Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

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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. 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! 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). 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.

Broken Greek by Pete Paphides, review: a music memoir that Broken Greek by Pete Paphides, review: a music memoir that

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

Santa Esmeralda: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1977)

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. 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. BBC Inside Science — Should the public wear face masks? Did SARS-Cov-2 escape from a laboratory in Wuhan?

Pete Paphides interview: ‘Confessing my early music Pete Paphides interview: ‘Confessing my early music

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. 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. Then there’s your fixation with Abba. I found your description of them as almost proxy parents moving and hilarious in equal parts.

Never have the trials and tribulations of growing up and the human need for a sense of belonging been so heart-breakingly and humorously depicted.