Tomáš Vydra

"My grandmother on my mother's side had an ear for music. I don't have that, but I have a musical sense, I just like listening to music. And actually in that Africa I suddenly started listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, because that's what those people had. Ghanaian music, which is called highlife, is extremely interesting, extremely lively, so it was swirling around. What was interesting was that I went to a local school where I was the only white person, so when the Ashanti King Osei Tutu II died, I was the only white person at the funeral of the Ashanti King because the whole school went there. There were bands that escorted the soul. Those Ashanti funerals were colorful. They had... orange was the color of mourning. The music that was played there - I love the energy. I love going to concerts by young bands. I don't really go to old band concerts, because if I want to see a tired old man, I look in the mirror. But I love the energy that the music gives off. I think that's a wonderful thing. That's where I started with music, I started collecting records. Collecting - that's a stupid term at ten or eleven, but I just had one or two or three records, I had some tapes, some cassettes, and that's what I brought back here. I got some in Holland. Well, this is where I found out there were exchanges. That there's an exchange market every Sunday. And I started going to the exchange market. Which was good, because from time to time the cops would come in, beat us all up, take everything from us, but there was always a market, exchange, every Sunday. It was a complete miracle that basically in the seventies there were illegal exchanges where people would exchange, buy, sell just records of western artists. Every time they broke it up somewhere, it moved somewhere else. There were no cell phones, there was no internet, there was nothing, and yet we all suddenly knew where to go."

"I don't really like movies that describe communism as if it was fun. It wasn't fun. And State Security was anything but a bunch of jerks. They knew very well what they were doing. They were just clinging to the fact that I wasn't yet fifteen, that under the international convention of children they couldn't interrogate me, and that I was actually free to move around. So when I knocked on the door of the cell, they let me out into the corridor. I couldn't go any further than the corridor because there were already other bars there, and there was a guard sitting there, and he wouldn't let me go anywhere. But I could go into the corridor. And I just watched my parents having a hard time, especially my mother, and it left me with this... I realized at that moment that in order to handle this crazy unfreedom, my soul had to become so free that actually my existence would be in sheer rebellion. And I began to provoke them. I found... I asked for a textbook, because I had textbooks there, because I had to take differential exams, because I was still in elementary school and I had to take differential exams to finish that particular class. So I asked for a Russian textbook and I was learning Russian in that hallway. I thought it was wonderful. I don't know if they liked it, they kept looking at me and taking the book. However, I continued my rebelliousness for quite a long time. I didn't follow any orders, I was always boycotting something. I was banned from everything, even from the Spartakiada, because I just stood there during the drill and didn't move at all, so they banned me from it and I didn't practice at the Spartakiada."