Stanislav Pilík

"We were named after our band leader, whose last name was Moucha. We didn't speak English at all - but maybe that might be correct. We called ourselves Moucha's Detective Agency. But I say that not to laugh at the name, but at what happened later. Because those bands were allowed to play, but we had to have what they called playthroughs where they tested us to see how much we could do and if we could play for the public. That's an interesting thing too, because that doesn't exist now. You play, you have an audience, you have maybe money to start up, you get some sponsors or you get something and it's your own business, your own private activity. Not then, the authorities were monitoring it. And if you wanted to have a band, you had to have patronage. So we had Socialist Youth Union (SSM) as our patronage, that's why we were in SSM - so we could have a band. Otherwise, of course, we wouldn't have been there. But in order to have a band, we had to be members of SSM. So we had the SSM as patronage, and when they did the playthroughs, the jury were guys who played trumpets and saxophones in the brass band. We just hated the brass band at that time. We were all like youth forward, rock 'n' roll, Presley, Beatles and so on." - "Did those playthroughs include interviews about politics?" - "Well, I have a friend Saša Pleska from Brutus who still plays. We used to go to school with him by bus to Florenc, and sometimes he would come with me and say, Sláva, read this, what do they have against the lyrics? Look, I'm supposed to cross it out!´ I said: 'There's no swear word in there.´ I can't remember what the text was... But it just seemed inappropriate to someone on the committee he was going to. He's the frontman of a band called Brutus, which is very well known, they were in the film and so on. He had a lot of dirty words elsewhere, but he said, 'The didn´t cut out of that.'And as I mentioned our name, we started playing in about ninety-six, when I was going to university, or we were starting at secondary school, and sometime in seventy or seventy-one, it came up that we weren't allowed to have an English name. Brutus was not allowed to have a Latin name - because he was actually an emperor from the West Country, from Italy, from Rome. Brutus, wasn't it - Even you, Brutus! They had to change their name to Cyclop. Terrible, when you realise what it is, it's hard to believe. And we had to rename ourselves because we weren't allowed to have an English name - so we renamed ourselves Moucha's detektivní kancelář."

"He was just giving it away[František Kriegel's speech at the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's Central Committee congress on 31 May 1969], and maybe those people gave it away again. Then one day we were sitting in the living room, he was smoking again, we were watching some TV show or something, I don't know what it was, I was with my parents - I don't even know where Hanka was. Yeah, Hanka was in the school residence, because she was training at school to be a seamstress and she was in Vansdorf, I think, so she wasn't at home. And we're sitting in this living room and all of a sudden the doorbell rings. Mum goes to the door to look - and I just stared. Ten guys, half of them had leather coats down to the floor. It reminded me terribly of the films they used to show us, propaganda films about the Germans. So they looked exactly the same - like in those Nazi movies. It is still getting to me now. It was such a shock. They came into the living room and said: Are you Zdeněk Brabec? You're coming with us. No explanation. And we did not see him again."