Tomáš Kábrt

“It was some time around 1979 or 1980, actually, the punk movement originated in Great Britain and the first so-called punk appeared here. I had classmates like that, too, and I befriended them. I did not consider myself a supporter of any fashion style, but I know that the authorities did not like them, because the punks died their hair and so on. The policemen would stop them in the street and wonder why they had green hair, and the punk guy would reply that he was in an indoor swimming pool and that they probably added too much chlorine into the water.”

“We printed it ourselves, using screen printing, for example. It is a process which you use when you print some designs on T-shirts, for example. There is actually a kind of a frame, and there is a mesh inside, you place a stencil with the picture on it and then you place it on the T-shirt and you roll over it with a squeegee dipped in paint, and the design would transfer on the T-shirt through the dense mesh. Then you let it dry. And we actually used a typewriter and a copy paper, because if you wrote something on a typewriter and you wanted to have more copies, it was not like today, when you set twenty copies on your printer and it comes out in twenty copies, but you had to type it twenty times on a typewriter or to take a copy paper and insert a so-called carbon paper in between, which was a black paper made from coal, and you would alternately place the carbon papers and copy papers into the typewriter. And if you hit the typewriter keys with great force, you were able to make up to five copies and if you had those black carbon papers in between, it would print through on the other side, too. But this would not be enough for our magazines, and so we used the copy paper. If you hit the keys really hard, it would actually punch holes in the shape of the letters through the paper, which was very thin. And we would then place the page with the typed-out letters on the mesh, and place it on a sheet of paper and then roll over it with the squeegee dipped in paint, and the letters would transfer onto that paper.”