A few days ago your guitarist Michal Brener got married. Are you all married already?
Yes. Michal was the last one, guitarist Petr Lebeda and I got married two years ago and drummer Ondra Štorek in 2016.
How do punk rock and marriage go together?
If we were twenty, it wouldn’t be possible. We lived much wilder until our thirties. Today we are all normal and big boys to whom family life belongs.
We don’t have to go to work every weekday from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, and as our republic is relatively small, we only play on Fridays, Saturdays and sometimes Thursdays. We are pretty much home all week and also our band is already in a position where they don’t have to play all the time
How many children do you have in the band?
Three so far. Ondra has two, I have one.
You started out as a punk rock group. Did punk stay in you?
He stayed and I think he will always be with us. It would have been in us even if we started out as a country band. Punk is an attitude, it’s in the way a person resists the things around, not just the music. Punk doesn’t mix with anything, and that’s how we are. And it doesn’t matter if someone calls what I’ve described punk and someone calls freedom.
When we started, we were looking at the punk rock and neo-punk bands that were active at the turn of the millennium. In them we found musical and life inspiration. Before that, we grew up listening to classic rock bands, Motörhead, AC / DC or Mötley Crüe. It’s mixed in us, but we have punk in us. After all, which of the rock musicians doesn’t have it in?
Personally, you often comment on political events on social networks. How did you come up with it?
I don’t know exactly when the need arose in me, but I have followed politics since I was a child. My parents told me that under the Communists, when the boring parliamentary broadcasts of the time were on TV, I would sit in front of the TV, put small plastic animals in front of me and show what the politicians said about them.
My political opinion was shaped by what I grew up in, the type of parents and grandparents I had, how they lived under the Communists, as well as my adolescence when I sensed what kind of bulls were in power. I have decided and need to comment on the policy.
Rybičky 48 is an allegorical composition inspired by a 1968 song
culture
The most since many fake news came out. It has always been there, but with the advent of social media, anyone can spread it. Years ago, when a man expressed his opinion in a pub, few people heard him. Today you write something on Facebook and the whole world can read it if I cross it.
It started to annoy me that people share stupid things, don’t think about what their content is and still agree with them. Many people confuse truth with opinion. A feeling is not an opinion and an opinion is not the truth. I don’t think she will change anything by commenting on it. But somehow it forces me. Maybe someday I’ll reach a stage where I don’t care. But it would be resignation, and I don’t want it.
Does it upset you?
Not that I get angry, because many times I enjoy myself. But what bothers me most is the human stupidity that accompanies it. It bothers me that some people believe information that doesn’t make sense at first glance. When I see what they are capable of believing, it hits me negatively.
Have you ever had an offer to enter politics?
It had it, at the regional level. But I wouldn’t do it because it would destroy me. In politics, you have to talk to every idiot, even the one whose opinion you don’t recognize at all. And I can’t imagine having to agree on something, for example, with a member of the SPD. If I ever got into politics, maybe I’d hang my bass on a nail. Then maybe I could be mayor somewhere in Kutnohorsk …
But they say you don’t give up rock and roll, you die in it …
That’s right, and it’s not just about rock and roll. I thought about it in connection with the Jára Cimrman Theater. A few years ago I read an interview with the now deceased actor Jaroslav Weigel. In it, he said that not only he, but also other members of the theater often have pain all over the body. However, as soon as they get on stage, the pain subsides and it’s surprising that they don’t do a somersault.
Rybičky 48 in the clip for the song Go home, IvanVideo: band archive
I already feel it too. Sometimes something hurts, but on stage, if it’s nothing extreme, it goes away. When I’m sixty-seventy I’ll tell you if that’s still the case.
Most people perceive the Rybičky 48 band as funny. Do you like this rating?
For example, I also often exaggerate when I tell people that we’re actually a fun band. We all played in these groups when we were young and it was the best school, we adopted a lot of styles, we improved as players. So when people say they like our music about us, they don’t offend me.
Have you ever wanted to convey a more serious message in a song?
I mostly write happy songs for happy people, but since it’s a sad time, I’ve written a lot of series as well. I have them in a drawer at home and we have only released one Two sons of wine.
I knew it wasn’t going to be very successful, even if we tried to knock it out a bit with the music video. And it hasn’t caught on, we don’t even play it at concerts. People just don’t trust us with pop songs and solutions to serious topics. We’re more like going back to our punk roots and making harder songs.
When you were playing punk rock, people didn’t take you very much. How do you remember him?
We listened to Green Day, Blink-182, Sum 41 and bands like that. We wanted to copy them, but as we weren’t very good musicians and didn’t have producers, a kind of Czech version was created. It was pretty rock, but at the time the mainstream didn’t care about punk rock and some punks hated us.
Rybičky 48 in the clip for the song MyVideo: universal music
At the punk festivals we played at, we often quarreled with visitors. We did it, sometimes we gave it to me, however it was sometimes dramatic. But I like to remember that. Today even young punks come to our concerts and tell us that their older brother saw us and that we are simply legends of punk rock. The way I see it is that their older brother fought with us, the younger one listened, and for the younger we are already legends. It is funny.
A few days ago you released the album Jedeme dál. It is made up of singles that have been released before. Will you continue like this?
We will not. We did it for the first time two years ago with a record Individually. At the time, it bothered me a little that we were releasing clips for songs that had been out for two or three years, that is, from released records. With the last one, we said that when we release enough singles, we will put them on an album. We added the songs that each of our band composed and sang to them, so that there was something new.
We have not made such a bonus this year. I have a good relationship with the individual songs, but not with the whole album. From my point of view, it’s already our least favorite record. But only as a concept. There are clouds of songs that I like and we will be playing them for a long time.
Why should people come to your annual concert in Prague’s O2 arena?
It will be a great party not only for us, but above all for the fans who love us. They should be there because they grew up with us and we with them. It won’t be like meeting a friend in a pub somewhere, but like coming to his birthday. The concert was postponed twice due to covid. During that time, we tried to prepare it so that everyone could really enjoy it.
