Rangers

Music band

It was not about language but about the heart.

Mirek Řihošek, Maxmilian Presser, Franta "Goliš" Drápal

Did you listen to Radio Luxembourg?
FD+MŘ: Sure!
FD: It´s better to say we hunted it. It was difficult to understand it, it was a bit interrupted. Tuning worked in the direction of the wind (laugh)...it  had to be retuned it all the time, but it worked.
MP: I listened to it on my dad´s Philips radio. He listened to the Free Europe station and I to Radio Luxembourg. Like Mirek,  I had drawn a scale line, helping me with tuning, more or less one mili... – not one milimeter but a half milimeter, otherwise it was totally somewhere else...(laugh)
MŘ: Surprisingly, we had a quite good radio at home, but I caught Luxembourg the best on a kind of small Talisman – that was its name – and it was a kind of handy bakelite radio (laugh). So, there we got inspired when we were fifteen years old.

When was that?
MŘ+MP: In the sixties, about sixty-two, sixty-three, four...
FD: I listened to it about ten years later.

What meaning had Radio Luxembourg for you at  that time?
FD: Surprisingly, there was something  new on the radio, some bigbeat. I heard In rock and stuff from Deep Purple for the first time on Radio Luxembourg.
MP: The meaning consisted in that there was at least some music! Here we could hear only „Frankie went around a little garden...“ and this kind of bullshit. Yvetta Simonová and so on. At that time, there were not any peoplemeters and ratings, like today. There was always some responsible guy that played what he liked.
MŘ: Radio Luxembourg was a kind of open little window towards the west...
MP: Ajar...(laugh)
MŘ: Ajar window towards the west, regarding the music.
FD: Special about it was that it had a continuous development. It progressed all the time with the evolution of the music. It was always new. So Mirek in fact listened to country music, the Shadows...
MP: I heard there for the first time for example House of the Rising Sun...
FD:  ...and then bands like Yardbirds and stuff, Clapton, Jimmy Page, then Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.It was all there. All that was coming up, all that was new, they played. It was a great inspiration  to us.
MŘ:  Radio Luxembourg  played simply modern  stuff at that time.

Did Radio Luxembourg have any impact on you at that time?
MŘ: Sure. I think we then started  to play a little bit with Honza Vančura. I remember an old song that we heard and played in accordance with Radio Luxembourg – Abilene. It was already then a country song that we could not recognize at the time. While we did not play it later, the Greenhorns did recorded it (laugh).
MP: Me and Brabec too, right?(laugh) Anyway, Radio Luxembourg influenced me too, of course, because thanks to it I finally listened to music. I recorded that Abilene song with Jiří Brabec and Hamilton IV. Hamilton IV. Then came  to Czechoslovakia to make a record with us. It was in the  eighties.
MŘ: So at the end, Max made a record with the artists that we listened to on Radio Luxembourg while growing up (laugh).

What comes up while saying Radio Luxembourg?
MŘ: I remember that I  had started to play guitar a little bit when Shadows, a guitar band, showed up on Radio Luxembourg and it spoke to me, it influenced me as well. I heard there also Hank Marvin. He was a teacher of electric guitar and played so clearly...
MP: ...and he articulated nicely!

And what about English, did it play any role, did you understand it?
MP: Well, I did not understand and I don´t understand it up to the present day (laugh).
MŘ: At that time of course, we did not devote ourselves much to English, we spoke more Russian than English. Today, it´s different, people want to learn English because they have opportunity to travel. We did not have such a perspective, so we had a problem with English. We did not understand it much – or at all (laugh).
FD: But it conquered our hearts. It was not about language but about the heart.

Is there anything else you want to say? Do you have an idea what more to tell?
FD: I just don´t think there is definitely anybody among my contemporaries who would not know Radio Luxembourg. Everybody simply knows it.
MŘ: I would say, in the sixties, it was for us a little light at the end of a tunnel (laugh).