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Rock 'n' roll survivors

Prague's original alternative band can still play

By Darrell Jonsson
For The Prague Post
March 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Chadima, left, managed to avoid being thrown in jail.
In the free world during the 1980s, MCH Band’s samizdat cassettes cut the air like a knife. On the liner notes of the 1990 recording, Es Reut Mich F… (Globus International), music critic Josef Vlček describes the group’s sound as “Prague music. The coolness of Gothic cathedrals, richness of Baroque palaces, and the tragicomic atmosphere of the Czech-German-Judaic inhabitants of Prague, stigmatized by Nazi and communist terror.”                                   
MCH Band was the work of Mikoláš Chadima, an upstart ’70s musician who started out playing guitar and saxophone at communist-approved dances and weekend concerts. By the late ’70s, though, Chadima had drifted close enough to the underground to compose songs for his band Extempore with titles like “A Naughty Boy Warned by the Head of the Institute.”
Due to differences in drinking habits, Chadima’s slightly younger age and his inability to worship New York City’s Velvet Underground, he and many of the ’70s and ’80s Czech rock ’n’ roll generation started their own scene, often referred to as Alternativa. Chadima’s MCH Band was on the verge of breaking into the Czech underground, on a concert bill with  Czech underground bands Sanhedrinem and Umělá Hmota, when he received some disturbing news that prompted him to cancel. That was March 17, 1976, the day the Plastic People of the Universe and many of their friends were arrested.
Chadima may not have shared the tastes of his musical elders, but he espoused the same politics. His life didn’t get any easier after he signed Charter 77 in 1979 and nearly found himself imprisoned. Yet, during the ’80s, he and his band pursued a dark, industrial-tinged rock ’n’ roll with an urgency of soul survival. Influenced simultaneously by British progressive rock and jazz of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and over time Frank Zappa, MCH discovered that the best way to stay a step ahead of the law was to frequently change the name of the band.
“As far as I know, nothing quite like the Czech underground existed in [other parts of] the Eastern bloc,” Chadima says, which may be one of the reasons MCH’s music resonated with so much of the post-punk experimentalism happening in the West during the ’80s. MCH Band’s alternative sound fit the niche perfectly where bands like Tuxedo Moon, the Residents, Magma, Art Zoid and the Art Bears were taking eclectic liberties with rock ’n’ roll’s inherent hypnotic dance format.
But MCH was far from enjoying the freedom of its Western counterparts. In 1981, when the band was invited to London, only Chadima was granted a passport. When he performed there, it was with a group of local volunteers. And, on his return to Prague, the secret police promptly confiscated his passport. This was all during a time when, Chadima says, “My band was getting lots of invitations to festivals in the West. In many cases, the organizers were offended when we declined the invitations, because they did not fully understand our inability to travel.”
After a year or so the invitations stopped, and Chadima pursued projects in his home studio, cutting back on the above-ground gigging. What tracks leaked out from Czechoslovakia appeared on international compilations, and met with critical acclaim from magazines such as England’s NME and Spin, Sound Choice and Option in the U.S. Chadima also made a literary splash in the ’80s. His book Alternativa became known as a “samizdat best-seller,” recounting his music career and in the process defining the movement for many Czechoslovak samizdat readers.
Since 1989, it has become much easier to get MCH recordings and hear the band live. Recent concerts have drawn enthusiastic audience response, and with good reason. Chadima’s guitar work has improved, and his band’s capacity to evoke Prague’s singular atmosphere remains intact.
MCH Band

When: Thursday, March 29, at 8
Where: Kaštan
Tickets: 120 Kč, available at the venue

Though MCH has never attained the status of better-known Czech underground groups, the band has had its own notable moments, including what would become Kyiv’s own version of a Velvet Revolution. In December 2004, MCH was invited to perform in Ukraine at Kyiv’s Independence Square for the crowds who had taken to the streets.
Compared to other alternative bands of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, MCH Band’s sound has always been closer to what worldwide listeners expect of Czech rock’s more atmospheric and experimental side. The upcoming concert at Kaštan offers an opportunity to hear a legendary group led by the man who literally wrote the book on Czech Alternativa.

Darrell Jonsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (28/03/2007):

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