The morning was still cool when I arrived at the Place de la Constitution, the start and finish of a 21-day declaration of love. I waved to the Gëlle Fra and stopped for a minute to take a deep breath. My adventure was beginning there and I was now aware of the responsibility I was carrying. Suddenly I realised that everything was silent. After the binge of the day before, the capital was now offering me a rare moment of tranquillity. Not bad for the beginning of an epic journey. Then, I found myself thinking about the music of the country. What is the soundtrack that makes this land and these people dance? What music explains Luxembourg?
I resisted the temptation to put on my earphones. As I got further away from the city, the noise of cars and airplanes was replaced by the sound of birds. They had different chirps depending on the landscape - deeper in the grain fields between Cessange and Leudelange, more like a sing-song in the woods around Bettembourg, Fennange and Noertzange. And from there to Dudelange I entered the urban fabric of the south, where the noises were more industrial and rhythmic. More repetitive.
On the way I bumped into Fabienne Dimmer, who is and has lived in Dudelange for 50 years and has 34 years of experience in organising concerts. She is now the stage manager of concert hall den Atelier - and the afternoon she met me she was exhausted from organising Siren's Call, the festival that brings Phoenix to Neumünster Abbey tonight.
"Well, I started setting stages for music festivals when I was 16, and in my life I've prepared thousands of shows,” she said. “From concerts for 300 people at the Rotondes to Rammstein, which 80,000 people attended in 2019. And I can tell you one thing, the music scene in Luxembourg has completely changed."
Thirty years ago the country's music scene was practically non-existent, she said. "There was traditional folklore, of course, and there were occasional concerts and artists,” Dimmer explained. “But in the early 1990s a completely new dynamic began, coming from the south of the country. You can't talk about music in Luxembourg without talking about Dudelange. It is the heart of change.”
Dimmer walks towards the town's water tower, where only a few weeks ago the second edition of the Usina festival was celebrated. "It's been like that since the beginning. It was in Dudelange that the Fête de la Musique began 30 years ago. When we started it had one stage, today it has 14 - and then it spread to the whole country. With the advent of that, new bands started forming here, and rock music invaded the Minett landscape."
Her theory is rockabilly. "The south of the country first produced a punk movement, then a pretty strong rock'n'roll, and now there's a new hip-hop movement sung in Luxembourgish,” she added. “But notice: it's always the protest, the cry of revolt, and the strong, cadenced rhythm. And this comes from the working classes, from the children of the factory workers, from a certain dissatisfaction that still exists in the country, even if it is the richest in the world.”
She admits that there is an old jazz wave and that the Luxembourg spirit is to gather people of all backgrounds around a piano and pound out songs in chorus - "because that is our cultural tradition." But if Luxembourg has a sound, then it has beat and it might well have guitar playing, it has sharp words and a critical spirit. And it comes, probably, from Dudelange.