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Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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.” 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. You just don't want to get the call to say your child is missing, but two of our families have had that call and we are devastated for them and our hearts are broken and our sympathy goes to them all."

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

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)

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”. 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 principal of St Michael's, Tim Kelleher, said the school community is "absolutely devastated" over the deaths.

Broken Plate Greek Restaurant YYC - Calgary, AB | OpenTable Broken Plate Greek Restaurant YYC - Calgary, AB | OpenTable

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. 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… Many of their friends are out there in Ios and it’s a very, very difficult time for them now, and we’d just ask them to look after each other over the next number of days," Mr Martin told RTÉ. 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?Post-mortem examinations are to be carried out on Tuesday on two teenagers from Dublin who died on the Greek island of Ios. Once availed of these facts, listen to it and it’s like you’re listening to the saddest Wombles song of all time. Judging by the response on social media, Broken Greek has really touched a nerve. You have become, to use the vernacular, a legend. Heartfelt, hilarious and beautifully written, Broken Greek is a childhood memoir like no other’– Cathy Newman Composer Horace Ott came up with the melody and chorus lyric of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood in 1964 after falling out with his wife-to-be Gloria Caldwell. Within a year, that argument had resulted in a song with which both Nina Simone and The Animals enjoyed huge success ( in 1986, Elvis Costello recorded a nice version too).

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Book review | The TLS Broken Greek by Pete Paphides | Book review | The TLS

I ADORE this utterly wonderful coming-of-age memoir. Joyful, clever, and a bit heartbreaking’– Nina Stibbe 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. 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.”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. As if to prove their own point about the power of the human will, Teach-In task themselves with the challenge of singing lyrics that lapse into unabashed nonsense as if their world depended on it (which, on the night it won them the Eurovision Song Contest, it sort of did).

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