“The Kinks or Billie Eillish.” That’s exactly what Miro Žbirka answered last October when asked what kind of music he plays when he wants to improve his mood. In those only two chosen names, there was not only a huge overview and desire to follow the news, but also a lifelong devotion to pop in its maximum breadth. The musical form that enchanted him in the sixties and has not released him since. The discipline, which he claimed, among other things, was the only field in which the elderly had something to learn from the young. And few on the Czechoslovak scene had such a great desire to learn and always come up with something new and perceive trends like him.
“The news of my death is TRUE, Mecca would say if he were alive,” the announcement appeared on Wednesday, November 10, on the singer’s social networks. Meanwhile, the report of his death at the age of 69 was confirmed by his immediate surroundings. The Slovak daily Nový čas, which spoke to his wife Katarína, reported that repeated pneumonia was the cause of death. He ended up in the hospital on an infusion a month ago.
Žbirka spent the seventies in the band Modus, but in the eighth decade he stood on his own two feet and his fame began to rise there. The only proof can be that in 1982, apart from Waldemar Matuška, he became only the second singer to disrupt the hegemony of Karel Gott and to win the Golden Nightingale title in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Thanks to his mother, who came from England and met his father during the war in London, he not only gained knowledge of English, but also naturally gravitated towards the British scene. The Beatles started at exactly the age when they could perceive them as an early teenager. And it was exactly the impulse that brought him – and his older brothers – to new, wild music.
He admitted that without the Beatles, he would probably never have become a musician and he would never have had a dream to shoot in the Abbey Road studio, which he fulfilled in 2012. At that time he also lived in Prague for a long time, but remained straddled between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. At the same time, in both countries, he kept looking for suitable teammates and producers from the younger generation, who refreshed his serial albums to varying degrees after 2000.
Žbirka’s career was unique in the domestic environment in that he managed to transfer the current period sound to his albums in a completely non-violent way and excelled in almost every type of song that pop treats. On the one hand, he was a master of touching and sensitive ballads (Ballad of the Wild Birds, Atlantis or What Hurts, It Hurts), and at the same time he was able to write a catchy hit that made the pain forget.
During the eighties, however, he also traded his guitar for keyboards, and echoes of then leading bands such as Depeche Mode, Human League and David Bowie can be heard on records such as Boy from the Street or Fragments of Knowledge. Žbirka accompanies all this with his gentle voice and from the perspective of the observer rather than the actor. Sometimes he experiences unhappy loves (Nice Boy) or short-term relationships (Adriana), sometimes he walks through the city, watches the depopulated streets and perceives the threat of AIDS (I’m sitting at home), other times he votes self-ironically and drops his star status (Glory Drunk, I’m going to PKO).
He had a civilian image of a nerd, striped sweaters, decent glasses and appearance. Or texts full of stylization in the position of an outsider who wonders about the world, does not know what belongs, and trends pass him by. But his music spoke a completely different language – it was full of news and trends.
In some words, Žbirka’s biggest deception was done to the audience, and perhaps by period censorship, with the hit and album Nemoderný chalan from 1984, when he forced them to get an idea of his commonness and old-fashionedness. At the same time, the Czechoslovak pop scene did not know the creator, who was always as happy and consistently modern as he was.
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