Ever since the first cinema seats were slashed by frenzied teds driven batshit by the filthy rock, no end of would-be bad-asses have dined out on the perception that their band might be “A Bit Dangerous”. They all seem like pussies next to The Plastic People Of The Universe, the Czechoslovakian anti-establishment totems whose very existence irked the communist regime to such a degree that two of the band were banged up for eight and 18 months respectively, charged with “organised disturbance of the peace”. That’s “gigs” to you and us.
Magical Nights compiles 31 tracks’ worth of this remarkable band’s fitful output between 1969-85, and is an instructive primer for anyone itching to hear what subversion actually sounds like. Far from resorting to empty rhetoric, The Plastic People turned in on themselves and stoically pursued their gauntly experimental, grimly poetic but determinedly apolitical muse in near-secrecy.
Lo-fi as a matter of necessity, starved of natural light and grimy as a mole’s snout, their music begins with the eldritch viola of the early Velvets and the drum-kit-falling-down- stairs approach of John French, but blossoms into something uniquely haunted thereafter. If Jan Svankmajer had been Elvis, maybe all rock music would sound like this.
