Rock, Punk and Post-Punk in the Czech Republic: a quick and short guide

 Photos and Texts by Gian Paolo Galasi

Prague, the city where I lived for one week as a tourist from 9 to 14 August, is a very small-bourgeois town. It’s full of small and big shops, where you can buy things and, above all, food. At night, from every corner a different music reaches you, creating an overstimulation similar to the one experienced by the so-called ‘flaneurs’ in the Paris of the Nineteenth century. You’re sure to float and never fall, basically. But it’s hard to really feel something.

I avoided the Ghetto of the Jews since I wasn’t in the right mood for everything coming from it, as far as the international situation goes. I wanted to keep my empathy for someone who really deserved it. More suggestive, the block of the alchemists, near the “Lennon Wall”: I love the fact that magic and music are close the one to the other, and I can only imagine that maybe they’re working together for the umanity.

Obviously I got curious about the local music scene, but I was able to find only a small jazz club filled for a couple of nights with some no-one-will-be-hurt fusion, with people cheering with an applause the musician after the end of each solo. Stuff like that. Even the most interesting record shops, like Maximum Underground, were not furnished with records from local bands (apart from heavy metal, but this is not my cup of tea).

Luckily enough, at home, at ease, I could do my research with my laptop, so I can give life, through the following lines, to a succinct resumé of the rock’n’roll scene in Prague and the Czech Republic. I haven’t found out something outstandingly beautiful, but some interesting stuff and food for thoughts. Thoughts that, with the music, I’d like to share with my reader.

During the 1960s many young guys, despite the denials from the Communist regime, discovered the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones thanks to Radio Free Europe and the smuggling albums. First bands from Czechoslovakia were Olympic and Beatmen. In 1968 there was a short season of concerts, festivals and freedom of expression, quickly frozen by the Varsavia Pact and its tanks.

But before that, Prague and Bratislava (land respectively of Olympic and Beatmen) were the main capitals of beat culture and of the Czech way to rock’n’roll. Olympic were born in Prague in 1962, formerly called Karkulka. Originally devoted to the Beatles repertoire, in 1968 after some original singles they released the album “Zelva” that was the first LP of Czech rock music, becoming a reference for all the following scene.

Their style is not completely different from that of the contemporary Brazilian counterparts (in giving life to a mix of popular melodies and rock arrangements), even if less intellectual and more keen on simple texts and music of impact. Nonetheless, their sound is not only raw and wild, but it’s capable of finesses and original instrumental passages (see their use of guitar and flute).

Beatmen, formed in Bratislava in 1964, distinguished themselves for a repertoire related to the so-called British Invasion and the Beatles, but they were also one of the very first bands to explore the stages going over the boundaries of their country, contributing to the diffusion of beat music and to the following development of progressive rock during the Seventies.

The 1970s saw an authoritarian turn (no pemission to exhibit live, musicians had to cut their hair, and to change their names), and the music gone underground. In 1968 Plastic People of the Universe, a psychedelic and avant garde band, became the first symbol of the resistance of youth against the regime.

Members of the band were arrested in 1977 and the trial gave life to a transversal solidarity between intellectuals. This led to the creation of the movement passed through the historiy as Charta 77, coordinated by the political dissident, near both to the US and the Vatican, but in a way also to ecologism, Vaclav Havel.

Plastic People of the Universe are a classic example of how the avant-garde rock developed itself in Czech Republic during the various decades. In fact, they were promoting bands like Velvet Underground and their experimental sound, but in a way they were not adding something peculiar or personal, as it happened in Brazil with the above mentioned wave of rock music with Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé. PPotU are a clear example: they play well, they’re enough raw, but they miss somehow a true personality, an original voice.

During the 1980s, rock converged in a shy and innocent pop rock, while the ‘true’ rock music lived in canteens, rural festivals and always with the fear for the musicians to be arrested or blocked. Before Perestrojka anyway, and the famous Rolling Stones’ concert giving life to a renowned season of rock music for everyone since 1989, punk and post-punk operated in Czechoslovakia in a covert manner.

Bands like F.P.B. and E created their own music. Not at all vulgar, their proposal anyway seems at a deep listening son of the European/American sound of that time, with no peculiar or personal flickers, as said before. F.P.B. and E (this last from the city of Brno) are a classic example of passage from punk to post-punk. Both interesting bands, they miss that particular element that can make of them markers, and not followers of a style.

Even the most recent post-punk revival like Dukla, Plusminusnula and CosmoBrigade (the most interesting act to my ears) are calligraphic and not completely original. I suppose this is a mirror of the historical development of the country in which these musicians lived. Communism from 1948, then the so-called “Velvet Revolution”, the new closeness with the Western World and its religion, capitalism, then again the splitting in two countries did not helped people to develop a proper personality.

In a way, with some notable exceptions of some stuff coming from the Olympic and Cosmobrigade, the rock music in the Czech Republic was the music of people dragged by the events, as they were not able to take their life on their shoulders – even if they were enough self-conscious to notice it.

It is difficult to tell where the world, inside and outside the Czech Republic, is going nowadays, but if there is an opportunity to say and create something original, my hope is that someone will be able to grab it.