Válav Havel throws bubbly over the new Plastics CD. (Actually, he didn't but took a swig from the bottle instead and got a big cheer anyway!)

Below is a rushed translation of an article which appeared online on the Týden website on Wednesday. For those of you who wish to view the original, please look here




(On Tuesday evening, in Prague). In a sold-out Palace Akropolis, the new studio album by the legendary group The Plastic People of The Universe was launched or baptised, as the Czechs out it, by former (Czech) President, Václav Havel. The recording, titled The Mask Behind The Mask, was first showcased on 15 January at the prestigious Queeen Elizabeth Hall in London. After the Prague launch, the legendary band will go on tour.

The Plastic People of the Universe are, arguably, even 20 years after the fall of the communist regime, the most famous Czech rock band abroad whilst at home the band is the one that is most wreathed in myth and mystery. After a nine-year break, they have released a new studio album.

The album was released last year on 23 December by the independent music label Guerilla Records. The CD, the first in the history of the band to include music composed by other band members. Their long-standing and sole composer, Mejla Hlavsa, died in 2001. “It is not a good idea to baptise a record with bubbly, that’s just wasteful, and I prefer to drink it,” said Havel on-stage to thunderous applause.

The band was joined on stage at the launch by cellist Josef Klíč, who also performed on the recording. The planned appearance of the support act Aku Aku was cancelled for technical reasons. After the launch, the Plastics are to go on a concert tour that finishes on 30 April in Dvůr Králův nad Labem. The main composer on the album, with six credits, is the band’s guitarist, Joe Karafiát, while a major part of the lyrics is in the form of the unique verse of Vratislav Brabenec, the remainder provided by (Czech poets) J. H. Krchovský, Andrej Stankovič or Jiří Kolář. (MS: Also, but forgotten in the piece, is Tiger in Prague by the pre-war Russian ‘absurdist poet’ Daniil Kharms.)

For the first time ever, the repertoire includes a musical setting of a text written by the band’s former manager, Ivan Martin Jirous (Magor).

Since the band formed in 1968 almost 40 musicians have taken a turn in it, most of them staying for only a short time. With the onset of normalisation in 1970 the band were stripped of their professional status and, with it, their equipment.

The (Communist Czechoslovak) state’s intimidation reached a climax in March 1976 when all The Plastics were arrested, which led to international protest. What later became Charter 77 was formed during the campaign to defend them. The band even recorded at Václav Havel’s country cottage.

Early election?

Will there be an election before May 2010 in the United Kingdom?

I ask only because this week I received literature from two political parties through my front door. The Liberal Democratic Party were the first with large format 'red top' style "Lewisham News" delivered on Wednesday, I think. Their headline for Lewisham voters was "Iraq Cover Up Shame". This leaflet was in a large pile of post and junk mail that day including business cards from "Catford Cars" which, struck me as potentially emblematic but I'll leave others to waffle on about that.

This morning, The Conservative Party were alert enough to push "In Touch....with your local Conservatives" through my letter box. Next to its headline was a photo of Boris Johnson, London's Mayor, with Jonathan Clamp, East Lewisham's Tory Party candidate. Both looking very dapper in suits and ties. The headline was "Conservatives Protect Freedom Pass". I didn't read beyond the headline......I know it's bollocks.....

Anyway, to continue....Do the Lib Dems and Tories know something we don't? Will the UK election happen earlier than May? The economic growth figures are due out shortly. I'm sure we'll find out we have a 'snap election' if they 'prove' Britain is 'out of recession', whatever that means.

It makes no difference to me at all. I haven't voted since 1986. I did go through a phase of spoiling my ballot card, including bringing various of my children in pushchairs to the election booth and inviting them to doodle in the ballot, too. These days, my children are older, less likely to do as they are asked and might question what they were doing in such an peculiar environment!

There is a metaphor somewhere there, too.

If the government wants my taxes, it can fuckin whistle

I joined Billy Bragg's nobonus4RBS facebook group this afternoon after reading an article online this morning at the Guardian website. I think it is a wonderful, creative and humourous way to protest.

Do I think the government will be quaking in its boots? No.

Like about a third of those in Britain who actually declare their earnings, I file my tax return online towards the end of January and pay up via a debit card. Last year and other years, I paid on time. This year, I'm not going to pay it at all.

It's a small protest. It will cost me an extra £100 on top of my tax bill which of course, HM Revenue will seek from me. However, I have taken a stand and would encourage others to do the same.

This government can get Gordon Brown to Copenhagen but cannot ensure the country's transport system operates when there's snow. This government can send an army to invade Iraq but struggles to protect it from a small number of dedicated young men laying road side bombs. This government has mortgaged my grandchildren's future to Chinese (and other foreign) banks and now expects me to pay the fools responsible...........again!

I keep hearing the same thing about executive remuneration. It goes like this, "one has to pay the best to attract and keep the best". My response is that maybe we should remember what best means. "Best" doesn't mean bringing down a financial system and then asking those who rescued it to pay an extra tip to those who brought it there. There are other words for that.

I'm not polluting the environment, I'm not invading a country without a UN mandate, I'm not risking my grandchildren's future: I'm just not going to pay my tax bill this year.

If the government wants my taxes, it can fuckin whistle.

The Mask Behind The Mask: The poetry behind the legend of The Plastic People of The Universe

For those who missed Friday's concert, here are the programme notes I wrote about the new CD. It's a bit long but then this isn't a regular bloody blog....

The Plastic People of The Universe release their latest collection of songs at a launch party in Prague on 26 January. This is the first release without the participation of Milan ‘Mejla’ Hlvasa who died in 2001. The title, Maska Za Maskou/ The Mask Behind The Mask, is enigmatic but offers hints at the other talents that have remained hidden behind the mask of The Plastics’ legend.

The legend, of course, is everything in rock ‘n’ roll. The Plastics’ legend goes something like this:

Friends got together after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and started playing cover versions of songs by The Doors, Fugs and Velvet Underground (remember the colour velvet). They loved Frank Zappa and in particular, his song Plastic People. They grew their hair long, wore make up, mad costumes and played gigs and sang in English until things got heavy. After things got heavy, they carried on anyway and began getting into trouble with the normalised authorities in Czechoslovakia or “began socking it to The MAN”, in rock ‘n’ roll legend speak. Eventually, the band and some of their friends were thrown in jail for ‘disturbing the peace’. This blunt and stupid act catapulted the band into international consciousness and gave Václav Havel a book title. It also provided the the band with a subversive power – the exact opposite of the Soviet puppets’ intention. By jailing The Plastics and their friends, the 1970s Czechoslovak authorities actually acted to unite conflicting anti-government groups and individuals. Václav Havel and those very disparate people became known as dissidents and coalesced around a document called Charter 77. Thus, by implication, The Plastics became dissidents, too. Fast-forward to 1989 and the whole Fall of The Berlin Wall narrative. In Czechoslovakia, this is known as The Velvet Revolution (we did remember the word ‘velvet’, didn’t we?). Chain-smoking Václav Havel becomes president of Czechoslovakia and thus the myth is complete: The Plastic People of The Universe brought down the state and Frank Zappa joined the government.

Rock ‘n’ roll or what!

Can we imagine a globalized version of that myth where Al Gore replaces the chain-smoking playwright and The Killers replace The Plastics? No, The Plastics’ myth has more resonance, it has good guys, bad guys, suffering and ends rather like a rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale – the good guys take over and continue smoking, drinking and making music. Let’s remember that: the music. Let’s remember the music and also Al Gore is not rock ‘n’ roll.

This legend was quoted as recently as December 2009 when another smoker/ playwright, Tom Stoppard, wrote an article in the London Times under the headline, Did Plastic People Topple Communism? Both a character from his play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and a character from the band, Vrata Brabenec, offer the same response, “that’s the story, I’m afraid”.

The story is The Plastics brought down Czechoslovakia’s communist regime in 1989 but like all stories and myths it both highlights and disguises a truth. In the 1970’s, it was the Soviets who created a mask for The Plastics. Brabenec laughs, “Those goons gave us the best PR possible”. This PR, as Brabenec calls it, was a mask. Now, The Plastics reveal and revel in a new mask, one they have recreated for themselves.
For those of a certain literary disposition, a title like The Mask Behind The Mask has that certain bit of poetic, Wildean whimsy. The analogy works particularly well when one thinks of the deterioration of Dorian Gray’s portrait. Are The Plastics exercising a certain aesthete whimsy of their own or are they exorcising the ghosts of their own perceived degeneration..four of them are in their 60s, after all…..the notion has a wonderful irony about it.

For those who have read beyond the British late Victorian “aesthetes” to encounter the French poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, the title The Mask Behind The Mask may generate some pleasingly decadent and gamey sensations in the synapses of their sensitive souls.

The sheer dandiness of the title may remind others that there was such a thing as political subversion in culture way before the Soviet Union had been a twinkle in Father Stalin’s eye. For those who have read a little too much Czech prose and cultural criticism, one is reminded of the energy and creativity in the stories and essays of Bohemia’s most extravagant Dandy, Arthur Breiský. Breiský encouraged the creation of as many masks as possible. He was such a masked dandy and legend that no-one can really be sure when or where he died. Was it in an elevator crash in a New York skyscraper in 1915, was it somewhere in Germany in the 1930’s or did he simply decide he had nothing further to add and left Prague in 1914 or later? Never mind the truth, the mask of the legend is far better!

Another legend hidden behind a 1970s regime-inspired mask is Egon Bondy, a poet so subversive he was classified as a mentally ill and sectioned by the Czechoslovak authorities. As The Plastics moved from cover band to composing original music in the early 1970’s, they were introduced to Bondy by another poet and cultural critic, one Ivan Martin Jirous. Jirous has also been described variously as the Plastics’ manager, artistic director and more often, Magor or loony. The Plastics were encouraged to set Bondy’s poetry to music and Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned was the result.
In the same way that describing Václav Havel as a playwright doesn’t quite cover everything, describing Egon Bondy as a poet doesn’t quite cover the breadth of his achievement either. Due to the times he lived in, it simply isn’t known how many volumes of poetry he produced, or how many novels he wrote. Then there was his history of philosophy. Bondy’s biopic is in production, the screenplay written by the son of one of Bondy’s psychiatrists!

Whatever Bondy’s achievements, it is fair to say that Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned is a wonderful introduction to his thoughts. However, it also provided The Plastics with the template for the rest of their output: poetry first, music later.
Bondy’s vision was encapsulated in what he called “Total Reality” and produced poems of striking but false simplicity. For example, Mír. In English, it is regularly translated as Peace with these lines:

Peace peace peace.
Just like a piece
Of bog roll

But the original is not too difficult
Mír, mír, mír
Jako toaletní papír

Unfortunately, the translation misses out important meanings. The Mír in the poem is peace in Czech but also Russian. It was also the given reason for Soviet intervention anywhere and the name of Soviets’ space programme. Toaletní papír was often in short supply in the peaceful Soviet paradise. So the couplet takes on a variety of meanings beyond peace being like bog roll. Peace is war, it is Russian, it is a rocket, it is misused science and it is in short supply.

Thus we have the beginings of Bondy for beginners: satire, cultural critcism and polemic all wrapped up in a sweet rhyming couplet but betrayed by a dissonant, dissident metre. A technique used again but more pejoritively in other lyrics on the Egon Bondy’s album. In Podivuhodný Mandarin, for example, it is never quite clear who, exactly, is the Mandarin. Also, adding to the ambiguity is the adjective podivuhodný. Podivuhodný can be translated as admirable or miraculous and is frequently translated as wonderous. I mention this because those adjectives conjure up magical, positive messages but the poem’s Mandarin is grubby, lewd, even bawdy. The cultural critic, Pavla Jonssonova, describes it today as sexist. However, the audiences listening in the 1970’s were able to make up their own minds. In those days, the Mandarin could have been understood as the Soviet “advisors”, the Soviet-managed Czechoslovak government or their collaborators. Sexism was one of many cultural crimes.
Those audiences at Plastics gigs also included the secret police, the civilian police and their many friends. Possibly before but certainly after Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, The Plastics were living on borrowed time. However, Brabenec disputes whether the band could ever have been dissidents. He even disputes whether the poems they set to music could be regarded as anti-regime, even in the 1970’s. When he is asked about those days his responses vary but they follow a general theme: “we were musicians playing music”. This isn’t quite the story we began with. It lacks the legend element.

The political situation is different: Havel is not only out of jail, he an ex-President and an ex-smoker. Where was the band that night in 1989? Josef ‘Pepa’ Janíček, The Plastics’ keyboard man, was drinking in a bar - not demonstrating in Wenceslas Square. He was not ambivalent about the situation. Janíček continues,“The Bolsheviks knew the game was up when the sons of the Communists themselves wanted to become capitalists and entrepreneurs.”

On 17 November 2009, the demonstration on Wenceslas Square in Prague was recreated and Dan Bárta sang the national anthem in front of a tenth of the Czech population. Where were The Plastics that night? “We were drunk in Bratislava, it was a pleasant evening. I was glad I wasn’t in Prague in all that shit” continues Brabenec. “Politicians are still shits and musicians still play music”. According to Brabenec, the world remains the same.

Let’s get back to the music. The Mask Behind The Mask has something for everyone. It contains poems written by Josef Krchovský, Jiří Kolář, Martin Bauber and Ivan Jirous with a series of musical arrangements recalling the best of The Plastics’ psychedelic, rock, free-jazz and underground back catalogue. The highlights however are a series of poems by Vrata Brabenec set to music by Eva Turnova and other members of the band. Non-stop Opera, in particular, encapsulates their entire back catalogue and, as such, is possibly the finest song they have ever recorded. It begins with a rip-roaring opening guitar riff synchronized with the bass which is then joined by the widely misinterpreted “Velvet Underground violin drone” of Jiří Kabeš; before subsiding into a subversive “underground bass drone” for the opening verse. Brabenec, finally finding his singing voice in his late 60s, sings this opening verse with great passion. The psychedelia, dissonance and vision he describes can be distilled to one line:
I just envy the ashtray, it keeps all its butts together in good order.

When once the band were admired for behaving normally in the mad reality of a normalized Czechoslovakia, the band must now be admired for behaving like they are not dissident icons. This is because The Plastics remain a rock band. They always were.
So where is the poetry in The Mask Behind The Mask? Surely, it must be more than decadent whimsy and dandy pose. It must be more than the sum of Bondy’s total reality, the influence of the Velvet Underground’s drone and Frank Zappa’s freeform jazz-rock. Branenec, who wrote the lyrics to the title song, says only that it is “about transience”. The poetry in this collection of songs is more than the sum of its many parts, more than the legend. It is about being human in a world that often appears to be the opposite. It is The Plastics’ finest achievement to date.

The Search for Elvis continues

As we contemplate our mortality through the prism of TV review shows and articles outlining various narratives of the noughties and delusion, I would like to remind everyone of a small item of news about Elvis, which appeared in November.

It appears that the same CIA who lost six, seven or was it eight agents in Afghanistan has awarded Osma Bin Laden the codeword Elvis.

Now, I'm the last person to discourage an interest in the iconography of Elvis and I am certainly not going to bang on about how the CIA created Bin Laden and his aledged network of Evil, al-Qa'ida or whatever other nonsense comes out of Langley, The River House or any of those other places where the secret police forces are based.

However, I would like to remind everyone that Elvis actually died more than 30 years ago and the notion that the largest secret police force in the world is looking for him is beyond ironic. My prediction for the next decade is this:

While we refuse to acknowledge our culture is capable of producing nothing better than vacuous irony, well, no-one will ever find Elvis.