Plastic People of the Universe, Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned, Invisible Rcds, LP, 1978
The good records from my friend Sebastien. Thanks to him, today, I can present you the masterpiece of legendary Prague's band : Plastic People of the Universe (Wikipedia website myspace). A super great album, you must have this one. That's 70' rock prog, of course, but with an surprising dark side (static rythms, uprightly singing) prescribes by the political/social environnement.
Somewhere between pink floyd and joy division ?
Liners note :
The Plastic People of the Universe came together in Prague in september 1968, barely a month after half-a-millon Soviet-led troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
Since 1970, the band has led a semi-legal existence in increasingly tough conditions - precisely because they have refused to compromise with the regime. A whole underground movement grew up around them, involving other bands, singers, poets and artits. As the movement expanded, so did police harassment, and in march 1976, the plastic people along with other musicians and poets in the underground were arrested overnight. Though some were later released, seven of them were put on trial and given prison sentences of up to 18 months fo "an organized disturbance of the peace". Two members of the plastic people, its artistic director Ivan Jirous and the drummer Jaroslav Vozniak, are still in jail.
This is their first record. It comes from a copy of tapes made by the Plastic People in 1973 and early 1974 on 
largely homemade apparatus and simple recording gear. The record was produce without their knowledge.
It is also the very first appearence anywhere of the poetry of Egon Bondy. Like the plastic People, Bondy has become a legend in his own time in Czechoslovakia. He is a generation older than most members of the band, but his poetry has long been a favourite, especially of young people, for its abrasive and pugnent humour, its directness and honesty, and its absolute refusal to comrpomise or conform to accept taste or opinion.
The Plastic People's musical mentors were group like Frank zappa's Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, and something of these influences can be heard in the music. But they have never tried, as so many group in eastern Europe do, simply to import Western rock into an alien scene. Over the years, they have develope a mature and original style of their own. Their music and Bondy's lyrics are saturated with the atmosphere of Prague, a city where the mystic and the mundane, the absurd and the real, mingle in everyday life.
This record is not a cry of protest. It is a deliberate statement of what is possible, even in what seems to be an impossible situation. In their world of apparent gloom, the Palstic People and Egon Bonby - and the other bands, artists, poets and young people who live with them in the underground - have created a world of gaiety and dignity and freedom. It has become what it set out to be - an alternative culture where, in the words of Ivan Jirous, "much can be done whe those who make the culture desire little for themselves and much for the others." February 1978
The record comes with a full size 60 pages B&W booklet.
Side A : 1.20 2.Zakpa 3.Toxica 4.Magické noci
Side B : 1.Metro Goldwyn Mayer 2.Okolo Okno 3.Elegie 4.Podivuhodny Mandarin 5.Jo, to se ti to spi
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