THE PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE

From January into August 1968, under the rule of Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček, Czechoslovakians experienced the Prague Spring. In August, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. This led to the overthrow of Dubček and to, in what came to be known as the normalization process. Less than a month after the invasion, Plastic People of the Universe was formed.



Bassist Milan Hlavsa formed the band which was heavily influenced by Frank Zappa (Plastic People being a song by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) and the Velvet Underground in 1968. Czech art historian and cultural critic Ivan Jirous became their manager/artistic director in the following year, fulfilling a similar role the one Andy Warhol had with the The Velvet Underground. Jirous introduced Hlavsa to guitarist Josef Janicek, and viola player Jiri Kabes. The consolidated Czech communist government revoked the band's musicians license in 1970.



Because Ivan Jirous believed that English was the lingua franca of rock music, he employed Paul Wilson, a Canadian who had been teaching in Prague, to teach the band the lyrics of the American songs they covered and to translate their original Czech lyrics into English. Wilson served as lead singer for the Plastics from 1970 to 1972, and during this time, the band's repertoire drew heavily on songs by the Velvet Underground and the Fugs. The only two songs sung in Czech in this period were "Na sosnové větvi" and "Růže a mrtví", lyrics of both being written by Czech poet Jiří Kolář. Wilson encouraged them to sing in Czech.



After he left saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec joined the band and they began to draw upon Egon Bondy whose work had been banned by the government. In the following 3 years Bondy's lyrics nearly completely dominated the PPU music. In December 1974 the band recorded their first "studio" album, Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned (the title being a play on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), which was released in France in 1978. (o resto aqui)



(2008)