THE BEATLES

BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

 

(How a Phenomenon Called the Beatles Took Root during the 1960s in Czechoslovakia)

 

© Vladimír Tučapský, 2010

 

1962-70

 

During the period around 1960 Czechoslovakia, surrounded both geographically and ideologically by countries of the Soviet block on most sides and, on the west, by the Iron Curtain, experienced a certain political and social loosening whose consequences were perceptible especially in the sphere of culture. The offering of books and periodicals was broadened, theatres both large and small expanded their repertoire, films were made that were more personally distinctive, and subjects previously taboo were opened for discussion. Within a short time the influence of rock and roll was felt in Czech dance music. Whoever attended dances, ‘teas at five’, or concerts by big beat groups (and who ideally lived in Prague) could form a quite clear idea of modern musical trends.

 

In the autumn of 1962 the Beatles, having a fresh contract with the EMI recording company in their pockets and a new drummer named Ringo Starr, launched their mega-successful career by recording hits, giving concerts, and appearing on radio and television. It was on radio waves that their songs first flew into Czechoslovakia: the foreign station listened to most frequently was Radio Luxembourg. To this day musicians of Czech bands founded at that time have touching memories of how, with an ear to the radio receiver, they made written transcriptions of hits like ‘Love Me Do’ (a single released in October 1962), ‘Please Please Me’ (January 1963), and ‘From Me To You’ (April 1963) with chords that sounded similar.

 

We shall probably never learn when it was that Czech radio first broadcast a song by the foursome from Liverpool, or which one it was. Programs devoted systematically to music of this type were just slowly coming into being at the time. The legendary hit parade of the married couple Miroslava and Jiří Černý called Houpačka (The Swing) began to be broadcast in December 1964, and in July of the following year radio offered a new program for youth called Mikrofórum, whose main agenda included presentation of current trends in pop music. The more courageous wrote for a song to Radio Free Europe. Whoever had a tape recorder ready next to a radio tuned to the right frequency could make recordings that had not been officially released in our country. Big beat bands, usually overlooked and underrated, were defended by the weekly magazine Mladý svět (Young World) and then also by Melodie, born in 1963.

 

A thorough search through printed matter from 1963 would certainly find the first instance of the word ‘Beatles’ set by a Czech typesetter and then printed; it was probably in an inconspicuous newspaper report about a strange phenomenon to which the British media were devoting such unprecedented attention. In November 1963 an extensive article by the Czech film director Jiří Weiss expressing his impressions from Britain appeared in Literární noviny (Literary News) under the title ‘Neuvěřitelná Británie’ (Unbelievable Britain). Weiss mentioned ‘the newest jazz group, which has become the idol of English youth’, and conveyed in his own words the experiences of his host’s daughter Daisy who attended a concert by the Beatles: ‘The Brouci [= ‘beetles’, or ‘bugs’] have straight-cut bangs on their foreheads and long hair in the back.’ Weiss understood Daisy’s euphoria to some extent but, for who knows what reason, avoided the title Beatles, using only the Czech ‘translation’ Brouci (imprecise because the original is untranslatable).¹

 

The first more systematic discussion of the Beatles appeared in December 1963 in Mladý svět. In an issue published a few days before Christmas Eve, one could see on one page how Czechoslovak President Antonín Novotný toasted with Leonid Brezhnev, while the opposite page, at right, was occupied by the article ‘Říká se tomu „Beatlemania“’ (They call it ‘Beatlemania’). The author Jiří Tunkl, a sports reporter, concerned himself not so much with the music as with the raging of fans, the alleged proletariat origins of the Beatles, and their ‘sympathies for the left’; but at least he showed the members of the group in a photograph and gave their names correctly (which was by no means a matter of course either then or later).² With a ‘calling card’ from Mladý svět, references to the Beatles began to spread rapidly under the Czech name ‘Brouci’, and the ‘Beetles’ bored deeper and deeper ‘under the skin’ of the Czechoslovak public. Two months later the Beatles made their way to the cover of Mladý svět, even if only in the form of a match-box-sized photograph at the edge. It was not until the October 1964 issue of Kino (Cinema) that the foursome took a prestigious position covering the whole title page.

 

After a report on the ‘beatles’ (with a small ‘b’!) and the Liverpool big beat scene translated from the foreign press in the new magazine 100+1 zahraniční zajímavost (100+1 Interesting Reports from Abroad), in August 1964 the musical monthly Melodie rushed in with a two-page article on the group. It offered factual information on its history that was relatively accurate for the time, but the final, doubting paragraph reminded readers that maintaining a prominent place in pop music required ‘something more than long hair and advertising drumshots.’³

 

 

The repertoire of the Beatles (their own songs as well as rock and roll hits they adopted from others) was performed in concerts by many Czechoslovak big beat groups, for example Olympic, Donald, the Matadors, and the Slovak group called Beatmen. First to sing a Beatles song in Czech and release it on a single was Karel Gott. The lyricist Jiří Štaidl transformed the hit ‘From Me To You’ to ‘Adresát neznámý’ (Addressee Unknown). Gott arranged the piece for two voices and, using playback and accompaniment by the Olympic band, recorded it on Monday, 27 April 1964. Jiří Černý notes: ‘This is not a musical translation from the Beatles; in short, it’s a piece as imagined by Karel Gott himself.’⁴ Soon thereafter the single was released by Supraphon in the series Big Beat Mladého světa (Mladý svět’s Big Beat). (But the unproblematic Josef Vobruba Orchestra had to be given on the label as providing the accompaniment instead of Olympic.)

 

The first television broadcast of a video with the song ‘Adresát neznámý’ was in the series Vysílá studio A (Broadcast from Studio A), directed by Jaromír Vašta. In the original program (in which the composer was given curiously as ‘McLennon’), after the song ended Gott made an appealing confession of admiration for the musical qualities of the Beatles, following after the master of ceremonies Štědrý who spoke of them in terms of a ‘circus’. The popularity of Gott (who already held a Golden Nightingale award at the time) and frequent presentation of the song on the radio waves allowed the Beatles to penetrate literally into every household via this medium. The song became a super hit and still retains much of its freshness to this day. Listeners who were themselves aspiring musicians then welcomed the inclusion of printed music for the song with its Czech text in a songbook published by Mladý svět in July 1964.

 

After 1964 the Czechoslovak press finally began to take serious notice of the Beatles. The articles (mostly just brief notices) were mainly about the film A Hard Day’s Night, about the success of the group in the USA, or about its record-breaking sales of discs. However, there were also quite a few mocking reports, some even directly attacking the group, about hysterical female fans, noise, and the provocative long hair. Uninformed fans who bought a licensed album of recordings made by Tony Sheridan in Hamburg in 1961 with accompaniment by the Beatles, sold in the German Democratic Republic’s Cultural Centre in Prague, received a somewhat distorted idea of the group’s music. Audiences could also acquaint themselves with the Beatles in a similarly fragmentary manner via short television shots and journals (Reflektor and others) as well as via film weeklies: they described the hysteria surrounding the Beatles, Beatles fashion attire, and imitators, and showed airports filled with screaming fans. The effectiveness of even such short spots is proved for example by the recollection of the comics artist Kája Saudek, who in 1965 was serving a prison sentence (for erotic drawings):

 

And it was there that I saw a short video recording from their concert. Four long-haired boys in straight, narrow jeans playing rock and roll. We, by contrast, were in old, used military uniforms and short-cut. For all of us this experience became a symbol of independence and freedom. [...] In prison, the Beatles meant freedom.⁵

 

Although most young people had not yet heard much of the Beatles’ work, everything surrounding them had an unprecedented appeal. Starting in the summer of 1964 the number of personals ads in Mladý svět with the codeword ‘Beatles’ began to increase. The group’s name was given to fashionable dress jackets in the collection of the Klub odívání mladých (Youth Apparel Club) in Prague. And in the spring of 1965 the magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (The ABCs of Young Engineers and Scientists) even printed a sample of a ‘Beatles’ hairdo for girls!

 

Czechoslovakia had to wait a full year to see the film A Hard Day’s Night after the July 1964 English premiere. (The more fortunate could see it exceptionally already in October 1964 during the ‘Week of English Film’.) Eager viewers and listeners, who already knew well the title song of the film and the album from the radio program Houpačka, attended the Czech premiere on Friday, 23 July 1965. Finally the Beatles themselves were able to present themselves to the public in our country – with their wit, their directness, and mainly their excellent songs. Although the generation that loved classical rock and roll remained cool to the Beatles and the Mersey Sound Wave, for younger beginning musicians – even if their later development may have taken them in a different direction, A Hard Day’s Night was a glowing model and, as Oldřich Veselý recalls,

 

an absolute sensation. At that time, I think, our whole generation went crazy. In every secondary school there was at least one big beat band.⁶

 

It was mainly young people who were enthusiastic, but other reactions were also mostly positive. To this day people remember the winding lines in front of cinemas and the craziness and adulation during the projection, not unlike ovations during actual concerts. The newspaper Práce (Work) was resigned: ‘We’ll probably be seeing young men with long hair more often now in our country, too.’⁷ Even with some delay (at a time when the second film by the Beatles already had its world premiere), the Beatles still came to us relatively soon: in neighbouring Hungary, by comparison, A Hard Day’s Night did not open until 1968. And so the Czech form of Beatlemania in some ways continued directly from the slowly-fading mania abroad. Quite a few opponents and critics of the Beatles did not realize until seeing the film how insubstantial the loud manifestations of Beatlemania (which they had noticed most of all) were in comparison with the high-quality and imaginative creations of these four talented musicians. Some viewers also saw the film as providing valuable material for sociologists and psychologists.

 

A Hard Day’s Night was advertised by a poster created by Karel Vaca and by the slogan ‘Hrají a zpívají Beatles’ (The Beatles Playing and Singing). Czech subtitles were created by the important linguist and translator Miloslav Žilina. Fans found part of the information they needed about the film and individual members of the Beatles in a set of twelve photographs with commentary published promptly by Pressfoto under the title Beatles a jejich Perný den (The Beatles and their Hard Day’s Night). The story of the film, as explained in Filmový přehled (Film Overview) began almost like a fairy tale: ‘In Liverpool there live three boys: Paul, John, George, and Ringo. They travel all over the country to perform their music.’⁸

 

Time marched on, and the influence of the Beatles on Czech songs, fashion, and thinking was imprinted in the most varied spheres. Big beat groups were now tolerated: although they received invitations to recording studios only rarely, their concerts became a commonplace and fans could choose among them. The Beatles slowly ceased to be a synonym for long-haired hooligans, and even respected gentlemen decidedly beyond their teenage years professed sympathy for the foursome from Liverpool: Jiří Voskovec (‘I like the Beatles very much’),⁹ Miloš Kopecký (‘besides the fact that I liked them as musicians, my eye also rested on them with pleasure’)¹⁰ and Miroslav Horníček. The singer Hana Hegerová and the historian Miroslav Ivanov told of their positive impressions from concerts by the Beatles they attended abroad. The art historian Ivan M. Jirous and his then-wife Věra were overwhelmed by the film A Hard Day’s Night. As Jirous later recalled in a conversation with Jan Pelc:

Precisely because we had preparation from classical music, we recognized that something absolutely new was going on here, that a completely new epoch was dawning. We refused to judge it as some sort of pop music, some kind of inferior, cheap, or light art. In this we had an advantage over other critics and assessors of music. I remember my polemic with Jiří Černý, who wrote in the book Poplach kolem Beatles (Beatles Fever) that the group only provided entertainment and did so excellently. I rebuked him for not understanding that a new musical era was dawning. Today this is clear to everyone.¹¹

In October 1965 the English rock band Manfred Mann gave concerts in Prague and Bratislava. For the first time the Czechoslovak public saw and heard directly what such a first-class ensemble sounds like and looks like, and how a contemporary rock concert takes place. Many were able to believe that one day they would welcome even the Beatles on home turf.

During the second week of October, 1966 Prague had a visit from Tony Sheridan, a friend of the Beatles from their days in Hamburg with whom they had occasionally performed. Allegedly he came on the invitation of his musician friend Angelo Michailov, and by agreement with Prague Radio he recorded two songs in the city – one of his own and one with music by Michailov. In the November issue of Mladý svět appeared a photograph from the recording session and a short interview with the singer conducted by ‘jj’ (Jiří Janoušek). The interview introduces Sheridan ‘four years after his departure from the Beatles’ as one of ‘the founders of the Beatles, with which he parted ways after a half year, partly because he wanted to do not only beat but also jazz.’¹² Two questions are asked about the famous foursome; Sheridan answers only briefly and evasively, though he finally admits: ‘But they are great.’ He owes his lasting fame mainly to the fact that in June 1961 the then-unknown Beatles accompanied him when he sang as a soloist on a phonograph disc.

After the opening of A Hard Day’s Night in Czechoslovak cinemas, another important step for presentation of the Beatles and their work was publication of the book by Miroslava and Jiří Černý titled Poplach kolem Beatles (Beatles Fever). In the preface, Lubomír Dorůžka aptly describes the problems the Černýs faced:

Probably no scholar would dare to describe a freshly-erupted volcano when he can still see nothing but lava flowing from its slopes. But one who already smells the hot vapours of the lava and hears the flying rocks whizzing by has not the patience to wait until the scientist completes his observations.

Published by Panton in the autumn of 1966, this book now offered a broader view than just the usual profiles of members and the history of the group. Many pages are devoted to the roots of their music and the Liverpool Mersey Sound, to musicological and sociological ponderings, to the rules of hit parades abroad, and to the recording industry in the West. But less demanding fans also found information here, about the colour of eyes or preferred make of car of their favourite member, along with plenty of photographs. Poplach would deserve recognition even if only for being the first book on the Beatles published outside the Anglo-American countries and not a mere translation. This slender paperback with an unpretentious cover designed by Jiří Šalamoun was sold out shortly after its release; the first 26,000 copies were followed by a reprint. And most importantly – it was read, studied, and frequently quoted by all who had finally gotten what they had been waiting for: information that was not merely rehashed, and a comprehensible, objective view.

The number of Beatles songs recorded with Czech texts by domestic singers on phonograph discs swelled. Gott’s ‘Addressee Unknown’ served as a sort of pioneer, and ruffled the calm waters of the repertoire of pop music being recorded at that time; most of the ensuing cover versions of Beatles songs, however, merged with the wave of commercial interests. The subtitle of an article by the music journalist Pavel Klusák, who sought out many of these Czech and Slovak products in music archives and listened to the recordings years later, is apt: ‘How to kill the immortal ‘Brouci’ with their own songs’.¹³ Many other singers passed through the recording studios in the 1960s after Gott, such as Jaromír Mayer and Milan Chladil with ‘Píšu vám’ (Yesterday), Josef Laufer with ‘Michelle’, Karel Černoch with ‘Přijď co nejdřív (And I Love Her), Eva Pilarová with ‘Já čekám dál (Can’t Buy Me Love) and ‘Ten bál se koná’ (Lady Madonna), Petr Němec with ‘Hey Jude’, Pavel Novák with ‘Slib mi dej’ (Yesterday) and ‘Tón vět mi lál’ (Don’t Let Me Down), and the Golden Kids with ‘Bungalow Bill’. To this day one can still hear on the radio Marta Kubišová with ‘Hey Jude’, Petr Spálený with ‘To vadí’ (Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da), Helena Vondráčková with ‘Miláčku’ (Honey Pie), and Eva Olmerová with ‘Tvou láskou’ (Oh! Darling). A unique position in this field of ‘remakes’ is held by a distinctive version of ‘We Can Work It Out’ recorded by a group called Progress Organization.

 

A collector’s curiosity are cover versions – showing substantial effort but unconvincing – of four especially difficult Beatles songs released on an EP disc in 1968: ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Kde tě hledat mám’ (Got To Get You Into My Life), and ‘Jahodí snům neladí’ (Strawberry Fields Forever). The Czech texts by Petr Rada are surprisingly sung by an admirer of English, Pavel Sedláček, who years later admitted that texts in Czech were a condition for issue of the recordings. Rudolf Rokl’s band provides the accompaniment.

 

A special phenomenon was a recitation of the text of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ with which Karel Gott – after the model of Peter Sellers – entertained the audience in the Apollo Theatre in a program called Nešpory (Vespers). The repertoire of Josef Zíma at that time also included an attempt at a parody of the Beatles, accompanied by Karel Duba’s guitar group. Forgotten and practically unknown remains Zdeněk Marat’s song ‘George, Ringo, John, and Paul’, sung in 1967 by Vlasta Bláhová and the choir of Lubomír Pánek. Perhaps the most peculiar orchestral version of a Beatles song (‘From Me To You’) can be heard performed by a quasi-folk wind ensemble from Vrchlabí in Forman’s film Hoří, má panenko (There’s a Fire, My Doll!). The arranger Karel Mareš recalled: ‘In London we obtained permission to use the piece and it wasn’t expensive.’¹⁴

 

High-quality songs, including Beatles songs, were propagated by the popular radio hit parade of Miroslava and Jiří Černý called Houpačka (The Swing – originally Twelve on the Swing then Thirteen on the Swing), which began to be broadcast in December 1964 using the newly-implemented FM system; later Houpačka was moved to the station called Československo (Czechoslovakia). Divided into domestic and foreign sections, the songs were chosen by the Černýs. Then inscrutable listeners voted on whether broadcast of a song should be repeated the next time. The titles of songs from abroad were consistently translated into Czech. ‘Perný den’ (A Hard Day’s Night) was the hands-down winner starting with its first broadcast in February 1965; especially unmistakable was the increased number of votes for this song in the autumn months of the year, when the film of the same title was being shown in Czech cinemas. The first major rival was ‘Pomoc!’ (Help!). Then in the spring of 1966 both these songs were surpassed by Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley (and for a short while also by such singers as Pierre Brice and Dean Reed). Further successful songs from the repertoire of the Beatles were ‘Dívka’ (Girl) and ‘Žlutá ponorka’ (Yellow Submarine). Less popular were others like ‘Blouznivec z hor’ (The Fool On the Hill) and ‘Jsi boháč, miláčku’ (Baby, You’re a Rich Man). ‘Včera’ (Yesterday) and ‘Musíš ukrýt  svou lásku’ (You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away) dropped out immediately after the first round.

 

The Czech listener still had no way to see Czech translations of Beatles songs in writing. Several texts were published sporadically, for example in 1966 in Repertoár malé scény (Repertoire of Small Theatres) and in 1968 in Pop music expres. Lyricists like Petr Rada, Eduard Krečmar, Zdeněk Borovec, Zdeněk Rytíř, and Pavel Vrba wrote words for cover versions that often had nothing in common with either the original texts or the poetics of the Beatles. Recordings of some songs were released by Supraphon in 1968 and 1970 together with booklets of printed music in arrangements by Bedřich Nikodem and Jaromír Klempíř.

 

After August 1966 the Beatles stopped giving public concerts and concentrated on studio recordings. Now their music became more complicated, to the degree that it was important to know their entire albums and not only the hits. Czech fans who had no access to the original discs and had to rely on the Czech media and cover versions began to lag behind the group’s rapid pace of development. Film distribution also lagged. The film Help! made its way to Czech cinemas only after a three-year delay, in August 1968, and the animated Yellow Submarine was not shown here until four and a half years after the world premiere. The film Let It Be (1970) and the television program Magical Mystery Tour (1967) could be found on foreign television stations by the select few, but otherwise not until the 1980s with the arrival of video recordings.

 

(ABOUT PRESS CLIPPINGS)

 

And so it happened that Mr. Povondra began collecting clippings about salamanders. [...] He cut out and saved everything he found printed about them anywhere; there is no need to hide the fact that, after some uncertainties and hesitations in the beginning, he learned to devastate any newspaper in his favourite café where there was a mention of salamanders, and he achieved a special virtuosity, almost like that of a magician, in his ability to tear the needed page from a newspaper and stick it in his pocket right before the eyes of the head waiter.

Karel Čapek: Válka s Mloky (War with the Salamanders)¹⁵

 

Writings about the Beatles from the 1960s have a special sort of magic today, even though their poor quality sometimes makes those who remember the time grit their teeth. It is instructive and also entertaining to read through press clippings and see the emerging profile of ‘four delightful rascals called the Beatles’, in the words of the monthly magazine My 68 (We 68). The Beatles never gave a concert in Czechoslovakia, so few people had the opportunity to see them with their own eyes. The early writings are copied or compiled from other sources, and supplemented with commentary that says a lot about the degree of informedness or bias of the particular writer. The original attitudes toward the group – scorning (puppets in the hands of the capitalist Epstein) or ridiculing (the Beatles as hooligans hopping about) – gave way after 1966 to a stable image of talented and surprising musical innovators, or in some cases bored rich men engaging in experiments. Late in the 1960s remnants of journalistic bile still poured out here and there in descriptions of the outlandish habits of John and Yoko, who

 

usually give interviews in bed and haven’t cut their hair in a long time. Meeting them in a dark street, one would be terrified and cross to the sidewalk on the other side.

Magazín Lidové demokracie (Magazine of the newspaper People’s Democracy), 1969¹⁶

 

Hard to excuse is some misleading information still published in the second half of the 1960s. For example it was said in 1967 in the magazine Kaleidoskop that ‘John Lennon and George Harrison were friends from their early childhood,’ that in Hamburg in the spring of 1961 Paul had ‘long, mussed hair and a full beard,’ and that Sutcliffe then ‘suggested to the boys for the first time that they perform in wigs.’¹⁷ A different source, though providing current information about release of the album Magical Mystery Tour in 1968 and reproducing a fresh photograph of John Lennon in Rishikesh, gave the titles of their popular films (well known even in our country) asYeah, yeah, yeah and Po-po-pomoc (He-he-help). In the same year, in My 68, the singer Josef Laufer gave advice and information about new discs released by his colleagues: ‘an absolutely new item is the piece ‘Lady Madonna’ sung by Ringo Starr’(!)¹⁸ The popular magazine for youth called Pionýr (Pioneer) had been the first in our country to use the term ‘rockn’roll’ already in December 1959, but did not publish its first article about the Beatles until June 1968. At that time John and Yoko had already recorded their legendary album Two Virgins and were appearing together in public, so a quotation from John in this two-page article proclaiming that he was perfectly happy with his wife Cynthia and their son and heir John Charles Julian could seem quite crass to the well-informed. This was complimented by photographs of the well-known ‘Brouci’ faces, mainly from the time of the film Help!¹⁹

 

Little gems are descriptions of projects and visions never actually realized. For example in 1968 in Sedmička (Seven): ‘They have brought out a new long-playing disc with ten serious, religious songs in a slow rhythm.’²⁰ The announcement in Kino that Michelangelo Antonioni was to make a new film with the Beatles in Málaga, Spain in September 1967 came to nothing. One of the popular rumours that circulated was about the origin of the name of Ringo’s son Zak. The column for current events abroad in Mladý svět of December 1965 reported, unfortunately without giving a source), that Ringo

 

gave his son a Czech name. He told reporters that he knows well what ‘Zak’ means in Czech and immediately added: a pupil or student. He likes the word and chose it intentionally.²¹

 

(In 1969 the photographer Oldřich Karášek asked Ringo about this in person; he denied having said any such thing.)

 

Bizarre news items such as that ‘scientists have learned that sharks love Brahms but flee from the Beatles’, a photograph of Indian elephants with Beatles wigs and guitars performing in the Tivoli in Copenhagen, five bare-headed singers giving concerts under the name ‘Antibeatles’, singing ‘old and melodic romances accompanied by classical instruments’, and a model of the Beatles shaped from scrap metal by the furnace man Oberländer contrast sharply with thoughtful literary-sociological probes about mass culture, concerning the

 

illusory escape valve of suppressed humanity, a new religion, the opium of the people, the modern restoration of Olympus with divinely human and humanly divine beings ranging from cosmonauts through murderers and statesmen to Brigitte Bardot and the Beatles of Liverpool.

Plamen (Flame), 1966²²

 

Almost prophetic was a little article reprinted in the magazine 100+1 Zahraniční zajímavost where the Beatles admit that they have grown tired of concerts, travelling, and themselves, and therefore

 

the members of the foursome might perform as soloists, and record together again only for television, film, and phonograph discs.²³

This forecast appeared in an issue whose closing date was way back in December 1964.

 

Also certainly worthy of attention is an inconspicuous notice in the May 1967 issue of Kino describing a film with shots of bare male bottoms, with which ‘the Japanese film director Yoko Ono has made a name for herself overnight in London’.²⁴ Not until more than a year later would the name of Yoko Ono begin to appear frequently in our country, almost always in association with John Lennon.

 

Half-forgotten today is a story by the Polish author A. Czechowski describing a sensational event: a concert by the ‘Beatles’ in Warsaw, after which it turns out that these ‘four slender mop-headed boys are in reality cleverly-constructed robots.’ Because this story was published in Věda a technika mládeži (Science and Engineering for Youth), it also had something for technically-gifted readers:

 

The shining hair of the Beatles served at the same time as antennas both for remote control and for a miniature radar warning system. Most amazing was the treatment of the Beatles’ mechanism of movement – an unusually complicated system of hydraulic transmissions, of pumps maintaining high pressure in them, of emergency trouble-shooting devices capable of pumping fluid ten times as fast as the best compressors.

The tracks of the brilliant inventor lead from England to the South American rainforest, where ‘Indians remember the expedition: four Englishmen came to the settlement on boats.’ And from there to extraterrestrial civilizations.²⁵

 

An unmistakably Czech contribution is a merry interview given by the Beatles to a Czech journalist in 1968 in India for the girls’ magazine Veronika;²⁶ one only regrets that the conversation is fictitious. In the same category is an excerpt from the children’s book Sally, tvá kamarádka z Anglie (Sally, Your Friend from England), which describes captivatingly how the Beatles ride through their native Liverpool on a wagon pulled by female fans. They do so to promote their new film about the Loch Ness monster and a princess under a spell, and the author Zdeněk Mahler even wrote the text for a new Beatles song here: ‘Ve stínu skály / big-beat jsme hráli / najednou z jezera / vylezla příšera! / Jéjéjé!’ (In the shadow of the cliff we were playing big beat when suddenly the monster emerged from the lake! Yeah, yeah, yeah!)²⁷ All this was accompanied by a coloured illustration by Jan Brychta, and published in the psychedelic year 1967 by Státní nakladatelství dětské knihy (State Publishing House for Children’s Books).

NEXT PART AVAIBLE ONLY FOR REGISTERED USERS