Broken Greek - A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

By Pete Paphides

Published by Quercus

Vosene shampoo, B-side Abba songs, iron-sprung Pullman carriages, BT’s Dial-a-Disc, Rediffusion rentals and Kenny Everett — this is the stuff of every gen X or baby boomer’s youth. Those desperate for a distraction from today’s world can find 585 pages of such 1970s/80s memories in the music journalist Pete Paphides’s autobiography, Broken Greek.

And yet this is not purely another pop culture nostalgia fest. What sets it apart is that it is seen through the eyes of a child.The memoir opens with Paphides as the seven-year-old son of Greek Cypriot immigrants whose dream of a better life has them frying fish six days a week in a Birmingham suburb. He and his elder brother are left to navigate their conflicting cultures by the only means possible — music and television.

Paphides is riddled with insecurities and phobias, including only speaking to his family between the ages of four and seven, and embraces British pop culture to educate himself “when parents have no parenting left in them”.“All the music I liked was performed by people who might feasibly step in and take care of me if something happened to my parents,” he writes. Lynsey de Paul, Kiki Dee and Sting were contenders. His own SOS to the world would have said he couldn’t see himself “ever turning into the adult my parents expected me to become”.

In the meantime Top of the Pops became his ITN News at Ten. He learnt about Elvis only when his death in 1977 propelled him to No 1. The unemployment crisis of the early 1980s? The Specials’ hit Ghost Town told the story. Abba’s lyrics taught him about broken marriages and the Scottish pop band Orange Juice about love.At times it feels a blokey tome — the minutiae of Garry Birtles’s 1980 signing to Manchester United will not suit all — but Paphides’s voice is at its richest on the universal subject of surviving family life. He inherited his huge heart from his mother, Victoria, and this book is as much a paean to her sacrifices as it is to the power of music.It’s also funny.

The evening he drags his dad to meet his heroes the Barron Knights and a four-hour bus trip with three older girls discussing the merits of Duran Duran’s John Taylor are worthy of the cover price alone. Mostly its appeal lies in Paphides’s guileless musings on life. Aged only 13 when the memoir ends, he writes: “If you had love inside you and you felt you could decant it into somebody on a daily basis, how could you screw it up?” Lucky Caitlin Moran, the Times columnist and his adored wife of 21 years, although Paphides is now a clear competitor to her. Is there a more perfect way to describe a child’s memory of British weather than this? “It was one of those weatherless days: no sun, no rain, no visible clouds, yet no clear sky.” Or youthful bodies? “Her torso was flat and bendy like one of those fruit bars that middle-class parents give to their children.”

If you have ever spent “a rainy Wednesday in a small Welsh market town, just after half-day closing” and found solace in a song, you will relish this book. Ideally to be read on a Parker Knoll recliner.