Story:
The state secret police became more interested in 1977 after a successful concert of my band Extempore in Lucerna music hall in Prague. Our songs were considered ‘ideologically harmful’. Later on, we created the Mezzanin Folk Group and in 1981, we played at the Yappa festival in Łódź for 3000 people. Right after that, they had detained us at a train station in Ostrava and the pressure of the secret police has increased. We were interrogated on a weekly basis. In the autumn of 1982, they detained me again; they loaded me into a car and brought me to Bartolomějská again (name of the street with secret police station). They laughed at me with an expression full of self-confidence, they pulled up a thick file of documents against me which was full of lies. They accused me of abusing young girls – of course I didn’t do that. They’ve given me a choice to either get eight and a half years in prison or to move out of the country immediately. I chose to migrate and later I cooperated with Karel Kryl on the creation of this album in exile.
Jeroným Neduha