Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

For my 100th Nostalgia Interview, it was a massive pleasure to meet Pete Paphides, a music journalist who has written for Melody Maker, Q and Time Out and has been the chief music critic for The Times. Pete’s memoir Broken Greek, with the wonderful sub-title A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Pete also went to Lampeter, where he studied Philosophy from 1989-92, and Pete begins the interview by talking about his fond memories of rainy mornings in Lampeter and the culture shift he experienced from having left the city of Birmingham for one of the smallest campuses in the country. Pete relays his experiences of hearing the sound of sheep at night and we talk about the notion of ‘infinite choice’. Pete tells us about his more recent, very felicitous visit to a shoe shop in Aberaeron and we learn that Pete wrote Broken Greek in coffee shops – and how Lampeter kickstarted the idea of the café as office. Pete talks about his reasons for writing what he calls a ‘confusion memoi