Lubomír Kressa

"We were united by music because we didn't listen to Karel Gott or Helena Vondráčková. We were interested in western bands, alternative western music, which was a problem to find at that time. It wasn't like nowadays you can stream it from Spotify; it was more complicated back then. It was virtually the same with visual art. I asked myself many times why the communists were so bothered by visual art. They were based over here and there was one of their ideologues called Podhrázký. I didn't find fine arts so dangerous for the communist ideology. But the way it worked was that when there was an exhibition and someone did not fit into the system, albeit just a tiny bit, Podhrázký would go see it with a magnifying glass and examine it to see if there was anything encrypted, and silly nonsense like that."

"It all started long before 1989 came along, on a small scale. We had a group of, the word isn't very popular nowadays, but they were 'mánička' (longhair), folks with long hair and jeans or some green flannels who didn't really like communism and such. Of course there were different types among them. There were types who only really wanted to get drunk and go to dances. Then there were people who were interested in doing something more. Even though the look was similar. I had a friend here, an evangelical minister, the vicar of the parish here at that time. His name was Tomáš Trusina, and he was and still is a very educated man. He was fluent in English at that time. We would transcribe samizdat, for example. I knew Magor Jirous personally, we used to go to his place in Stará Říše when he wasn't in prison, and we would always get some samizdat somewhere, which is in fact an officially unpublished book. For example, Magor's Swan Songs."