Not just a blog about music but also about memories. So here are a few of those. When I left university in 1990 the first job I got was a teaching post in a town on the border between the then Czechoslovakia and Hungary called Komarno, formerly a Hungarian town lying on the Danube which had been split by the First World Peace Treaty leaving one half in Czechoslovakia and one half in Hungary. Czechoslovakia had just undergone a peaceful revolution and I was keen to see and experience for myself the incredible changes it was undergoing.
I drove across Europe to the town with my brother and sister in law in September of that year. We stopped for a Saturday night in Prague. Such an experience to see that spooky, haunted, fairy tale city just before it changed forever. We also stopped off the next day in Bratislava. Also a haunted city at that point in time but not in such a good way as it generally seemed to be haunted by Stalin's fist, (trust me I'll be getting to Deep Purple eventually).
All the towns we drove through in Slovakia seemed depressingly similar. Flat, (we were heading across the Hungarian plains), but also flattened by the oppressive force of forty years of Soviet occupation. Living there for a year seemed a bleak prospect. My brother mentioned turning back. When we arrived in Komarno it too seemed quite nondescript and also not a little bleak. If I look at pictures of the town centre now on Google Images it seems like Disneyland by comparison as it's been done up immeasurably but at that point in time it felt cobwebbed, sad and forgotten with only some hints of a more notable, imperial past in its architecture and the feel of its streets.
I lived and taught in the town for the following academic year. It was one of the more interesting experiences of my life, though it's not the time or place to say everything about it here. I wasn't in Prague as I'd wanted to be but I did get a sense of the people I was living among's past and the future they were heading into.
In terms of the music, Hard Seventies Rock was your only option apart from the fabulous Gypsy music I'd hear when I dined out at the Europa Hotel in the heart of the town. Little else however, seemed on the table when the record collections of the people I got to know there were concerned. And if you wanted to see anyone you needed to get in a car and drive down to Budapest which I did do at least a couple of times with colleagues, friends and acquaintances over the following months.
I saw Winger and Scorpions. I won't trouble you with them. But I also went to a Deep Purple concert there and that was a more memorable experience.They played at an enormous indoor sports venue in Budapest. Gillan wasn't singing for them at this point in their history but they did have Blackmore, Paice, Glover and Lord so it was a proper Purple experience.
They were good. They rocked and the crown loved them. One thing I remember particularly was a Spinal Tap moment in the set when a hologram of Beethoven was lit up above classically trained keyboardist Jon Lord's head and he went off into an extended party piece which incorporated excerpts from the great man's greatest hits. Nobody but me seemed to see any irony at all about this. Otherwise, it was the songs you'd expect and some stuff from more recent records I was less familiar with.
But despite all the Heavy Metal ham of the event they were good. Not surprisingly, really. There's not much of this stuff on here but The Purp, along with Led Zep and Black Sabbath and the music they produced in the early Seventies can't really be denied. So here is one of their great moments, listening to them yesterday afternoon after work took me back in time as these things do to Komarno, that small forgotten town at the end of 1990. Now, I raise an early morning cup of tea to the people I met and the times I had there. Oh well. Time for work!
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