Until he discovered pop music, life was all Greek to Pete Paphides

Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve out their own space. If you like X you can’t like Y. Punk and post-punk sharpened the divisions. I couldn’t stand Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity for a number of reasons, but it wasn’t helped by its older-brother’s snotty dismissal of pretty much everything that came after 1977, unless it was the latest record by some dinosaur which punk’s meteorite had somehow failed to wipe out. The film was much, much better in this respect.

Pete Paphides, born in 1969, had an older brother, called Aki: and Aki’s tastes are much more orthodox than young Pete’s (or Takis’s, as his family nickname was when he was younger). Aki can go through his younger brother’s collection and give verdicts at a glance; young Takis/Pete, having to deal with punk at a very tender age, doesn’t quite have this confidence. He knows what he likes, but there’s no aesthetic rigour, none of the Leavisite sternness about what is and isn’t acceptable — which is why he’s such a good music critic.

This is the story of a young boy growing up in Birmingham, with a Greek mother and Greek-Cypriot father. They run a series of fish-and-chip shops, but his mother makes proper Greek food for the family. His parents yearn to return to Cyprus; but Pete is growing up English, and when he speaks Greek he has to fill in the gaps with English words. For some years he doesn’t say anything at all, except to his immediate family. He has to stop being Takis, and start being Pete. This is one of the two strands of this excellent book. The other is his love of pop music, and his articulation of that love.