ABSTRACT
France provided a real counterpoint to German classical music, as well as to British. The French were able to come up with something quite avant-garde, quite romantic, beautiful and spacey and this was a real specificity. The popularity of records from the 1950s on changed everything. Before that, every generation still brought a development, in artistic terms, in the concept of music itself. People had been waiting for thirty years for a French group to make it big abroad. Playing to 200 people wasn't easy when, at the same time, in New York or Los Angeles, you're playing in front of thousands of people. All of a sudden English journalists, who'd had enough of what was going on in the UK came to see what was going on in Paris. In fact, French Touch existed already, through the engineers at Airbus and all that. This Channel Tunnel engineering project meant that the TGV brought a continuous stream of journalists over.
