Petr Choura

"In 1987, a concert was held in Lochotín as part of the European Peace March to commemorate the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. It marched via several countries; I don't know which ones because we were interested in the concert. There were to be three East German bands, three West German bands and some Czech bands. The German ones were Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Toten Hosen and NO 55. Of the Czech ones, Cop was there, Žbirka was supposed to be there, Michal David was there instead, and then Stromboli were there. The commies had no idea what was coming. The Einstürzende Neubauten were at the absolute peak of their creativity and world-class representatives of the industrial genre that was hard to get in Eastern Europe. Toten Hosen was one of the leading punk bands on the German scene. It ended up with the Einstürzende Neubauten never performing because they were put on a bus together with the Toten Hosen and expelled. Cop played first, then Toten Hosen, and a lot of people from Poland, East Germany and the whole Bohemia came to see them. I experienced the Toten Hosen in great euphoria, it was a huge gig. Lochotín stood up, the band radiated such energy that even people who didn't know it suddenly felt it. Then some East German band played, people calmed down, nobody cared. Then Michal David came and started his 'disco story'. Lochotín stood up again and Michal David was run off the stage, stoned, booed off. He walked backstage, the cops came in with dogs and surrounded the stage. Michal David returned after some time and finished the concert under police protection. It was absurd."

"I used to go to Prague to record swap meets and cops would scatter us into the woods. You got on the train at four in the morning to arrive in Prague at seven. The way it usually worked was that you went to the subway and observed people. Records have a typical shape, so you could tell who was carrying them. Also, we knew each other already. You didn't know where the swap was going to be. It was fun. People started chatting, then somebody came and said, 'We're going to such and such today.' We rode to the outskirts of Prague, walked to a forest, and put the records on the ground. It was in one location two or three times. Then word spread, the cops came, people dispersed, cops picked up somebody, and then we did it again the next week, only we went somewhere else. It wasn't until the late 1980s that exchanges became more official, under the SSM, and there were a couple of swaps here in Pilsen too. You talked to people at the swap and learned about concerts. We used to go to illegal concerts. It was commonplace if they didn't take place, or they started but ended with the arrival of the police who put an end to it, more or less dramatically."