Vladimír Hanzel

“During maths class one of my classmates hissed at me to give her the Beatles records I’d borrowed. With a heavy heart I pulled them out of my satchel and passed them to her. Teacher Dlouhý noticed it, ran up to us, took the record and said: ‘Confiscated, will be returned at the end of the school year.’ I was aghast. I thought I couldn’t do that to Lenka. During the break I plodded despondently to the maths office, thinking: ‘I have to soften him up somehow, explain that the records aren’t mine but Lenka’s, that her Dad brought them to her from Paris, that it’s a terribly awkward matter for me.’ I was preparing my speech, and on my way to the office I heard familiar sounds. When I came closer, I found out that the teacher was sitting there with a gramophone player, listening to the records. I knocked, he started a bit and looked at me guiltily. I bleated out a part of what I had ready, but he stopped me and said: ‘Can I keep them till tomorrow?’”

“The Unionists called the festival ‘Songs for Peace’. When I criticised that to my future wife, she told me: ‘If you think the title’s dumb, the festival will be called differently.’ And I retorted: ‘It’s not all that dumb. On the contrary! We just have to take it literally. Halfway through the festival there’ll be a peace song.’ The following year I played Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance from tape, people joined in and sang with him, that was good. A year later I played Sun City, a song against the apartheid in South Africa. That was connected to an article I wrote for Gramorevue, in which I whimsically compared the apartheid to the situation in Czechoslovakia - in 1948 a handful of people in South Africa usurped the right to rule, which was quite a parallel to what had happened here. People were used to reading between the lines back then, and I know a lot of readers were intrigued by the text.”