 Popular Culture in Britain and Radio Luxembourg
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The Beatles
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In the early 1960s British popular culture emerged from the long winter of postwar austerity, rejvenated by the assertive claims to attention of the young working class. Responding to prime minister Harold Macmillan's 1958 election message, “You've never had it so good”, previously unregarded groups began to demand consumer cultural goods designed specifically for them.
Rock & Roll is often used as a generic term, but its sound is rarely predictable. From the outset, when the early rockers merged country and blues, rock has been defined by its energy, rebellion and catchy hooks, but as the genre aged, it began to shed those very characteristics, placing equal emphasis on craftmanship and pushing the boundaries of the music. Just as rock `n' roll had provided a commodity around which the American teenage market could be defined in the 1950s, the Mersey Beat - a raucous and driving form of rock that emerged from Liverpool in 1962-63 - signaled the arrival of the young British consumer as a commercial cultural force.
But, as so often it Britain, their arrival was touched with class division. To be young, affluent and rebellious was not enough. As John Lennon later put it, “A working-class hero is something to be” Unexpectedly, this new kind of British cultural artefact proved highly exportable, and provided a major stimulus to popular culture all over the world. Superfically at least, the radicalizing effects of rock `n' roll seemed to have worn thin by 1960. Bland American “high school” sounds predominated. Britain's own Elvis clones, such as Cliff Richard, had turned into entertainers for all the family, while its imitation Sinatras continued to prosper both on records and on the airwaves.
'The Rolling Stones are arguably the biggest rock'n'roll band in the world so to secure a performance from them is amazing. The Stones, who first formed in 1961, August 31, and played their first ever gig outside England in 1963 at the Royal Lido Ballroom in Prestatyn. And although the four remaining members - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood - are now all around 60, they say they are still enjoying performing live.
'We do enjoy ourselves doing it. Everyone has been saying how can they enjoy themselves, they should be bored to death doing this,' Jagger said, in an interview from Dallas, Texas. 'If we were bored to death, we would not be doing it.'
The advertisement for the August 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair promised the appearance of more than twenty performers, including Joan Baez, the Who, Arlo Guthrie, Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix. As the personification of hippiedom, Woodstock--actually held at Bethel, New York--was the most successful counterculture event. In 1969, during the three-day rock festival at Woodstock, performers such as Arlo Guthrie pleaded with Customs agents not to confiscate his drugs, Jimi Hendrix rendered what the establishment probably regarded as a blasphemous interpretation of the "Star Spangled Banner" on his electric guitar, and Country Joe McDonald's cynical claim that he didn't give a damn about Vietnam, offended the patriotic silent majority.
Radio Luxembourg and "Pirate Stations"
Through this apparent decline was due in part to a moral and/or cultural backlash, it had much to do with ingrained aspects of national life and character. One of these was a readiness to live with maiden “Auntie” BBC's paternalism. British record companies were content - if not enthusiastic - to sell rock `n' roll, but BBC resistance severely restricted airplay.
The only alternative - the commercial radio station Radio Luxembourg, broadcast from mainland Europe - was very popular with teenagers (especially at 11 pm on a Sunday night for the Top 20), but that popularity did not translate itself into wholesale dissatisfaction with the BBC's music policy until 1964, when a rash of “ pirate stations” broke out, broadcasting unlicensed from ships moored just outside territorial waters. The pirates introduced an American style of disk jockey to an enthusiastic British audience.
Beneath the surface there was an unprecedented amount of popular musical activity. The steadily increasing popularity of the dance-hall as a venue for “sweet Saturday night” created a demand for bands at a local level. The existence of such bands was in large measure the product of a short-lived skiffle bom. This hybrid of American blues and folk music and British music hall was an offshoot of the fashion for traditional jazz (“trad”) of the mid-and late fifties. It had three important consequences: it gave a considerable push to the evolving process of musical “democratization”; it raised the guitar to preeminence; and it introduced a direct link to the roots of black American music.
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1960 - 1973
