Dublin who died on the Greek island of Ios. 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.”

Pete Paphides General 1 — Pete Paphides

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… 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. Braised short rib romanoff. Braised short ribs, shallots, garlic, green pepper corn, vodka, tomato sauce cream Pete’s sensitivity certainly wasn’t inherited from his father. When Victoria has to go into hospital her husband, a typically macho Mediterranean, can’t even manage to hoover the carpet. Expecting him to do even the simplest household chores is like “expecting a guide dog to round up sheep”. As Paphides deftly records, the closest Chris can get to telling his wife he loves her is to admit that he needs her.

How to say broken in Greek - WordHippo How to say broken in Greek - WordHippo

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”.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. 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.

Pete Paphides

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? 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.I was surprised how much I missed the world you describe in Broken Greek . Inevitably, it seems like a more innocent time.

Broken Greek: WINNER OF THE RSL CHRISTOPHER BLAND PRIZE 2021

Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy Newman 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.” 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. 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.

So wonderfully written, such a light touch. Drenched in sentiment yet not in the least sentimental’– John Niven Golden beets, grilled artichokes, figs, feta, green leaves, red onions, balsamic and parthena olive oil dressing All the below items are served with your choice of: Lemon Potatoes | Greek Fries | Avgolemono Soup | Feature Soup | Greek Salad Which two things connect Greek Cypriot immigrants Stavros Georgiou, Kyriacos Panayiotou and Christakis Paphides? Cherry tomatoes, mixed greens, cucumbers, red onions, peppers, olives, feta, cucumber & parthena olive oil dressing