Bedřich Ziegler

* 1961

  • "Of course, they dragged us to the Politická píseň [Festival of Political Song in Sokolov] to improve our reputation, right, because we were guys with long hair, and that wasn't very popular here. It wasn't the real youth, the communist youth. Well - if you want to play, you have to play at the Political Song. So I did it with the boys. And it wasn't just me, there were a lot of musicians there. When I listen to them, even today they mention it a lot. I'm not ashamed of it. It's just that I lived in that time, it had to be that way to continue doing what I enjoyed. So we played all these different prerounds of Political Song. I think some of it was in Domažlice. We got to Sokolov, where we played. And [Michael] Kocáb and his band played before us, too, and it was totally cool. I wonder if anybody's gonna blame him today? It's all just history. That's the way it was, and history can't be undone or changed."

  • "Here in Vary we played in a summer park, it was some festival. And because every musician should be a bit different from the others, something different in front of the audience, I would wear a folding top hat on my head during concerts. It used to be our sound engineer's grandfather's, from the first republic. And he gave me a fiddle to go with it. We played in a summer cinema in Vary. And my guitarist, Karel Idlbek, wore a kimono with Chinese characters. And when we finished playing, the guys in coats came in: 'Come on.' So we went. They took us to the police station in Vary, to the Gestapo, as it was called. And there we were interrogated. And I asked what was going on, and he [the policeman] said, 'How can you allow yourself to portray a representative of bourgeois society in a socialist system?' I was looking at him. I thought it was some kind of a joke. So I told him, 'Look, it's a pity for you, you could write books or something. Or some movies, screenplays.' And that's when I got hit, right? I got hit with a baton. So then, they let us go, and I never put that top hat on my head again."

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    Karlovy Vary, 29.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:32:11
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Do you want to play rock? You have to play at the Festival of Political Song!

Bedřich Ziegler at a concert in the 1980s
Bedřich Ziegler at a concert in the 1980s
zdroj: Witness archive

Rock musician Bedřich Ziegler was born on 16 November 1961 in Karlovy Vary, his mother worked as a saleswoman. After training as an agricultural machinery repairer and car mechanic at STS [Machine Tractor Station - transl.] Toužim, he joined the Jan Becher liquor factory in Karlovy Vary as a driver and wagon driver, where he worked until the 1990s. At the age of seventeen, he began to perform as a singer with the band Atomic. After completing his military service, he continued as a singer in the hard rock band Barock. The band faced normalization censorship regarding song lyrics, clothing during concerts and other manifestations but never permanently lost their permission to perform officially, the so-called playlist. In 1988, the band Barock took part in the pro-regime Festival of Political Song in Sokolov. Bedřich Ziegler remained a member of Barock until 2008 when the band stopped performing publicly. Around that time, he also founded the band Uriah Heep Revival, which plays the legendary British band‘s hits. He is also involved in making concert recordings of younger musicians.