Growing up in Birmingham with Greek-Cypriot immigrant parents, Paphides is caught between two cultures. His parents have a relentlessly attritional existence running a chip shop, while trying and largely failing to assimilate to life in the UK. His father, in particular, an almost stereotypically repressed Mediterranean male, is desperate to return to Cyprus. Pete, feeling more British than Greek, desperately searches for an identity that accommodates both his own emerging, modern desires and those of his traditionalist parents. The principal of St Michael's, Tim Kelleher, said the school community is "absolutely devastated" over the deaths. 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.

Broken Greek is like being in the presence of an Broken Greek is like being in the presence of an

Like so many groups who rose to fame with the 60s beat boom, The Hollies needed to survive by adapting. Of course, The Bee Gees managed to do that with spectacular results. And The Hollies? Well, comparing their 1977 album Russian Roulette and Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever songs is like comparing Studio 54 to singles night at Manchester Rotters. The legend of the former precedes it to such a degree that you can almost convince yourself you’ve been there. But The Hollies’ take on disco evokes a more elusive innocent segment of pop-cultural history. 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”.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? It's exactly the nightmare that every parent dreads when group holidays and big groups of children go away. The book offers plenty of side dishes and B-sides: British class and racial history; the popularity of Blue Riband biscuits, a Proustian madeleine for anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s; the arrival of Pot Noodles, Channel 4 and VHS. (I am of a different generation, but can relate to taping songs off the radio and using gates as football goals.) BBC Inside Science — Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan?

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Waterstones

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. 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.” The sense that other people suffered the same hang-ups has been a revelation to me. Even today I got a tweet from someone who said they had a fear of being near tall buildings. She wanted to know if it still ever manifests itself in me. I’m 50 now so it feels like less of a gamble to go on the record with some of this stuff. If certain things happened to me, they must have happened to other people too. We’re scared a lot of the time when we’re little and it’s something you don’t want to admit, especially when you have children of your own. Some of it might seem trivial, but some of it might be psychically quite impactful. You know, it could be little Jimmy Osmond or it could be an emu. I mention not knowing the difference between Freddie Starr and Fred Astaire, but why would you? You don’t know anything! 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. 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.

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.

Broken Greek: a striking memoir of Pete Paphidesâ?Ts Broken Greek: a striking memoir of

Broken Greek isn’t all about the transcendent joy of discovering new bands. There are flashes of racism; and Paphides’s parents spend much of the time miserable, largely from working themselves too hard – in the case of Victoria, to the point of a hospital stay. But they clearly love their children (even if Dad isn’t always good at showing it) and incidents of kindness and friendship abound, despite economic and marital struggles.Do you sometimes feel like the music you are hearing is explaining your life to you?” he asks early on. Paphides clearly does, and so while he struggles to fit in, and looks up in envy to an older brother already consumed with a bustling social life, he gets lost in music, which he analyses with scientific brio. The parents miss their homeland terribly. That two-month holiday makes them work even harder so that one day they will be prosperous enough to return for good. 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…