ABSTRACT
The Luxembourg listening experience was, in short, deeply British (the hardest aspect of our pop sensibility to explain to Americans). Its ‘illicitness’ was defined against the BBC notion of youth music, and it offered rock’n'roll as a secret that could be devoured under the blankets of a middle-class bedroom (for me Brylcreem and acne cures were every bit as exotic as Elvis Presley himself). I knew my parents had no idea that this music even existed (it was years later that I realized that they had used Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie themselves, before the war) but I had no clear sense of why it was, anyway, floating somewhere above the house, available but always liable to fade away, to burst into dangerous volume, to be overlaid with the indistinct gabbling of foreign tongues. (I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a generation of British rock fans who still listen to music as if we were overhearing it, taking part in someone else’s conversation which might, at any moment, be cut off.) I suppose this was the Americanization of youth culture, the way Richard Hoggart et al. agonized at the time, but, as a vicarious experience, it felt like something else: we were somehow sharing the post-war European sense of being occupied.
