Jaroslav Jeroným Neduha

“When August 21 arrived, how did you learn about it?“ – “We were coming from my friend’s where we sat, drank and in the underground – it was quite appropriate, like in a nasty fairy tale – there was this gentleman with newspaper spread in front of him. The title page read: Russian troops occupy Czechoslovakia. The man caught us starring at the page and talking, he asked where we were from and we said that from Czechoslovakia. He gave us that paper and we didn’t continue to play at Piccadilly but went to the embassy instead and we were in shock. Then I took part in a demonstration where there were about three to five hundred thousand people, demonstrating against the occupation in London. I caught a terrible cold. “What did the demonstration look like?” – “Many people, they shouted, they had placards, but I realised how vain it was. This is the same like today when no one can do anything bout Putin. But there are apparently people who admire him, even here. People won’t learn and they forget. They forget the history or even don’t know it. They don’t want to know it.”

“The norms were like that and you couldn’t make more money. But I still earned more. When you learned how to do it, you could do your month’s job in 24 hours. Usually we left it at the last moment, bought wine and then went to weld the plastic bags. In 24 hours of non-stop work, while me and Lenka took turns, we were done. What is interesting is that Mejla Hlavsa then got the same job and I taught him to do it. He said, ‘Jára, I will never learn this, I’m too clumsy for this.’ When he had about fifty or a hundred of bags done in an hour, I left him. Then I met him somewhere and he said, ’50 minutes – a thousand.’ He was really skilled then. At the beginning it was difficult but then it was fine… “How many did you make in 24 hours?” – “The workload for one month was about 20,000 bags. It is a tedious job, but you can drink wine, look forward to Slovakia. Eventually Víťa Parkán, Charlie Soukup, Vasil Šnajdr did the same job, a good job it was, just under the lamp. They thought that when we were together we didn’t get in touch with people, that we did home job and walked the line. Well, we didn’t walk the line.”

“It started already in 1968, in the autumn. Naive people invited Markéta and myself to Hradec Králové, the lair of the communists. We arrived by train well ahead of time and we had this idea to go to the square and play. The police arrived, asking what was it that we were doing there. But we weren’t even busking, just played and there was a small circle of people around us, nothing really happened. We told the police that we were playing in a club that evening. And they replied that we just thought we were playing there. They took us to the club and then they sent us back to Prague. Get lost, we don’t want you here. This was in the autumn 1968 – if comrades in Prague condone this, we certainly don’t. In the club they suggested putting us back on the train. But we even didn’t have money for the ticket. We spent all of our money on food. The people in the club made a collection, the police drove us to the train and we went, shocked, back. Then we laughed at it, how absurd it was. There were areas in the country quite unmarked by the Prague Spring. The Prague Spring happened in Brno, Bratislava and Prague. The impact on the country was minimal.”

“They also arrested me in the village of Světec. There were the coal mines are up at Bílina near Teplice. I was sent there by Doctor Pulec to prepare the church for the service. And yet there were bricks falling down from the tower! And there were three Old Catholic families there. So I went there and took with me a friend of my girlfriend. So we swept it up there, we put a cloth on the altar, tidied it up a bit, and we slept there in the church, in front of the altar - there was some kind of wooden stage there, so it wasn’t cold from the stone. The Mass was supposed to be in the evening, and in the morning a police car came for us, someone had told on us, that they had seen some movement in the church. And that was in autumn ’69. They took us to Teplice, there they interrogated us, and I said, here’s a paper from Doctor Pulec, that’s the administrator of the bishopric, here’s the paper that I’m a student of theology and that I was sent to tidy up the church, that a Mass would be said there. To which: ‘Anyone could say that... What kind of stamp is that here?’ A stamp of the Old Catholic Church, they’d never seen that before. I told them, for goodness sake, phone Doctor Pulec in Prague. So they phoned and phoned to some central office, finally they let us go, and I said, okay, and now take us back to the church, we’re seven kilometres away and Doctor Pulec will be here soon, we have to prepare it for the Mass, so I think they did actually take us... But when I returned to Prague I was summoned for interrogation, and they came up, I remember that, with such nonsense... ‘You crossed the Czechoslovak borders on 1 October in a monk’s habit...’ I said: ‘Why would I cross the borders in a monk’s habit? When I hitch-hiked from Amsterdam with my English lady friend, and we wore normal clothes! And actually, I could go walking about in a surplice, not in a habit, those are worn by monks, and I’m not one, but as an ordained seminarian, the lowest pupil, student, I could wear a surplice or a church garment, a cassock... And you could call me Your Honour!’ They stared at me eyes all a-goggle! That was still in ’69, but they were starting to mess around, Husák had given them free reign.”

“That was just shortly before leaving, one of the last concerts, well, so someone called out and the ‘white helmets’ surrounded it, and my mother was there as well, she was completely furious, and then they filmed everyone who came out, they videos by then, some cameras, and they checked, scrutinised, well, and they led Doctor Pulec away... but we’re also debating whether he was a collaborator or not, maybe he signed something for them so he could do things like that ‘under the candle’s flame’... I don’t know, but from what I heard, during the war he was a huge help, to Jews, Gipsies and just all around... But it was really terrifying because the chapel, the rotunda, was packed full, there were women with children there, and if a panic had broke out, it wouldn’t have ended well. And that was two weeks before my departure. But I played there one more time on the day of my departure to Austria, and they let that be. They just stood on the pavement opposite and watched, thinking, we’ll be rid of him at last. Well, so when the train was leaving the main station in the direction of Vienna, I leant out of the window and waved to my friends and shouted: ‘It’s your turn now!’ I laughed. My eye was twitching like this. And then I cried at Franz Josef Bahnhof, when we arrived safely to Vienna. There was one hitch in that the train started backing up in Gmünd. They were switching to a different engine or something, but I thought my heart had stopped... I was standing on the corridor and some man came and said: ‘I’m from Vienna, don’t worry, and don’t talk in that compartment, you’ve got plants there...’”

“In that year ’74 we began playing big beat, Pohřeb funebráka [Funeral Guy’s Funeral] and the like, and to trump it all I sang in English, so there were interrogations, but still it wasn’t all that tragic. Except after Lucerna in ’77, The Sweetheart of Four Hanged Men, that was a smash, and the Jazz Section, well, and by then we had interrogations once a week, once a fortnight, as I said last time, that psychiatrist, Doctor Vaněk, he hid us in Bohnice, me and Mejla, and then it went differently for both of us - Jerry and Miriš Toman the drummer fled to Italy through Yugoslavia, or how they managed it, and those who signed the Charter, like Jirka Mareš and Wasyl, were sent into exile. And then towards the end it got so bad that they came for me twice a week, at four a.m., three a.m., that was getting nasty. That was getting mental, right. So we drove to the Barťák to be interrogated, bla bla, and they took it around Ruzyně, which would’ve meant custody, and I could’ve had the pink paper [court summons - transl.] waiting for me there with some charges, and it would’ve been harder to get out of there than from the remand cell, even though you never knew when you were there either. So I didn’t go to prison, but I spent my 48 hours or how long it was in the remand cell. It was very educational.”

“And then when there was some meeting there and they sniffed it out somehow, they closed the road as far as Třebušín and checked everyone, so people went there through the forest, those who managed to get there, and their focus was mainly on important dissidents. In ’77 we were rehearsing the programme Ebonitový samotář (Ebonite Solitaire), which was agreed via Jirka Mareš, whose cousin had married Víťa Parkán, who co-owned the farmhouse with Jiří Kubíček. It was enormous, they were repairing it, and there was a second building next to it, it was a barn down below and a common room up top. Because these settlements served as... they had seasonal pickers coming there. There were huge orchards, which they hopefully managed to revive - Czech Garden, Litoměřice, it’s upwards of Litoměřice... There was always the picking harvest, and there was a dance in the common room on Sunday, and there were small rooms there were the pickers lived, they sweated away during the day, and in the evening they’d get together, smoke on the stairs, and enjoy themselves. That place was also scoured a lot when there was the wedding of Víťa Parkán and Petra. Of course there was Havel there, Lanďák, Petr Uhl, Sváťa Karásek, and Charlie Soukup lived there, and Dana Němcová visited there, and others - Londýn and Skalák would go there, people from the north, and the Princes and these Chartists and dissidents visited each other. Well, and the house came to an end when they were forced to sell it for its estimated price, it was already almost repaired, central heating, everything... they put a lot of money into it, but [the Communists] didn’t like it that they had this house and that people were visiting them and that they were organising events there, so they said they’d give them a flat somewhere in a housing estate in Prague. So they were glad to be out of Prague, they’d been evicted, but then, when communities like this appeared, the people started meeting each other... I think that they knocked down three or so of the Princes’ houses in this way.. They were a family with children. And there are other such cases.”

“On 22, 23 November we were at the Czech embassy saying we wanted to go to Czechoslovakia. And the clerk said: ‘You’re black-listed, so no.’ And I stuck my hand through the window and nabbed him by the throat and held him, and he let the iron blinds fall on my arm, and it was a dead-end situation: I was chocking him, he was screaming... And Ondra, the son of that dunce Kohout, and Jirka Chmel, the friends who were there, came and said, look, let him go, he’s just some bastard, we won’t dirty ourselves with him. They don’t want to give us a visa, so we’re starting a sitting strike. So some consul rushed up and: ‘We’ll call the police on you!’ ‘Call both the Czech and the Austrian police, they mustn’t enter the embassy. It’s diplomatic territory. We’ll be sitting here until you give us the visas.’ Well, and next door were the acaddie [academy] gardens, and the students knew about it, we talked with them over the wall, and they brought us wine and food and beer, and after two three hours the consul gave in, in the meantime I’m sure he was whipping up the phone lines to Prague, what’s going on, and they kept pretending as if nothing had happened in Prague! And yet it was already tumbling down like dominoes here. And some dogsbody came along again and said - the one behind the counter, the one I’d throttled, he locked up and legged it somewhere to Argentina to ask for political asylum, probably like the Fascists did it, I guess the Communists also put theirs aside and legged it, or I don’t know... - and he said come back tomorrow, you’ll all get visas, which we paid for, I don’t know, thirty shillings, some kind of fee, and we weren’t on the black list any more. It would be interesting to get hold of that book, that black list, who all was on it or wasn’t on it, because who wasn’t on it, that’s also quite telling of a person... But let’s not spoil our day and our life’s eve. It’d make one go barmy.”

“Of course, in those days, when someone was a Beat Cup or Beat Salon finalist, they didn’t come running up from Supraphon - we’ll release your album or at least a single - it didn’t work like that. You had a lot of arse lickery to do. And we were supposed to record a single with Markéta at Panton, but then it ended up that we found out that the man who’d organised the matter wanted to get Markéta into his bed, as is usually the case, so we didn’t quite come to terms... The records weren’t officially released until by Supraphon in ’91 - To, co se sem nehodí [What Doesn’t Fit Here], but all your concerts, 99 per cent of them, were recorded by Jirka Munzar, then Miloš Munzar, his brother, and that distributed on tapes, so even when I was in exile, first off they heard me on Free Europe, second off Cibulka sold tapes on the black market, not just with Extempore, but with everything, Czech alternative, then the Czech new wave, so we weren’t forgotten, and after the year ’89 the Prague Extempore got together again and we could play. That was another kind of peak until ’93, then it died down, then I had a funny kind of Extempore in Moravia, then we released Milá čtyř viselců [The Sweetheart of Four Hanged Men] on a CD at Šíma’s, and there was a big tour for that, so we went up again, then exhaustion, nothing new was happening, and now there’s another kind of peak, we’ve livened up a bit thanks to the success at Akropolis [a music club in Prague - transl.], I hope there’ll be some repeats, we’ve even taken on a new guitarist and we want to do new things.”