Pavel Štěpán

“When we played at the Palace of Culture the organizers came to us, it was not easy for them to feature us at the Palace because we were banned so it was not going smoothly but there was some leverage. Even back then there were people inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth who were not brainwashed by the regime, they were not such hardcore communists and they wanted to help the bands. The other ones, not the pop music ones. They would just say: ’Look…’ Back then we had this huge hit called ’The World Has Gone Fucking Crazy’. And they said: ’Look, guys, you know, the lyrics… They’re great, the song is great, but they will be filming here and there will be these important people and there will be checks and it would be nice if you maybe played the song but didn’t sing this, or something like that.” I mean we did this little trick – because we did end up playing the song, but as soon as we came onto the stage the audience started screaming, people started climbing up to the stage, started pogo dancing, and at the sign of the first notes of ’The World Has Gone Fucking Crazy’ people started pogo dancing and singing along. So the song ended up with us singing the lyrics ’The world has gone…’ and we wouldn’t say it, the people would scream the rest of it for us.”

“Then there were classic summons as well. The whole band would get a notice to show up for an interrogation at the local crime division in Jihlava. We would each spent half an hour there with them asking us classic stuff… Jihlava… Why are we doing this? Where have we seen that? Do we know what it means? That they are actually fascist symbols, the whole punk movement is fascist. The band Kiss, they always compared it to Kiss. The Kiss members, they, too, all think that they are rockers but they are, in fact, fascists, because they have that double ’S’ at the end. And they would take pictures of us, put us in the archives, and it never ended up being anything too serious. Usually it was really over in a half an hour. They took our pictures. We would tell them some nonsense, that we saw that stuff in a German magazine and that we actually have no idea what was going on, we would tell them this kind of rubbish. The problem was when State Security came from Brno, those guys were playing a different league and they knew very well what was going on, and they never believed this nonsense we told them.”