Jaromír Tůma

"Of course, if someone had a sister who married in Holland, they were guaranteed a supply of records. Here I have to praise the Czech communists for not confiscating the records, unlike, for example, those of GDR. It was impossible to smuggle a record from the West into the GDR. Yes, some of them came out in their Intershop, similar to Tuzex, but that is different. So, the records had to be obtained and imported. I had to turn to people who went abroad, where I did not actually go, could not. I got some of those permission to go abroad by mistake once and I could go to Holland and the countries around there, but that was it. I was actually in the West and the world – I was catching up with everything in those 1990s. Well, back then it was brought to me by prominent people, mostly sons of communists, who were traveling freely to the West."

"So, I wrote for Melodie, but that was not enough – I started doing the discos. But on the basis of becoming a DJ at the Prague Cultural Centre, I got a freelance job. That was a win! I just did not have any clerks inspecting my profile background, I was free, so to speak, all the way up to 1990, when I started my first job as editor-in-chief of Melodie. So, I was actually free in a way. I did disco dancing and listening. And a rather spicy thing happened to me in those 1970s, that I found my wife at a listening disco. So, I have a disco woman at home, but the joke is that at those listening discos I was playing music for very discerning listeners – no Abba, no Bee Gees, I started straight in with the song Travels to Nihilon by XTC, and I was blasting it up in that way, at those listening discos. And I went into the 1970s, which was a kind of escape for me, because I would go – if I was not playing in Prague, usually during the winter – I would go to Mariánské Lázně, Karlovy Vary, Piešt'any, Harrachov, Špindl [Špindlerův Mlýn – trans.], and I would play at places like that, or I would do tours, not big ones, so that it did not exhaust me too much, and it was a different life. A different world. We were just replacing those bands that stopped coming here again. When we could not see David Bowie live, at least we played him at discos – well, people danced and were grateful. And they looked at me and maybe they saw the Bowie in me."

“Aerosmith was here. We met with them in the backstage. Then they had some press conference in the hotel Jalta in the Wenceslas Square, there were various other media, radio stations, journalists, and so on. And this Steven Tyler, the singer, the one with the big mouth, he is a type similar to Mick Jagger, and he so totally captivated by her, by Tereza, that he said: “Your chewing gum, do you like it?” Because she was interviewing him and chewing a gum at the same time. That was her style. And she replied: ‘Yeah, would you like some? Take it.’ And she turned her mouth to him and he leaned toward her and he pulled the chewing gum from her mouth like this. And all the rivaling TV stations got angry at that moment, because they saw that people would be talking about us again and that this Tereza was noticed one more time again among those people.”

“It was at a time when the Mikrofórum was the first and the only program in the radio which supported the students and those who went on the strike and which broadcast in complete opposition to the whole radio station. And I was broadcasting the music there and my moment came some time around eight o’clock in the evening when the Wenceslas Square really got full of people, because the broadcasting room of Mikrofórum got occupied by the militia, the militia of the radio building, and the director of the radio himself brought them in there, and they said: ‘So from now on you will only broadcast music, and no spoken word.’ Well, that was my moment. I have a list at home of all these songs that I played that night. The songs said it unequivocally with their lyrics.”

“To put it simply, when I came to study at the university in Prague, I was already a bit mature even for my first attempts at articles about music, because the monthly magazine Melodie started to be published at that time, and it was led by the excellent expert Lubomír Dorůžka. And when I wrote to him from Mělník that he had some errors there regarding the singers of pop music, he invited me to show him the mistakes. And in January 1965, to be precise, my first article was published in that magazine. And then the tenth article, and the hundredth, and some time in 1992 I became the editor-in-chief of the Melodie magazine.”