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.

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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