A music lover from Prague’s Dejvice used to travel not only to the borderlands for music
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Martin Oulický was born on 11 December 1951 in Dejvice, Prague, as a child without a father. His mother soon moved out on her own to study and work, and so the little boy grew up with his grandmother and grandfather. With his youth came an interest in music, and he regularly attended concerts of the underground band The Plastic People of the Universe at the Břevnov pub U Lhotáků. From the age of fifteen, he regularly went on holidays to visit his mother in Přimda, near the West German border. In addition to access to the pure broadcasts of Free Europe, especially its music programmes, he also came into contact with the civil border guards there. After primary school, without much interest in the field, he trained as a lathe operator. Instead of compulsory military service, he became a worker for the Military Construction Works, after which he was to join the shortened compulsory military service. He tried to avoid it altogether by staying in a psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, but in the end he had to enlist. After the war, he joined the FAMU studios in Prague as a lighting technician. He worked there in various professions until just after the Velvet Revolution. In the 1990s, among other jobs, he worked for a long time as a caretaker at the residence of the Portuguese ambassador in the Czech Republic. Martin Oulický lives (2025) in Prague and has two children.
