Jaromír Tůma

* 1946

  • "That was one of the best concerts I have attended, nota bene with my wife, because she is from České Budějovice, so it was close from her parents’ house. The best bands played there, just whatever you can think of at the time. There was Martin Kratochvíl's Jazz Q, there was Pražský výběr, perhaps Abraxas and some harder bands like that too. There was a great audience! It was packed, and I enjoyed it immensely – and so I wrote about it in Mladý svět magazine . And not a big review, but just a comment that this was how festivals should be. And then – it was unbelievable – the Tribuna magazine put such a smear on the festival and the behaviour of the people that I thought I was at a completely different event. They mainly wrote – I do not know, maybe it was like that, but for God's sake! – they wrote that people had bought out all the pills the local pharmacy that arouse infatuation and so on, and that there were strange people hanging around in the park all day. This article about Kaplice was one of the triggers of the campaign against the new wave. Then there was the article ‚Nová vlna se starým obsahem’ ['New Wave with Old Content' – trans.] and so on. And well, then we fought back."

  • "Of course, if someone had a sister who married in Holland, they were guaranteed a supply of records. Here I have to praise the Czech communists for not confiscating the records, unlike, for example, those of GDR. It was impossible to smuggle a record from the West into the GDR. Yes, some of them came out in their Intershop, similar to Tuzex, but that is different. So, the records had to be obtained and imported. I had to turn to people who went abroad, where I did not actually go, could not. I got some of those permission to go abroad by mistake once and I could go to Holland and the countries around there, but that was it. I was actually in the West and the world – I was catching up with everything in those 1990s. Well, back then it was brought to me by prominent people, mostly sons of communists, who were traveling freely to the West."

  • "So, I wrote for Melodie, but that was not enough – I started doing the discos. But on the basis of becoming a DJ at the Prague Cultural Centre, I got a freelance job. That was a win! I just did not have any clerks inspecting my profile background, I was free, so to speak, all the way up to 1990, when I started my first job as editor-in-chief of Melodie. So, I was actually free in a way. I did disco dancing and listening. And a rather spicy thing happened to me in those 1970s, that I found my wife at a listening disco. So, I have a disco woman at home, but the joke is that at those listening discos I was playing music for very discerning listeners – no Abba, no Bee Gees, I started straight in with the song Travels to Nihilon by XTC, and I was blasting it up in that way, at those listening discos. And I went into the 1970s, which was a kind of escape for me, because I would go – if I was not playing in Prague, usually during the winter – I would go to Mariánské Lázně, Karlovy Vary, Piešt'any, Harrachov, Špindl [Špindlerův Mlýn – trans.], and I would play at places like that, or I would do tours, not big ones, so that it did not exhaust me too much, and it was a different life. A different world. We were just replacing those bands that stopped coming here again. When we could not see David Bowie live, at least we played him at discos – well, people danced and were grateful. And they looked at me and maybe they saw the Bowie in me."

  • “Aerosmith was here. We met with them in the backstage. Then they had some press conference in the hotel Jalta in the Wenceslas Square, there were various other media, radio stations, journalists, and so on. And this Steven Tyler, the singer, the one with the big mouth, he is a type similar to Mick Jagger, and he so totally captivated by her, by Tereza, that he said: “Your chewing gum, do you like it?” Because she was interviewing him and chewing a gum at the same time. That was her style. And she replied: ‘Yeah, would you like some? Take it.’ And she turned her mouth to him and he leaned toward her and he pulled the chewing gum from her mouth like this. And all the rivaling TV stations got angry at that moment, because they saw that people would be talking about us again and that this Tereza was noticed one more time again among those people.”

  • “It was at a time when the Mikrofórum was the first and the only program in the radio which supported the students and those who went on the strike and which broadcast in complete opposition to the whole radio station. And I was broadcasting the music there and my moment came some time around eight o’clock in the evening when the Wenceslas Square really got full of people, because the broadcasting room of Mikrofórum got occupied by the militia, the militia of the radio building, and the director of the radio himself brought them in there, and they said: ‘So from now on you will only broadcast music, and no spoken word.’ Well, that was my moment. I have a list at home of all these songs that I played that night. The songs said it unequivocally with their lyrics.”

  • “To put it simply, when I came to study at the university in Prague, I was already a bit mature even for my first attempts at articles about music, because the monthly magazine Melodie started to be published at that time, and it was led by the excellent expert Lubomír Dorůžka. And when I wrote to him from Mělník that he had some errors there regarding the singers of pop music, he invited me to show him the mistakes. And in January 1965, to be precise, my first article was published in that magazine. And then the tenth article, and the hundredth, and some time in 1992 I became the editor-in-chief of the Melodie magazine.”

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Just do not play Czech records, the members of Czechoslovak Union of Youth told the DJs

Jaromír Tůma
Jaromír Tůma
zdroj: Pamět Národa - Archiv

Jaromír Tůma was born on 26 April 1946 in Mělník. Since childhood he devoted himself to music, founded various bands, listened to foreign radio. In the second half of the 1960s, he experienced especially the boom of big beat, but also of popular music. He wrote about music for the music monthly Melodie, was a dramaturge for the music publishing house Supraphon, and had his own music block on the popular radio show Mikrofórum. He was a dramaturg at beat festivals in Lucerna. After the occupation in 1968, he interrupted his studies in foreign trade economics at the Prague University of Economics and Business and did not finish them. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the space for free journalism shrank, he supported himself as a DJ under the Prague Cultural Centre. He toured the country with discos, during which he tried to compensate the missing foreign bands for the audience. He stayed in Melodie until 1983, when the Bolshevik leadership was installed as part of the campaign against the new wave of music. He worked externally with Czechoslovak Radio, Czechoslovak Television and the magazine Mladý svět (Young World). After the Velvet Revolution, the music world was radically transformed again, discos ceased to play their role, while in 1991-1993 he was able to be the editor-in-chief of Melodie, but the magazine faced economic problems instead of ideological pressure in the free world. He then worked at TV Nova, where he prepared, among other things, the popular music programme Eso. He wrote for the Czech version of Playboy, and currently hosts the show Větrník on Radio Beat. He has written a total of nine books on music, travel and wine.