took place in the 1960s and is thus the one that attracts the most attention by music journalists. She told The Independent in 1996: "Most people don't really know me artistically. The proof is always having to talk about the Sixties and the Beatles." Her earliest musical tastes were French chanson singers—including Cora Vaucaire, Georges Guétary, Charles Trenet and Jacques Brel—since in the 1950s it was the only music played on the radio. She has expressed that Trenet "touches [her] more than the others because his music is sad and light". Hardy was also a big fan of singer and songwriter Barbara, who inspired her to write her own compositions. In the early 1960s, she was introduced to English-language rock and roll and Brill Building pop through Radio Luxembourg, receiving inspiration from artists such as Brenda Lee, the Everly Brothers, the Shadows, Cliff Richard, Neil Sedaka, Connie Francis, and especially, Elvis Presley and Paul Anka. Hardy felt "completely spellbound" by these foreign young artists and began to sing and play the guitar to try to imitate them. She recalled in 2008: "I immediately identified with them, because they expressed teenage loneliness and awkwardness over melodies that were much more inspiring than their texts". Although she is regarded as one of the greatest exponents of the yé-yé pop phenomenon of the early-to-mid 1960s, she was set apart from her peers by writing much of her own material, which allowed her songs to be "devoid of older, male sexualization or control, a privilege not many others of her era enjoyed." She also distanced herself from the other yé-yé singers by "eschewing the easy road of sunny, good girl pop". According to Jean-Marie Périer: "She was the opposite of all the French new artists trying to look and sound American. And her melodies were sad, she didn't try to make them dance the twist." Aside from original compositions, much of her 1960s repertoire consisted of versions of foreign artists that spanned a wide range of styles, including American girl-groups, early rockabilly, pre-Beatles British rock and roll, country music, folk, folk-rock and, to a lesser extent, doo-wop and soul. Her rockabilly-tinged full-length debut Tous les garçons et les filles is the closest she was to the yé-yé genre and its noted for its simplicity, featuring minimalist accompaniment of acoustic and electric guitar, bass and jazz-influenced percussion. Robert Ham of Paste felt that the album