Guess some of us are inescapably romantics.
I think I have this thing for swamp pop because it reminds me of a US childhood I never had, though living in India at the end of the war exposed me to US pop culture via the cars (mainly American - the ones you'd want to remember; Britain's Standard Vanguard, anyone? Didn't think so.) and the magazines, too, were all American. Silver Screen, Photoplay, the musings of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchel were all there - as were the movies. Life, Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Sports were there... music came from Radio SEAC, a U.K. military station out of Columbo, Ceylon; when the Brits left it became Radio Ceylon, and like Radio Luxembourg which reached parts of Britain at night, if the atmospherics permitted, the music was predominantly to suit the sales aspirations of the US record industry. Britain's David Jacobs first graced my ears over that station long before I heard him again in Britain.
We could sometimes (in Scotland) pick up on AFN from Germany - the US forces radio network. The UK's BBC couldn't compete because of the domestic music unions... what else was new there at the time? You had to have had to listen to English pop to know what it was during the early, pre-rock'n'roll years. Elvis and Bill Haley changed the rules overnight back in the mid-50s, and Radio Caroline, (on 199), the first of the pirate ships I heard during the 60s was to be followed by a copycat one in Scotland, too. Kept me awake through many a desperate night in the darkroom, hands frozen from the water in the washer. Yeah, them wuz the days - I think.
When I was in boarding school, a couple of us would sneak into the local (the only?) cinema in Ooty - Assembly Rooms, it was called, for some reason never questioned at the time. As the school was run by Baptists and assorted fundamentalists, going to movies was both rite of passage and challenge to mental tyranny of the most oppressive and corrupting kind. Getting caught would have certainly earned us six kisses from the cane and almost as surely, expulsion. Perhaps that latter was a subliminally sought route for escape; perhaps we wanted to get caught. I have sometimes thought that my ultimate transition, when back in the UK and older, into model photography was a rebellion against years past, a kind of levelling of the score, if you will. Perhaps, in a very roundabout way, I owe those bigots my career. So, not all a bad deal then.
In retrospect, one can only smile at it all and ponder the illusions and travails that beset us all in life.
Rob