Who is Brutus?

I nodded.It was certainly not the only case.Brutus, that is a great legend of Czech dancers. Almost every week, he goes to Czech towns and villages on the weekend to spread joy, good mood and perhaps also a taste for beer. It flows into you, you don’t even know how. I’ve experienced it myself. We, music journalists, look down on them a bit, for us it’s too big a folk song, something that has replaced the brass band in the falconry and culture clubs. We look for art and new trends, but Brutus stands his ground. For your old…

Brutus is originally a rock band from Kraków, usually classified in the genre today somewhat contemptuously referred to as “agro-metal”, which, along with Kabat, is frequented by mostly regional bands of a hard rock character, based on the rock tradition of the seventies, mostly active at local parties. Brutus has eleven albums to his credit,on which we can find a number of songs that have become popular over the years. The group also appeared in Czech cinematography – first in Saša Gedeon’s film Indian Summer (1995), in which their romantic suicide anthem Půjdeme spone do nebe was a great success. We can hear a fragment of the song Zabda se me as a ringtone in every rerun of the new series Comeback, and another hit Gorilla appears in Prušinovský’s series Okresní přebor.And that’s not all – in the movie Two Brides and One Wedding (2018) there are seven Brutusák songs, and even the Rávkoné phenomenon makes an appearance in it. The ensemble will celebrate fifty-nine years of existence this December! Almost fifty musicians took turns in it (and in its historical transformations).

Mandragora or How it all began

The story of Brutus begins on Christmas 1966 in the newly established crayfish group mandragora. The four nineteen-year-old boys performed for the first time in the summer of the following year with a repertoire similar to that played by the beginning groups in Prague at the time – something from the Beatles, something from the Rolling Stones, Animals, The Kinks. Over time, when the musicians had won a little, they reached for the then progressively oriented rock repertoire. And to that, also like in the whole contry, they added a few of their own, from today’s point of view, skeletal compositions. But in the countryside it was a little different than in Prague. What was the point of playing cream or Vanilla Fudge when the only occasions to play were dance parties? Like many Czech bands, Mandragora experienced a wave of departures and arrivals of musicians, further strengthened by the fact that sometime in 1971 the “hunt for big beats” began, a systematic action by the security and party authorities to eliminate rock music in Czechoslovakia and the associated circle of “problematic youth”.

Guitarist Míša Pleska, who was considered the central figure of the band, left to play elsewhere, he even spent some time in the same band with the up-and-coming Jiří Schellinger, but eventually ended up in a bar band with which he also traveled abroad.Once he did not return from such an event and ended up in Chicago, where he still lives today. And since there was not the only person in the circle of people who gave a thumbs up to the normalizing Czechoslovakia, it did not reflect very well for the district party cultural bodies at Mandragora.

Mandrake got a kick out of it. It must be said that at that time such decisions were not given in writing. Just simply the body in question, whet

The Story of Brutus and Kyklop

The band Brutus faced challenges in Czechoslovakia during the 1980s. Their first official performance was on November 1, 1982, at the Žižkov cultural house Na Chmelnice, alongside the band Arakain.

“Aleš Brichta called me,” says band member Hasal, recalling a funny story. “He said, ‘Look, we need to make things easier for the commission. They’ll give the band a plate of sandwiches if we don’t ask for a bottle.’ So I called Dědek Plesk, and he said, ‘A bottle? then buy them a bottle of pickles!’ The jury laughed a lot, but we did it, with the condition that we wouldn’t be called Brutus. So they quickly came up with the name Cyclops. It didn’t help us, though.”

Trouble After Trouble

The band’s troubles didn’t end there. When news spread in Rakovník that Brutus was performing under the name Kyklop, the director of the local District Cultural Center, vladimír Majer, warned a colleague in Prague-East about the band. This letter, found on dvorana-rakovnik.cz,is a rare example of documents ofen destroyed after November 1989. the letter’s evaluation of the band’s lyrics is especially noteworthy: “Their lyrics focused on alcohol, sex, enjoying life’s simple pleasures, sadness, fear, forgetting, vulgar language, and double meanings – all very problematic.”

This report worried officials, even in the more liberal Prague-East. It took almost a year to resolve the issue.while no one fully understood Perestroika, everyone feared that bans could be reinstated. Kyklop faced another setback in 1986, being banned for six months for playing unapproved songs at a concert near Pardubice. At that time, only songs approved by the Cultural Center or another ensemble founder could be performed. “Plainclothes police came, likely after a tip-off, and recorded us. There was a lot of discussion, and we didn’t play for si…