pete paphides 533 For the first time, almost all of my favourite bands were past entities. It bothered me that bands split up, but then all change bothered me. How do people change and not mind the scrutiny that comes with it? How can they leave the house and ride out the risk of ridicule or failure? In the case of ABBA, Japan and The Teardrop Explodes, there hadn’t really been a choice. These groups simply couldn’t continue. But with the Jam, it was different. I’d never seen anyone control the narrative like Paul Weller did. It seemed almost incomprehensible to me that you might sacrifice perhaps three or four more years of success in order to ensure that when the time came to end it, you ended it when your stock was at its highest. And not only that, but when you did, you did so by explaining your reasons in the words of your farewell single. All the things that I care about (are packed into one punch) All the things that I’m not sure about (are sorted out at once) In keeping with this emphatic gesture of self­determination, the Top of the Pops performance of ‘Beat Surrender’ saw Weller even go to the trouble of reconfiguring the way his group presented them­ selves. With more than a nod to the set­up of sixties pop shows such as Ready Steady Go!, Weller dispensed with his guitar and stood on a platform at the back of the stage. Beside him was the first signing to his new label Respond, wedge­haired seventeen­year­old school­ girl Tracie, whose vocal was as high in the mix as his own. In front of him, slightly lower down, were his bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler. Foxton had made no secret of the fact that Weller’s decision to break up the band had left him in shock. Look at the footage now and it’s heartbreaking to see Foxton, his loyal lieutenant, savouring the dying days of a period of his life he must have known he wouldn’t better. 9781529404432_Broken Greek ­ 8th proofs.indd 533 23/01/2020 12:19:13 534 broken greek And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names I didn’t see much of myself in Weller – that was what was so awe­inspiring about him. I saw far too much of myself in Foxton. If I’d been in the Jam, I would have been the one begging him to give it just a couple more years. I would have been the one confiding my sorrows to the Smash Hits journalist. In 1993, when Foxton was interviewed by Select magazine, he lamented the fact that Weller had stopped returning his Christmas cards. A few years after that, he formed his own Jam tribute band, From the Jam. You could somehow extrapolate from that first Top of the Pops of December 1982 that this would be what fate had in store for everyone involved. Between Weller’s serene, half­smiling delivery and Foxton’s frantically com­ mitted performance the script appeared to have already been written. The thing to remember about Top of the Pops was that it wasn’t a slick production. There was very little directorial instruction from the people who make the show. The impression you made on Top of the Pops was down to how much you prepared for it. Given that you were being piped straight into over ten million homes, it was crazy that most bands didn’t give this a second thought. But there was another group who had prepared their performance as meticulously as the Jam. However, this wasn’t a grand farewell gesture. It was the very opposite. In his memoir, Black Vinyl White Powder, Simon Napier­Bell – who later went on to manage Wham! – recalled seeing George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s prime­time TV debut: ‘When Wham! came on to do “Young Guns”, they com­ pletely changed the way the programme looked. It was as if they’d rehearsed with the TV crew for days.’ It was also the first time my dad had taken an interest in Top of the Pops and, indeed, any pop music since his unpleasant encounter with ABBA’s The Visitors. 9781529404432_Broken Greek ­ 8th proofs.indd 534 23/01/2020 12:19:14 pete paphides 535 ‘You should record Top of the Pops so your mother can see it,’ he declared gnomically. ‘Why would my mum want to see Top of the Pops?’ I replied. ‘They’ve got a Cypriot singer on there tonight. Yiorgos.’ Yiorgos?! There was no Yiorgos in the chart. I knew every record in the top 40, and there was no way I would have forgotten a Yiorgos. I patronisingly informed my dad that his information was poor. Or perhaps someone had played a joke on him. But he wasn’t having any of it. His friend Stratis, who owned a chip shop in Tottenham, knew Yiorgos’s dad personally. The way my dad was carrying on, you’d have thought he’d known Yiorgos’s dad personally too. ‘His father is from Patriki,’ he told me, as if this might mean anything to me. ‘Whose father?’ ‘Yiorgos,’ he said. ‘Yiorgos, the singer?’ ‘That’s right. Patriki in Famagusta. Yiorgos’s father moved over here and opened a restaurant in Watford.’ ‘So Yiorgos’s father is a friend of yours?’ ‘Kyriacos?’ ‘Is that what he’s called?’ ‘Yes. Kyriacos Panayiotou. Of Patriki.’ ‘You know him?’ ‘Well, I’ll almost certainly know some of his family.’ ‘Right. Well, anyway, I think you’ve made a mistake. There’s no Yiorgos on Top of the Pops.’ I showed him that day’s Evening Mail with a full list of the artists performing on that night’s show. ‘See? Where does it say Yiorgos?’ My dad took the paper into the hallway where the phone lived and started dialling Stratis’s shop in Tottenham. What was already becoming a tortuous and seemingly pointless process became even more protracted when someone who wasn’t Stratis answered the 9781529404432_Broken Greek ­ 8th proofs.indd 535 23/01/2020 12:19:14 536 broken greek phone. Stratis had gone home, presumably to watch Yiorgos the son of Kyriacos from Patriki on TV, leaving someone who was: (a) British; and (b) unaware of the Yiorgos thing to run the shop and answer the phone. All I could hear from the living room was my dad’s voice booming, ‘It’s Chris! Tell him it’s Chris from Birmingham! He’s . pardon me? Oh. Yes. Yes, please. Do I want Stratis to call me back? Yes. Tell him it’s an emergency!’ Tomorrow’s World was coming to an end. Top of the Pops was maybe two minutes away, and all we knew for sure about Yiorgos the singer was that he was the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. It was still far from clear whether Yiorgos the singer would be on tonight’s Top of the Pops and, if so, in what capacity. However, as instructed, I pressed ‘play’ and ‘record’. As I did so, the phone rang. It was Stratis – Stratis who was friends with Yiorgos’s father, Kyriacos from Patriki. The call lasted half a minute at the most. There was no time to spare now. ‘TAKI, IT’S JUAN! IT’S GEORGE MICHAEL AND JUAN!’ I was sure that George Michael and Juan were no more a presence in the top 40 than Yiorgos, the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. But, as it turns out, I was wrong and my dad was right. ‘Oh, Wham! Wham!’ So, Yiorgos was George Michael and George Michael was one of our lot. Simon Napier­Bell had been right. These guys had left nothing to chance. They cared far more about wowing you with their crisp dance moves than pretending to play their instruments. The gene pool from which George Michael had grown would have been enough to make my dad take proprietorial pride in the success of Wham! But the look sealed it for him. With the slicked back quiff, it was as though George had taken a picture of the young Chris Paphides to the hairdresser. And the combo of leather waistcoat and jeans merely completed the comfortable familiarity of George’s look. As the performance 9781529404432_Broken Greek ­ 8th proofs.indd 536 23/01/2020 12:19:14 pete paphides 537 finished, the on­screen graphics flashed up to tell you what you’d just seen. My dad instinctively ignored them. In his mind, there was no Wham! – only Yiorgos, the son of Kyriacos from Patriki. George’s Greekness had the immediate effect of getting my back up. He looked like the Greek I knew I could never be. Thin. Handsome. Confident. Masculine. Outgoing. Normal. Successful. Attractive to girls. It took me years to realise that we had more in common than I could have ever imagined. The erstwhile Yiorgos Panayiotou, son of a Greek­Cypriot restaurateur, had been a pudgy teenager with unmanageable curly hair, stuck in the suburbs, using pop music to try and establish for himself the cultural identity that his parents could never truly give him. But if pop music was what gave George Michael his cultural identity, he needed to look elsewhere when it came to establishing a pop star identity. Over time, we all came to realise that the per­ sona he invented for himself in Wham! was that of the other guy in Wham! – Andrew Ridgeley.