Most Queen fans didn’t seem to know or care that their favourite rock star was a homosexual Parsi Indian

All these years later, it isn’t difficult to see what the young George Michael might have seen in Freddie Mercury. Even if George had yet to untangle his own sexuality, he would have seen in Freddie plenty to help him map his own route to pop stardom. Here was a singer in a band who had so totally detached his identity from his background that even most Queen fans didn’t seem to know or care that their favourite rock star was a homosexual Parsi Indian whose birth certificate had him down as Farrokh Bulsara. By the force of his personality and his songs, Freddie Mercury seemed to suspend all speculation concerning his background and sexuality. You could be forgiven for failing to spot the signs if you just listened to the records, but the videos made it clearer. 

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 7,949

It was like a medley of best bits from standards that had somehow eluded our ears prior to this point

Even without seeing what they looked like, it seemed immediately shocking to me that, in 1982, you could have a hit as big as that with a record that sounded like that, with violins and mandolins at its centre. But then, how could it have been anything other than a hit? Everything on ‘Come On Eileen’ was a hook. It was like a medley of best bits from standards that had somehow eluded our ears prior to this point. Even the intro gave you twice as much as you were expecting, with one hook, played mostly on violins, in the first twenty seconds, giving way to a second more urgent earworm which introduced the piano and mandolins. 

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 7,323

They talked about innovation and originality, as though these qualities were determinants of listenability

People who remembered them from before seemed more enthused about the old stuff than their current run of singles. They talked about innovation and originality, as though these qualities were determinants of listenability. About a year later, I’d finally get to see and hear what it was about early Roxy Music that got people excited. As the closing credits of Mike Read’s Pop Quiz rolled, Roxy Music’s Top of the Pops performance of ‘Virginia Plain’ revealed a confusion of androgynous aliens marauding into uncharted territory on their sequinned sonic steamroller. Bryan Ferry’s hair was longer and his eyelids were brushed with something shiny. He wore the collar of his black top up and his pointy shoulders gave him a camp, vampiric air – a hypercaffeinated younger brother to the casually coutured ghost who fronted Roxy Mk 2: Heathcliff dressed by Antony Price.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 3,849

The opening line is the giveaway. I don’t wanna talk

The speed with which ABBA released ‘The Winner Takes It All’ was telling – just seven weeks between conception and release – suggesting that everything to do with the song had been part of a single sustained act of catharsis. And nowhere was that more apparent than in the lyrics themselves.

The opening line is the giveaway. I don’t wanna talk

When a song begins with those four words, you know the protagonist is going to do quite a lot of talking. About things we’ve gone through And now we know what she’s going to talk about. Even at the age of eleven, listening to the song for the first time in the car with my dad, I can dimly recall a sense that things were about to get messy.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 3,698

A park full of ex-punks spontaneously started dancing to the ABBA song

In 1997, when the Sex Pistols marked the twentieth anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks with a reunion show in Finsbury Park, they decided to walk on stage to ‘Dancing Queen’, the idea being that the song would come to an abrupt halt when the Pistols appeared, as if to remind people about the bland MOR dreck they blew away on their arrival. The problem was that, twenty years on, all the battle lines had long been erased. A park full of ex-punks spontaneously started dancing to the ABBA song.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 2,227

Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song

Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song. Four centuries of Ottoman rule prior to the twentieth century would be enough to see to that, although we Greeks hardly needed any encouragement. Even at the peak of Greek civilisation 2,500 years ago, when things were going pretty well for us, we still made time to invent Greek tragedy.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 889

When I say they don’t write children’s television music like they used to, I mean that they literally don’t

When I say they don’t write children’s television music like they used to, I mean that they literally don’t. The songs we were exposed to were a marriage of convenience between, on the one hand, avant-garde library musicians, left-leaning folk enthusiasts and experimentally-minded classical musicians, and on the other, the commissioning editors who enlisted their services.

....

Even if Freddie Philips – who believed that children should be raised on a diet of Boulez and Stravinsky – reined in his avant-garde instincts for his Trumpton and Camberwick Green music, others didn’t feel the need to try. Vernon Elliott’s music for The Clangers catapulted me to worlds which depicted outer space as a place where tiny curiosities happened against a backdrop of vast emptiness. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so different to the brief Elliott set himself in evoking rural Wales for his music in Ivor the Engine.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 509 and 644

Whole Streets seem’d to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their Inhabitants

It seem’d enough that all the Remedies of that Kind had been used till they were found fruitless, and that the Plague spread itself with an irresistible Fury, so that, as the Fire the succeeding Year, spread itself and burnt with such Violence, that the Citizens in Despair, gave over their Endeavours to extinguish it, so in the Plague, it came at last to such Violence that the People sat still looking at one another and seem’d quite abandon’d to Despair; whole Streets seem’d to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their Inhabitants; Doors were left open, Windows stood shattering with the Wind in empty Houses, for want of People to shut them: In a Word, People began to give up themselves to their Fears, and to think that all regulations and Methods were in vain, and that there was nothing to be hoped for, but an universal Desolation;

D. Defoe, A journal of the plague year (1722), 152

Once again, she had traveled thousands of miles, crossed oceans and continents, only to find herself back at the beginning

But here there was only sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I [Rose Wilder Lane] felt a part of it, empty myself; there was a moment in which I was nothing at all—almost nothing at all. The only thing left in me was Albania. I said, I want to go back to Albania. She did not appear to recognize it, but her description matched, detail for detail, another high plain under a vast sky, another prairie covered with brittle grass, far to the west. Once again, she had traveled thousands of miles, crossed oceans and continents, only to find herself back at the beginning.

C. Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2016), 278

Fraser's biography of Ingalls Wilder is in large part a double biography of her daughter also. Those parts are simultaneously frustrating and achingly sad.

You have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were

“Often, if you want to write about women in history,” the novelist Hilary Mantel has said, “you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.” But when it comes to Wilder, we don’t have to pretend. 

...

That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier. But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind.

C. Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2016), 5 and 28

Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac

The individualistic, artisanal quality of the French baffled the men Paul called the “Marshall Plan hustlers” from the U.S.A. When American experts began making “helpful” suggestions about how the French could “increase productivity and profits,” the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.”

J. Child, My life in France (2006), loc. 1,441

I am for the Established Church. ... And if you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too!

Edward Thurlow, the crusty Lord Chancellor under George III, thus addressed himself to a deputation of Nonconformists:

I'm against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other church , but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too!

The Reverend Sydney Smith showed the same spirit. On his deathbed he complained of being so weak that 'I verily believe, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have the strength or energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.'

C. Elliott, 'Great gossips', Slightly Foxed 64 (2019), 75

 

Strangely, for a work of fiction, it has explanatory footnotes

If you'd like a taster of Fanny [Craddock]'s novels, I recommend The Lormes of Castle Rising (1975), the first of her grand country-house saga, larded with lashings of below-stairs goings-on - all very Downton. And strangely, for a work of fiction, it has explanatory footnotes, in case you don't know your Rognons en Brochette from your Mousseline de Soie. It's as though Fanny, as a novelist, wasn't sure whether she wanted to be upstairs huntin', shootin' and eatin', or in the kitchen directing ops. 

L. Graham, 'The Fanny factor', Slightly Foxed 64 (2019), 35

What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers

There are, of course, just as many leaders as there have always been. What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers. The generations that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century lost trust in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of the Catholic bishops to the degrees of the Freemasons to the stature of federal representatives. There haven't been any new LBJs because the whole notion of leadership has changed - and the whole shape of democracy is changing

B. Bishop, The big sort (2008), 298-9