Pavel Štěpán

“Once those State Security guys slapped me so hard that I almost fell off my chair, that was because of these petitions, but otherwise they wouldn’t beat us with batons or anything like that… I know that a lot of other people from other towns had problems with that, that they would cut off their hair, the cops would take them to the station, cut off their mohawks, cut up their jackets with scissors, rip all those metal studs off. Every time those guys from, I don't know, from Příbram, from Prague, from Strakonice, when they came to Jihlava and got to meet the local police, they would say: ’You guys live in heaven on Earth, these Jihlava cops are so sweet compared to the other ones.’”

“When we played at the Palace of Culture the organizers came to us, it was not easy for them to feature us at the Palace because we were banned so it was not going smoothly but there was some leverage. Even back then there were people inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth who were not brainwashed by the regime, they were not such hardcore communists and they wanted to help the bands. The other ones, not the pop music ones. They would just say: ’Look…’ Back then we had this huge hit called ’The World Has Gone Fucking Crazy’. And they said: ’Look, guys, you know, the lyrics… They’re great, the song is great, but they will be filming here and there will be these important people and there will be checks and it would be nice if you maybe played the song but didn’t sing this, or something like that.” I mean we did this little trick – because we did end up playing the song, but as soon as we came onto the stage the audience started screaming, people started climbing up to the stage, started pogo dancing, and at the sign of the first notes of ’The World Has Gone Fucking Crazy’ people started pogo dancing and singing along. So the song ended up with us singing the lyrics ’The world has gone…’ and we wouldn’t say it, the people would scream the rest of it for us.”