Closing Bars

I have decided to place Czech Mate? on hiatus. The blog will remain available for people to read, and there are plans afoot to take this forward in a new direction this later year.

Regular and irregular readers of this blog are welcome to join me as I return to my writing roots:

www.praguejazz.blogspot.com is here.

Happy New Beer!

And so another one rolls around, taking us further along the calendar and further away from all things past and passed. Christmas seems like a distant memory, and it was with great sadness that our tree was taken down. Three weeks after I struggled and fought to get the eight foot beast up the stairs and settled in its stand it still looked as fresh as the first day. So here’s 2008, which will no doubt go even faster than 2007.

I don’t like New Year Resolutions. They smack of the tokenism and conventionalism; two of the very few isms that I don’t wantonly indulge in on a daily basis. If you want to do something just bloody well do it. There’s no need to wait for the calendar to tell you that this is the day that you are going to change your life. I wanted to quit smoking, so I quit smoking. I didn’t need a New June Resolution to do this last summer. If everyone who claimed that they wanted to quit smoking actually grew some balls overnight we could put the patch industry out of business by next Wednesday. And send all those hypno-frauds back to their crooked colleges and sham clinics. Isn’t a world without Paul McKenna worth stubbing it out?

If one is to resolve to do something then it must be something that one is truly resolved to do. In my case I have resolved to drink more beer, or more to the point, more beers. Hopefully, with the support of my friends, a few motivational websites, and a daily refocusing of my life aims, I should be able to do this. It is time to venture along the road less travelled (mainly because most travellers have fallen over into a ditch) and unleash my inner potential. Now where did I put my bottle opener?

The Czech Republic has more than one hundred breweries, all producing different and varied beers. Beer does tend to get a bad rap in many parts of the world. Americans associate beer with kegs and frat parties, where the mentally retarded specimen that is the Average American College Boy tries to funnel some foam before spewing all over a Prom Queen. Even worse, they associate beer with American Budweiser. Most Americans, except those with an appreciation of microbrew, don’t know beer from shit.

Similarly, in Britain, the Real Ale mobs have managed to gain moral superiority because of the simply dreadful array of lagers that are available. Stella Artois is not, as the adverts claim, “reassuringly expensive”. Not unless you get your sense of inner security from having your wallet Hoovered out in return for something closely resembles water, and I mean the freshly passed variety. The less said about Fosters the better. Then there’s Skol. And so the begutted and self-righteous Little Englanders gather to be correct, and enjoy their tepid pints of Old Badger Scrotum and Randy Vicar’s Pants.

Czech beer, of course, is a perfect answer to all this nonsense. Crisp and refreshing lagers, but with a level of flavour and body that would make your Real Aler stroke his beard in genuflection and your Average American College Boy fall over comatose after three sips. However the good stuff can be a real sod to find.

Prague pubs mainly just serve the Big Three. Pilsner Urquell, its slightly lighter sister, Gambrinus, and the Prague brewed Staropramen. All three of these have the distinction of being owned by the multinationals and their future is probably as safe as any native tradition in the hands of white South Africans. There’s also a smattering of Kozel (named after a goat or a tit, depending on who you ask), Czech Budvar (a.k.a. real Budweiser), and some Krušovice and Bernard, but that is about it. Most of the one hundred breweries seem to be missing in action.

Of course these are fine beers, and knock seven shades of the proverbial out of most of the lagers (and indeed any beers) found elsewhere in the world. They are delicious and flavourful, and happily slip down the throat by the gallon, especially when accompanied by some stinky “beer cheese” and cold meat. Pilsner Urquell, when it is served from a big tank rather than the usual kegs, is notably smooth and solid and lacks the excessive bitterness that it can otherwise have. Even Staropramen, which tastes like bleach when served in most London pubs, is presented here in pleasing form.

Best is always preferable to better, and so the search for new beer experiences goes on. Thankfully there are a handful of bars and bottle shops that sell beers from all over the Czech Republic, and it is these that lie at the heart of my beery aspirations for 2008. Here one can easily sample the beers of this country without wandering out of the city. Speciál beers made with more sugar (14s and 16s, as opposed to the usual 10s and 12s) that have more body (and alcohol) than their lighter counterparts. Unfiltered beers with their unmeddled cloudiness, and the once almost extinct half-dark granát brews with their deep red colours. If you get lucky there may be a kvasnicový (yeast) beer on tap, or even the delicious heavy porter that comes from Pardubice. And that is just the start of the list.

And so there it is for 2008. Drink more beers. Not necessarily more beer, because the second plan for this year is to back away from the twin barrels of heart attack and high blood pressure that are currently pointing in my direction, but more beers. More variety. More taste. And in case you think I’m just a drunk looking for an excuse, more cultural understanding. (Beer is required for understanding… no point trying to get me to understand places like Africa until they have beer. I think they need water first though).

And so a slightly belated Happy New Beer to all of you out there, on the other side of the interweb. I’m off to drink a bottle of granát from the Černá Hora brewery. I bet you wish you were too.

The End Of The Road?

And so I sit here, nursing a bit of a hangover and hoping that the unsettled queasy feeling in my gut will die down, trying to take stock. The end of 2007 is fast approaching, and it is almost a whole year since we threw all our possessions into the back of a van and headed out across mainland Europe. The fears of that time have not gone away, and sometimes they catch me by surprise in the darkest hours of the night. The sorting, the shifting, the loading. Wondering if the last one to leave really did turn out the lights. The sound of a door closing for the final time. The spectre of grand failure still stalks the gloomy corners of my mind. Stupid of course, because I didn’t fail and it all worked out. But now, as I pull (or am pulled?) back from the ledge, I can bring myself to stare down into the abyss for the first time. There was a long, long way to fall.

The travelling man and the road make good companions. I have always travelled, and enjoyed the journey. Childhood flights to Serbia, or pounding up and down the motorways of Britain in search of cooler and louder rock music, I have always had somewhere else to go. A transatlantic, pan-European and Baltic-edged wanderer, I know that I do not count as a real traveller in some eyes. It is very true that I have never gone seeking pygmies in the jungle or trekked barefoot to an enclave for African lesbian single mothers in order to buy some fair-trade beadwork, and I am not ashamed to say that I probably never will. My self loathing is brooding and brutal, but I have not yet denounced my middle-class white prattishness to the point of wanting to live without a flushing toilet in order to say sorry for slavery. There is beauty in civilisation as well as in wilderness, and the constructs of man are something to be proud of. This is especially true in the case of bars and luxury hotels.

As we chugged through France, Belgium and Germany almost twelve months ago, through the falling snow that was deep and crisp and very bloody uneven if you weren’t behind a gritter, all signs pointed to Prague. It was our final stop on this epic jaunt, but was it really the end of the road or just another stop on the long journey home?

Prague is pretty much at the centre of Central Europe. Destinations lie in all directions, and usually at the end of a motorway or railway line. It is hard to break out of the island mentality, and often I still find myself slightly bemused by the fact the going abroad involves nothing more than heading off down the road. There are no planes or boats to signify that you are going into foreign and strange lands; just a bit of a queue at a motorway booth. Even then, the sight of a British passport in Christian hands doesn’t attract much more than a wave onwards. Onwards down the road.

This summer we took such a trip, piling on the miles as we headed east into Moravia, before going Pole-side and stopping off in Krakow. Then south to Budapest and Novi Sad, before a shortcut across the corner of Austria in order to reach Bratislava. Český Krumlov, an idyllic town in South Bohemia with cutesy towers and majestic stonework, was the final port of call before driving back into Prague once again.

These places had their joys for sure. From what little I can remember it was good to see Gina’s family in Olomouc. Krakow was stunning, and had lots of women with whips in charge of horses. Budapest is majestic but nothing there (including the traffic, the hotels, the subway, and the toilets) works. Novi Sad was a sentimental return journey to homelands after a seventeen year absence. Bratislava was sweet but too small to live in. Český Krumlov is a UNESCO toy town, and wherever you go you are never more than one metre from at least fifty Japs loaded up with cameras and those strange masks they wear to protect themselves from airborne diseases that might make them grow or something. Time to click them ruby slippers.

There’s no place like home, so they say. If only it was always so simple working out where home actually is. During that spin around Europe we went to places that are hailed for their beauty and majesty and all round perfect loveliness. Enthused over endlessly they are of course amongst the jewels in Europe’s crown. But none of them, with the possible exception of Novi Sad, felt like it could ever be home. Similarly, two days back in the UK in summer made me realise that there was no going back in that direction. If I ever return to Britain on a permanent basis it will most likely be both in a box and against my final wishes.

We also travel on a smaller scale around the Czech Republic, such as following the hallowed steps of St Michael of Palin to the stone colonnades and spa waters of Karlovy Vary. Beautiful, especially in the snow, but not home. Trips to away Slavia hockey games take us to towns and cities spread widely on the map. It is fair to say that you maybe don’t see that much when you’re busy swigging whisky from the jar on a train to Pardubice, but still I’m glad that it was a return ticket.

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and deck your balls with howls of folly, and other such things. The road reaches out to us all calling us onwards, but for once its charms fail to entice. It has been a long year, and although there may be many journeys awaiting us in 2008 they will end as well as start here. I may go back to the former Yugoslavia to die one day, but hopefully I have a good few years left in me before I have to have to start scouring the International pages of the Times Educational Supplement once more.

As I attempt to heal the hangover with my first svařák of the day I wonder if for all my fears and foolishness I did manage to find what I was looking for. I was braced for failure but less so for success. Can I allow myself to accept that this really is the end of the road?

Merry Christmas to you all…

Masquerade: The Confessions of a Prague Gig-olo

I have been going to see live music for more years than I care to remember, and seriously frequenting gigs since I moved to London in 1995. Never has a Yes tour gone by since then without my suitcases getting some action. Good music has taken me around the world, brought me friends, tempered my moods, and given me a sense of smug superiority over those who listen to punk, hippity-hop poor-man shooting tunes, and other such unmelodious and worthless dirges.

Prague is a city that holds much good music. It is also a city where I can afford to go and see it; pay witness to the act, as it were. Some might call what follows pictures at an exhibition. Or merely things that go to make up a life…


Stan the Man plays loudly and drowns out the yammering Yanks in the bar. He has the longest running blues gig in this city, as you can not fail to know from the press cuttings outside the club. One dose and you see why. His assault on the strings has the sort of fire that you only see in a musician that hasn’t made it rich. His face tells the story. The words, when audible, just highlight. The feeling is all within. Alongside him the drums and bass are to music what drum’n’bass isn’t. Controlled power. With his cap slung over the statue and the naked lady peering over his shoulder there is no room for youth worship and fashion parades here. At least not on the stage.

They sit close but apart, and her long blonde hair falls down over her shoulders. It’s a tight black dress occasion; the sort that is not designed to be worn for long. During the interval he goes to the guitarist in the bar. A nudge, a wink, a whisper. Returning to his seat he heaves his portly gut in behind the table and smiles a pathetic empty smile; a smile as empty as her dead-ahead stare. A song, a dedication… time for the slow one. The sort of song that would suck if Eric Clapton played it. But Stan is real aching blues, not Range Rover Rock for fat ex-Yuppies from Surrey. The crowd turns to peer at the couple. A nudge, a wink, a whisper. I try to read her eyes. It pays better than working in a shop. Some nights will be okay. This one probably not. As she passes men on the staircase she looks up… part SOS, part “for rent” sign. The band plays hard and loud, still roaring, still aching, still drowning.

Drowning in bodies, it felt like sometimes. About eighteen thousand of them, all turning up to see Roger Waters play Dark Side of the Moon. The moon was about the only place that they hadn’t come from. Central Europe in the EU era is a good place for old rockers. Border restrictions are gone. The lines on the map have quit moving from side to side. For now at least. Everyone can pile in and listen to the illicit and subversive words of the man who built a Wall and then tore it down to escape the madness. It was hard to turn without walking straight into a Polish flag.

A long wait. In my case five hours. My feet hurt. Next time get a seat. Flying pigs, lasers, smoke bombs galore. A snarl at Bush and a gripe at Maggie. The backing singers hit the mark. Andy Fairweather-Low, unrecognisable from his teen-idol days, played a mean guitar. No beer is allowed on the stadium floor. Bugger. Someone holds my place while I go to the bar before the show starts. Don’t even bother at the interval. No way to get back. Smoking is banned but that doesn’t stop the pothead who keep lighting up when the more psychedelic tunes get aired. He’s being careful. He knows that he could get chucked out. He also knows that he could get torn apart by all the reformed hippies who haven’t touched the stuff for years but would kill him and ten others for a single drag during Shine On. I look hard for him.

I looked hard for about two hours. Where was the bloody noise coming from? I could hear it from the flat… the unmistakable din of a drummer’s soundcheck. Bang! Bang! Thud! Crump! Bang! A din that it is normally advisable to run away from, but just where was it? It wasn’t behind the school, down the road, through the tunnel, or behind the hill. But it was getting louder. I should have looked up sooner… up Žižkov Hill to be precise. It’s a long climb and you need a beer when you get to the top. It’s a good job that there was an outdoor beer and rock festival up there that day. It had lots of food, and market stalls, and lots of standing around in the sun, overlooking Prague, and drinking beer. Then the Led Zep tribute band walked on. An American girl screamed wildly then apologised afterwards. Beards reverberated knowingly in unison. Immigrant Song brought back memories of teacher training, and the night I blew my voice watching Robert Plant with my elbows on the stage and a busy day to follow. They were pretty cool. The big crowd liked it. Then we went back and stood in the sun and drank beer some more.

Standing in the sun drinking beer is good fun. When you’re doing it in the name of not being a Communist git then it is even better. Letná Plain, the vast expanse of flat land that lies atop the city and across the road from the home ground of Sparta Praha, used to be the Red parade ground. It was there that the loyals would march and celebrate the workers' paradise that hadn’t killed them yet. Now, to the irritation of those who miss a bit of Saturday night purgin’, the capitalists have crashed the party. On the first of May, when lefty dimwits around the world still see fit to go out and look untidy in the name of the people, those who gather on Letná are moderately right. In more ways than one.

Nika Diamant opened with her band. The spring breeze did its usual spring breeze thing and billowed playfully around the curtains at the side of the stage. Curtains sponsored incidentally by Bernard beer who were supporting this event. It is a good beer that helps out at anti-communist rallies. I drink a lot of it and you should too.

The crowd moved forward, away from the stands and stalls and anti-Chinese petitions, to listen to the music. Without the confines of an indoors the sound rang out clear of echo or distortion… sultry rhythms and jazz standards. Finger clicks and tasty licks. Cool on a hot day. I saw her in a club the month later, when I was sitting at my usual table. You can find me there by the piano. The stage was much smaller but her voice was just as big as before.

I like that table. It’s almost on the stage if there was a stage. More honestly it is on the bit of floor where the musicians stand. “In your face”, as our less-educated cousins would exclaim. I don’t want to stare at the back of your head. If I wanted to do that I would follow you down the street. I don’t want to hear your voice. If I wanted to do that I would give a damn what you say. Most of all I don’t want you to distract me. If I wanted distraction I would get a go-go dancer. I don’t even want perfect sound. For that I can buy the record. I want to be close. I want to feel the music. I want to hear the slide of fingers on guitar strings, and wince in pain at the effort on a double bass. I want to hear the click of a dropped stick and the muffed laugh of the pianist as he hits a bum one when snoozing in his solo. The breathy count of the chanteuse as she ushers in the tempo. The growl of the bluesman and the silent curse of the perfectionist. Anything but the bullshit of the expats.

I asked the girlfriend of one musician why they only spoke in English on stage. Only tourists come here, she said. It’s a show for tourists. She said this in the interval of a session when her bloke’s band bent a few lesser laws of physics exploring the darker regions of the jazziverse. If this is what they do for the tourists then I’d like to see what they do when they mean it.

The drummer meant it on Thursday. Hitting the skins for Miriam Bayle, whose voice sounds a lot more exotic than her name, he was a tricksy little bugger. Never the same way twice as the saying goes. Never the same one once the joker could retort. They got a trumpeter to sit in and started playing Thelonious Monk for kicks. It kicked. It was her own arrangement. That’s what they do around here. It’s called talent. I’d like some.

They played Masquerade… yes that one the Carpenters did… in an arrangement that twisted and turned. I last heard that song in Budapest. It was a hot night and everyone was sitting outside. The waitress was friendly so I pretended to like the beer. Inside, to an audience of nothingness, a group of guys jammed to cover the awkward silences and bovine chewing of the punters. They played Masquerade too… fooling around and improvising and getting lost and finding the way… for about twenty minutes. They were playing for themselves and I doubt they knew that anyone was actually listening. But out there, on the eve of a sentimental journey, at least one person was…

Where Time Has No Meaning

It is a place where nobody ever wishes you a “good morning” or a “good evening”. You are never blessed for a “good night” because nobody knows if you’re about to have a night, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. All hours of the clock are equal, and equally blind, and equally bland. Character and personality are ripped away from the face of the dial. Two in the morning is no longer the time of the lonely grope for the gin bottle, and six is no longer a call to arms for the jiggling joggers and their horribly coloured trousers. There is no time for work, break, dinner, fooling around, or kicking-out. But you always know the time.

Resistance is not useless. I have resisted and I do not have British television channels piped, beamed or slingboxed to my particular and personal corner of a foreign field. Not even the international hotel fodder delivered to English speaking runaways around the globe makes it through. I have no CNN (but this will change if there’s another cool war – they always get the best tank footage), no BBC News 24 (this won’t change – it sucks), and even no Fashion TV (the poor man’s nudie channel). Most of all, however, I have no BBC Prime – the channel where “nation shall speak mediocrity and endless repeats unto nation”. It is not that I wouldn’t watch it. I would, for a million hours a day. And then I’d spend the other million bitching about the fact that it was all mediocrity and endless repeats. The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s hardly worth the effort of shifting countries. At least watching endless Czech sport I am picking up a few Czech phrases. Education, and all that.

Instead, for English news (I never know when the next flood, plague, election, or other amusing catastrophe is going to hit the UK) I turn back to the radio, and the BBC World Service – the place where time has no meaning. The World Service is no stranger to British shores. Its edited highlights and news bulletins fill the hours when BBC Radio 4 takes a nightly power-nap to recover from the day’s deeply deep thoughts and importantly important insights. Like Gardener’s World. And so in thousands of minds an association forms; a union of pathos that binds Ol’ Blighty’s insomniacs, early risers, and dirty stop-outs. You know you’re up late. You know its dark outside. You probably know where the gin is.

Listening to the World Service out in the badlands of the World itself there are no such ties that bind. My evening listening is the background to somebody else’s breakfast. He missed it because he was at work. She missed it because she was in bed. They missed it because they have BBC Prime and were watching “Hetty Wainthropp Investigates” again. But it is alright, because there are plenty of repeats, scatter-gunned around the clock to make sure that everyone gets a clear chance at listening. You never know when you will get to hear once more that hour long special on jellyfish or some feminist dim-bulb claiming that men forced women to have regular periods. In either case, “never” would be too soon for me.

There is no point listening to the World Service for much of its content, unless you are particularly interested in the disgruntled views of the African public or the type of “world music” that makes you want a either a curry or a shotgun. I don’t get it: Chicago in part of the world so why not play some damn blues and cut it out with the Amazonian Butt Flute? The news, in the absence of any other source of information, is adequate. World Drama sometimes has a plot. Sport coverage is surprisingly decent. It’s not all bad, but that’s not the point.

Just as we all look up and see the same Sun, and as such people who live thousands of miles apart can see the exactly same object before them, so this global broadcast reaches out over and above the distances that we normally live our lives by. It crosses the time zones more thoughtlessly then we cross the road.

For right or for wrong there is not much in the way of social unity in 2007. This is not all bad. Too many people thinking the same way usually causes trouble. It’s nice to have friends and be loved and all that sort of stuff, but we’re all individuals these days, so go away, keep your nose out of my business, your doctrine to yourself, and your bloody hand out of my wallet.

It is in this (ever warming) climate that the BBC World Service provides a point of unity and commonality. It does not matter what time of day it is. It doesn’t matter that I’m getting up for work and you are getting dressed for a date. It doesn’t matter if you’re hitting the books and I’m hitting the booze. The time in GMT is rigorously monitored, but like hooks with nothing to hang on them, these bulletins are more curio than command. There is no morning or evening, no night and day. Just numbers keeping account of themselves.

It does not matter what country you live in, what colour you are, what you believe in, and how you voted last time round. It is irrelevant how much you earn or what car you drive or how big your house is or what your wife looks like or how many wives you have. We’re all different but we’re all the same. Humanity stands together. We’re all listening to the same sound. We’re all drinking from the same well. We’re all digging the same vibe. For once, no matter what time of day it is to us, we’re all thinking the same thing.

“How much does satellite telly cost anyway?”