Mgr. Jiří Sova

"Then there was a meeting of the Civic Forum, and it was decided that the forum would have a chairman. I don't know how many candidates there were then, but Václav Klaus, charismatic at the time, won overwhelmingly. I was the chairman of the drafting committee at the time, and I read the resolutions of that Civic Forum assembly. And those resolutions were quite colorful and extensive at the time, and the decision-making process to find a consensus in the Civic Forum was terribly cumbersome. It bothered even me that... okay, the philosophical basis, freedom, democracy, but now it's like somebody needs to say what's going to be... what should be done. And so I was reading the resolution, whether it was in the Lucerna or wherever a meter behind me, Václav Klaus was tap dancing to give the final speech, and he was saying, 'Come on, come on, this is bullshit, this is bullshit...' I said to him, 'I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, the Congress has agreed on this. I have to read it.' But at the same time, I was sort of thinking that this is the person who is going to give it the momentum now. Now it's going to move. Then, I don't remember exactly, but I probably got even closer to him at a meeting, and I experienced his negotiating methods, plus what I knew from some of my colleagues. And when it was splitting up, I joined the part of the Civic Movement - Jiří Dienstbier, Petr Pithart, as if for purely human reasons, sympathies, and so on, that was less action-oriented, more philosophical, because those ways, those actions of Václav Klaus bothered me humanly."

"When me and Mario and our friends, who we met somewhere, started one of the following bands, we wanted to call it Beton because we were rehearsing under the janitor's flat behind the construction industry school, and it was concrete. So we said, look, there's concrete everywhere, so Beton. We took it to the district cultural center and got the answer that you can't disparage such an important building material for a socialist state by using it as the name of a rock band. So the bandmaster suggested that we call ourselves Stratus. So I said, 'Dude, that's impossible. They don't know that Stratus is a storm cloud. It's such a foreign word that they won't get it.' He said no. He got there with it, and he got fired again. So we said, look, we've got to write a proper justification. So how about we call ourselves G7? G7 is a chord, Hradec has a G in the emblem, and there are seven band members, including the engineers, that could work. So he wrote it that way, and it passed. We had G7 on our posters, but when we went anywhere, nobody said anything other than 'jee-sevn'. So the Bolshevik took a little revenge on himself."