Petr Hromádka

"They didn't want me to have longer hair. I was once forced to go to a barber from whom I ran away. They didn't want me to wear jeans. I didn't get jeans until I was about seventeen, in my third year of grammar school. Everybody had them, I was unhappy about it. I listened to music at home. That was a bit of an incident. Always, as my mother was into the tidiness of it, when I had those [Deep] Purple and all those bands, [I took] wooden spoons, pillows like that, which I tried to clean up afterwards. My father had this little briefcase and plastic foil. That's what I put on my bed where I slept. So it was a Hi-hat, the plastic was a rhythmic, the transition was a stuffed pillow. I had these slippers like a stepper. When my parents weren't home, when I came home from school, I would drum. And one time my mother came in, it was playing quite loud, so she banned it. She said I was whirling up dust. Nobody thought I was interested in it, I was just whirling dust. So I had to clean it up. The tape recorder was taken away from me and so on..."

"The biggest revelation for me was with Ondra Hájek, who lived one floor up, he had a friend named Jan Sobola. Then I found out that he actually wernt to our grammar school, he was in the same year, but he was more mature. He was the kind of person who could drink ten beers, he was extremely well-read. He ended up badly. He was an early mature person who didn't build, didn't develop, and who recommended books to us. And he said, 'Listen, I know a band that plays - there's a guy from Panama, there's a guy who's from England, there's an American, there's an Irishman, and there's a Czech. It's called Mahavishnu.' Mahavishnu Orchestra, with Jan Hammer, of course. He was right that John McLauglin is Welsh, Rick Laird is Irish, Jerry Goodman is American and Billy Cobham is Panamanian. When I heard that, he played me the recording, and I listened to it with Ondra. That was something so mysterious, that was my second year at secondary school, I was sixteen. It completely turned the panorama of my life around. That was something, even though it was instrumental, even though there was no singing, it was energetic, incredibly complicated, I didn't understand it. Rhythmically it had odd meters, odd rhythms. It was incredibly spiritual. McLaughlin studied Eastern religion. It was an unexplored world for me, combining ethnic music and jazz. Improvisation. Just very strictly written. The word irritation. There was an irritation and a mystery. That it was all behind that barrier of consciousness. It still has that effect on me to this day. That it's something that everyone can't go. That you have to claw your way to it. Then I had some of that stuff in my notes, and that's what I've learned through years of musical practice, of course. I've come to that, it was actually incredibly revolutionary."