2024-09-22 08:58:23
The prose The Sky under Berlin changed the life of the writer Jaroslav Rudiš. At least that’s what he states in the note for this year’s second edition of his debut from 2002. “She forced me to write and wander through history and the present,” notes the author, who later won prestigious awards thanks to other books, some of which he first published in German. a respected Czech-German cultural institution.
His position was sealed when, in August 2021, he accompanied German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his way to Prague by train on his way to a state visit. A month later, the politician awarded Rudiš the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for building bridges between Czechs and Germans.
It doesn’t sound very punk, in contrast to the “dirty” music of the two-member band U-Bahn, which Jaroslav Rudiš forms with guitarist and composer Petr Kružík from the former Priessnitz band from Jesenice. Now, after a long break, he is preparing a series of performances with U-Bahn. First on Sunday in Prague and the following days in Brno, Ostrava and Zlín. The planned Saturday date in České Budějovice was canceled due to floods. The next one will probably take place next spring, because according to Rudiš there is a lot of interest in the current ones.
The writer invented the band U-Bahn in the pages of the prose The Sky Below Berlin and populated it with three fictional characters. The central one is the thirty-year-old Czech teacher and guitarist Petr Bém, who sometime at the turn of the millennium called the principal of the elementary school in Prague’s Jindřišská street and informed him at the beginning of the school year that he would not come to the afternoon meeting, that he would not arrive even tomorrow and never again. He leaves for Berlin by train to try his luck as a street musician.
In the subway at the Weberweise station, he meets a future bandmate, bassist Pancho Dirk. For the Berliner, who wears the inscription Bury me with a guitar on his T-shirt, punk is primarily a means of packing girls. “Just as Hitler’s boys picked up panzerfausts to stop Russian tanks in the streets of Berlin and save the leader, Pancho Dirk picks up a guitar to expose a girl’s heart,” Rudiš characterizes him on the pages of the novel.
The name of the U-Bahn group will be proposed by Pancho Dirk. Not only because he met Bém in the Berlin subway. U-Bahn is said to express everything important for a punk rock band – darkness, noise and speed.
Guitarist Petr Kružík and Jaroslav Rudiš in a photo from 2004. | Photo: Dušan Tománek
For the drums, the two of them get a rather simple hulk called Atom, who, of course, composes the essential song of the novel U-Bahn called Ich bin Berlin. He claims that he wanted to express sharply left-wing, anti-capitalist positions in it. And the Berliner Zeitung writes about her in Rudiš’s fiction that she reflects the aridity and emptiness of the present.
In this way, the writer creates several more songs in his debut prose, which will become real after the release of Nebe pod Berlin in 2002.
Petr Kružík takes Rudiš’s texts from the book and sets them to music – U-Bahn steps out of the novel, becomes part of the real world and starts giving concerts. Sometimes as a support band for Priessnitz, who join U-Bahn when he plays.
U-Bahn’s repertoire is, however, modest. At the author’s reading some ten years ago, Rudiš described it with the words: “We have three songs, once we had four, but we forgot the fourth.”
A few days before the current concerts, however, Aktuálně.cz said that four will definitely play, and maybe there will be five. The basic trio is a remastered 14-year-old recording released this year with the songs Gagarin Pop, Ich bin Berlin and Tunel. The fourth is supposed to be a composition that was not named in the book, but Rudiš has now named it CNN. In it, the novel Pancho Dirk sings that he lost his girlfriend yesterday, his eyes are wet, he feels a little sick, “but the weather is supposed to be better from tomorrow / reports a lady on CNN”. Of course, that girl was taken over by Bém in the Sky below Berlin Dirk.
Rudiš and music
U-Bahn is not the only musical project of writer Jaroslav Rudiš. He most often performs and records with the Kafka Band, with whom he released three albums inspired by the novels of Franz Kafka.
In addition, he released the single The Beautiful Landscape with Zdenek Jurčík and Tomáš Neuwerth from this group this year under the banner of the new project Winterberg. The latter refers to Rudiš’s first novel written in German, Winterberg’s Last Journey, and should result in a full album. Rudiš says that the other prose he is starting to work on will probably also be reflected in him.
Another musical project, Jaromír 99 & The Bombers, on the other hand, the writer considers closed. In 2007, he recorded it with the artist and singer of the Priessnitz band Jaromír Švejdík as a soundtrack to his Bomber comic.
Gagarin Pop, in turn, is tied to the musical inspiration of the novel U-Bahn. In addition to the Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and Joy Division, these were mainly David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Therefore, U-Bahn also had two songs from Pop’s solo debut The Idiot, produced by Bowie, in their repertoire. In the mid-seventies, when this record was made, both Pop and Bowie were living in West Berlin, trying to get rid of their drug addictions.
Rudiš fitted a fictional one to this real event. The uncle of the novel drummer Atom escaped from the GDR to West Berlin, where at the time he met both Pop and Bowie in a vegetable shop. They always went there for the same thing: two liters of milk and a bottle of vodka, Atom says in the book. The uncle once asked them why they didn’t drink orange juice with that vodka, to which Iggy Pop allegedly replied: “Have you ever seen the Milky Way up close?” When the uncle said no, the rocker added that he didn’t either, because everyone can’t be Gagarin.
From a fictional story, a song is born in the novel, telling about strange “shouting” rockets that “swing” in the sky and “Gagarin drinks in one, Iggy Pop in the other”. Dirk shouts to this that “a rocker is looking for love in space”. It is an allusion to the words of the poet and ideologue of the Czech underground Ivan Martin Jirous, known as Magor, that only a rocker creates love.
He would not put such a modest repertoire on a full-length program, so Rudiš calls performances with Kružík “literary concerts”. Accompanied by a guitar accompanied by pre-prepared loops and beats on them, he will therefore read excerpts from The Sky Below Berlin. And they sometimes intersperse them with songs. Like bookmarks.
Video: Single Gagarin Pop by the band U-Bahn
The song Gagarin Pop, as presented by Jaroslav Rudiš under the banner of the U-Bahn project. | Video: Supraphon