"The most successful and most critically acclaimed Brno band of the 1980s was formed during 1985 as a conceptual project of a wild folk singer and art history student Petr Váša, with the aim of interpreting the eponymous song cycle with the subtitle ´A set of incantations intended to evoke the evil spirits of industrial diseases´," wrote Josef "Zub" Vlček in a nice introduction to his article about the band in the monthly Gramorevue (1988).



Petr Váša played in 1982-84 with the Uzený koleno band , occasionally performed at ZUČ shows with just an acoustic guitar, and in 1985 with the "association of folk musicians for rock opera" he produced the operetta "Pale Girl with Dalaman". His hyperactivity was unstoppable, so it was only a matter of time before he formed a rock ensemble to capitalize on and interpret his musical and lyrical ideas and expressive ability.

In the series Bigbit, Petr Váša says: "I imagined something simple, rather austere, something that, unlike that dreamlike position, would be so close to real life that it would be almost like real life itself." And further: "I wanted to do something like my personal mythology. A sort of pantheon of the deities of that rotting late communism."

In 1985, he finally got the musicians he needed, and the original trio Z kopce was formed (it is perhaps interesting that the name was chosen after the leaning chimney on a house in Brno). The line-up of Petr Váša (voc, g), Pavel Koudelka (ds) and Ales Svoboda (bg) went out into the world with a nervous, nervous bigbeat that eventually won the same number of enthusiastic admirers as those who couldn’t stand it because of its intellectualism (Váša’s intention).

Musical publicity Vojtěch Lindaur describes Z kopce in the magazine Rock & Pop (2001) (abridged): ’The controversial student of the Faculty of Philosophy, wearing a pair of fangs that supposedly once belonged to Milan Chladil, had anger and defiance blazing from his eyes, and words rushing out of his mouth, naming everything that prevented us from behaving like human beings at the time: imposed boredom, neurotic restlessness, rampant indifference, cynicism, pub bullshit, purposeless survival from day to day... The musical order, especially the overwhelming and unpredictable rhythm with many changes of tempo, unexpected bursts of percussion, reminded me at times of Psí vojáky (Dog Soldiers), only instead of the piano Petr Váša struggled with the guitar in a very anarchic way. "



True words. The ensemble’s music was a tangle of rhythmic and dynamic changes and twists, shouts and ironic grins, hauntings and parodies. Only in the hints were your patterns legible. There was a mixture of the enthusiasm for the rhythm & blues of the 60s and the influence of the new wave of the early 80s. Vojtěch Lindaur in the magazine Rock & Pop (2001) reminds us: "Z kopce not only had nothing musically, formally or ideologically in common with the Czech underground, but they also differed significantly from the Brno bands associated under the banner of Valná Hromada." The agile Lenka Zogatová ensured the interconnection with these bands. "The manager Lenka Zogatová really connected us," says Petr Váša for MF Dnes (2001). "She was open-minded and didn’t allow any boundaries between Bitta, Z Kopce or Kokoliou... Sometimes she ordered a bus and all the Brno bands went somewhere to the festival."



The ensemble was also characterized by a surprising instrumental maturity - Váša’s original guitar playing, without boxes and with a clear sound, without classical solos, was easily recognizable. At first glance, spastic and nervous, but basically precise - it all stemmed from the complexity of Váša’s expression, the way he affected the audience. One moment a prehistoric shaman, cursing the microphone, one moment a shy orc, one moment a "Zappa" ironist and one moment an inmate of a mental institution.

But it wasn’t just Váša who was downhill. Jiří Tlach writes in his book Eccentrics on the Ground Floor: "The fact that Váša is the sole author of the lyrics and melodies, and moreover their interpreter, makes the result very dense and homogeneous. Behind him is a rhythm section (Koudelka, Svoboda) of seemingly impersonal musicians, but only at first hearing. From the multitude of miniature riffs, frills and frills, one can suspect that the rhythm section is not the work of casually hired friends, interchangeable during two rehearsals for any other, but of fully fledged musicians, involved in the arrangement, completion of the songs and, above all, espousing the same opinion as the protagonist of the group. They deliberately keep in the background and let your demonic delivery stand out."

Of course, despite this comment, the audience came mainly to see Váša - his raw expressive delivery, the deliberately exaggerated theatricality of his convulsive gestures, the quick change of the figure of a gentle ironist into a cauldron about to explode - this was the gusto of Z kopce concerts. The most popular pieces were, for example, „Hodiny u klavíru“, „Nuda“, „Z kopce“, „Ono to nejde“, „1000 způsobů“ and „Pohyblivé cíle“.

In the autumn of 1986, personnel changes took place. By then the ensemble had already completed its first programme, which "dealt with the problem of boredom as a significant characteristic of certain strata of youth" and the title of Rockfest laureate Svoboda was retired to the army and his replacement was the "elegiac with glasses" bassist and pianist Pavel Zemla. A little later, violinist Vojtech Kupcik started to work with the group (and eventually became a member). The concert programme was expanded with other compositions thematically devoted to the influence of the media on the lives of young people.

In 1987, the band again became the laureate of Rockfest, which was spicy mainly because between the two Rockfests the Bolshevik mocipans forbade the "kickers" to play. Váša reacted to the general bans and problems with the Power in the Bigbeat series : "This was no longer the 50s, 60s, or even 70s. It was no longer anything. That was no longer a quarrel or a lifestyle dispute. All that repression was so grotesque now that even that shit didn’t have the juice anymore."

So he and his bandmates founded their side project Ošklid (line-up: Váša, Koudelka, Žemla, Kupčík + Michal Zavadil - vocal, Tomáš Frgala - vocal, Ivana Lukášová - bvoc, Jana Klimečková - bvoc, František Máchal - tp, Jiří Salajka - vocal, perc), in which they presented to the audience in a somewhat different way basically the same thing - another analysis of "civilization diseases". The inspiration for the title came from his visit to a nudist beach in Bulgaria. "I waslooking at these piles of flesh and I thought, ’My God, I never thought people were so ugly,’" he said in Profiles of Rockfest (1988). Ugliness is merely an aesthetic category, nothing more... Ugliness is essentially about how human things become exclusively a matter of touch and smell, boy-girl relationships a matter of protein interaction, and social relationships a matter of practical violence. The ugly mass of people also aroused in me the idea of a mass, rich sound."



In many ways, Ugly was far more experimental and somewhat distant from what one might think of as rock. Melodia (1987) says: "The very short, absurd lyrics stand out thanks to the complex arrangements of the vocals. The singers usually take turns on a syllable-by-syllable basis, which was most pronounced in the song ’I’m an ugly person’..." In other pieces, the ensemble sometimes sang a capella, with individual voices intermingling and overlapping, in effect creating a kind of verbal collage. "A number of my colleagues say that this is the cruelest and most sophisticated band this area has seen in our country," writes "Zub" Vlček in Profiles of Rockfest (1988). In rock we are mostly (and thanks to metal more and more) used to pathetic, accusatory or denunciatory speech, so the coldness of Ošklid may seem cynical or at least unsentimentally harsh for that very reason. But is it really?"

Above all, Prune was a kind of antithesis to your basic formation. His cold, detached, sometimes even unpleasant music with lyrics that seemed to be barked by some human robots was far from the emotional big beat of Z kopce.



But to return to Z kopce: as far as concerts were concerned, the band performed quite often - they were invited to various shows. Apart from Rockfests, they were invited to the festival in Lipnice n. Sázavou (1987) and to the Wallachian Spalice. Apart from singles for Panton (Rock Debut edition), an LP album was recorded, with Jiri Chmelař (vcl) as a guest. Then Zemla and Koudelka left for the army, but soon even Váša could be seen in the green clothes of a soldier graduate. He disbanded Z Kopce in the nineties, as he felt that the group had said everything it wanted to say, and devoted himself to other activities, which initially included playing in the revivalist Ananas Beat and later diving into the so-called physical poetry, which he did practically throughout the nineties.

In a final assessment, we could quote Vojtěch Lindaur in his review of the newly released live recordings of Z kopce (Rock & Pop, 2001): "When Z kopce first took to the stages of Prague clubs, they became a kind of ’ideological’ base for a new generation of rock critics, an unprecedented example from which they derived and formulated new aesthetic evaluations of rock music."

Perhaps just a small addition to this - if we were looking for someone in the second half of the 1980s who could be described as a kind of "spokesman for the new generation", the first person we would think of would be Petr Váša.