Ivan Nekuda

* 1964

  • "We were looking at it with completely disbelieving eyes. We said to ourselves, this is impossible." - "You mean the beating on National Avenue?" - "No, not at all. That it made it into the official news and that it began to be talked about the way it was. Consider that you grow up in a system where there is a Communist Party, there is a system, and you grow up in that. It's actually framing your life and suddenly you imagine that they say away with the Communist Party and you, being brought up in that, you can't imagine an alternative at that moment at all. What will happen instead? So we looked at it very incredulously and because..." - "With friends?" - "Well, we were like, that's not possible. And one of the prevailing opinions was, 'Hey, dude, this is a whole trap to get us out of the holes so they can conveniently pick us up.'So I went to Prague sometime on Wednesday to see that I actually saw the whole of Prague covered in tape. When I saw that people were really wearing tricolours, how excited they were and so on. I came back home and I said, 'Hey dude, this is not a trap, this is a really big deal'."

  • "Because, of course, there was an unofficial market here, the stock exchanges were functioning in some way. I remember the day when my brother came home, he said, 'Don't even touch it!´ And he had this packet of records that somebody had brought. I still remember Joplinka, Savoy Brown, Grand Funk Railroad. That had to be transferred to tape as quickly as possible. We had an old gramophone at home, and it was recorded on B4, on those big tapes, on those 19-track tapes, through a five-track. They had the advantage of being able to fit eight vinyl records on it. And again, it was taken away, like, to whoever lent it to you, who in turn lent it carefully to somebody else. It just worked that way."

  • "I grew up in a home where there were... Imagine this room all the way around, the one lined with books three times, that's what I grew up in. I grew up in that my parents were members of a record club, so we listened to things like Armstrong, Fitzgerald, Brel, Piafka. If you could get it, Voskovec and Werich. It's interesting that, although it would have fit at the time, there was no Hurvinek or Tales from the Stump going on in our country. Rather, as I recall, we had records by the Golden Kids, Neckář, Kubišová, like the early Kubišová stuff... She actually made one single record and loads of singles."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Mělník, 23.01.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:09:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 12.06.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 02:43:41
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We didn‘t see each other as a movement, we were just friends

Ivan Nekuda at the end of the 80s
Ivan Nekuda at the end of the 80s
zdroj: archive of a witness

Ivan Nekuda was born on November 10, 1964 in Mělník as the second son of Květoslava and Miroslav Nekuda. His parents encouraged him to take an interest in music and literature, even those that were not approved by the regime. After completing his primary education, he entered the Mělník Grammar School, where he graduated without any problems. As a teenager, he helped his brother distribute records by banned musicians, which led him to join the underground. He was in contact with Vojtěch Lindaur, Vladimír Líbal and Heřman Chromý. After graduating from high school, he started working in a computer centre and later in a machine and tractor station. He learned about many of the demonstrations in 1989 after they had taken place and so was unable to participate in them. In 1990 he together with his friends founded the band Freon. A year later, he started studying andragogy at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Until 2004 he worked at the trade office in Mělník. Later he and his wife opened a shop in Mělník selling new and antiquarian books and vinyl records. He continued to run the bookstore in 2024 and still lived in Melnik.