STORY

I will never forget the day when I first met Petr Brant. It was sometime around 1987 and he had started the first year of the Secondary School of Pedagogy in Prachatice. Because there were only three men in our year and only two in his year, it was understandable that our interest, the interest of stagers with an extra year of experience, in any new male element was considerable.

Of course, we were mainly afraid that someone would disturb our label as perfect studs, who only brought slippers to school because female classmates brought all the rest. After five minutes of interrogation in the men’s toilets we knew that a heavy caliber came to our school. Faced with a question in what time he can run 400 meters on the oval, he said something about 47 seconds. That blew us away. We were about to argue about the truthfulness of this figure, when Petr dryly said “so let’s run to the stadium during the break and I’ll show you”. We were blown away again. We were never prepared for such self-confidence. At the stadium I was the one holding the stopwatch and unaware of the fact that I was starting friendship for life, I was trying to be more than strict. As Petr ran through the finish line, my right thumb stopped the stopwatch at 57 seconds and 4 hundredths. The three of us walked towards the exhausted pretty boy, who was already back then able to play the guitar and piano brilliantly and on many occasions used it to entertain the girls at the upper boarding house. Questioned how can he explain pulling our leg, he replied as dryly as before in the men’s toilets “.. yeah, sorry, I guess I got it wrong, it was fifty seven” and had a big laugh about it.

This is my oldest memory of meeting Petr Schel alias Petr Brant. Back then though I had no idea that the high self-confidence was hiding a very closed and sensitive personality that only used this way to protect itself from the outside world and to compensate for the stress from a highly intellectual family background.

Adolf Zika


How it developed...

The Secondary School of Pedagogy was one big leisure, everyone had some reason why they went there. For me, the reason was that I was a top athlete and I just didn’t have the time to study and so I chose something, which was quite easy, didn’t involve Math and one could talk around. I don’t know why Petr chose it and I never actually asked. I know one thing for sure though, he must have liked it a lot.. From the very beginning his personality was hidden under an air of mystery, especially for women, girls, about seven hundred of them in the school. Petr always communicated as a gallant young man, a gentleman, who looked like he just walked out of a film from the first-republic era. His ability to play during the breaks, either guitar in the hallways or piano in the class, was nearly always accompanied by smiles from the ladies and in many cases even moved professors. For us, the “most interesting” studs in the school up until the moment when he appeared, it was not so pleasant. His ringing baritone was already outstanding back then and so even with little experience, he gave the impression that he would be able to take care of all the buds that were winding around him.

However, back then I noticed that his musical talent would fit very well in my prepared band The Face of Madness. As the name implies, we were even-tempered and mature individuals.. Very soon Petr and I started practicing and our long, perhaps too long musical career without a single concert could begin. True, we were very productive as far as original production was concerned. We would never think of playing anything not ours and back then I don’t think we would even be able to. Although in Petr’s case this is not entirely true, because his ability to hear music, tones, melodies, was great and for me sometimes frustrating. But we had one thing in common, we made one author song after another. This explains why some songs on our, or Petr’s debut album more precisely, are so old and our family relatives know them for more than 15 years.

The road to the first official album, however, led through thorny ground and even got lost in a corn field several times, to reappear in an entirely different place a few years later and rejoin the original dusty path. I have heard somewhere that every path is a goal in itself.. And if this is true, then more than twenty years of music rehearsals, establishing bands, breaking up and coming back together, was the most meaningful thing that we could have done for each other. During that time Petr has become a renowned twice married sculptor and a two-time father, who won over his French audience, and I became a twice married controversial photographer and a two-time father, who won over his German audience and flew around the globe twice, sleeping in hotels in more than 40 countries. This all has given us experience and formed us on our way forward.

Everything got settled approximately two years ago, when I came to Petr to his sculptor’s studio in Southern Bohemia with a clear intention to provoke him to continue creating music. Even though his guitar lay covered with dust in the corner, he took it out that day, tuned it with one stroke and off the top of his head played our good old Ruleta. I knew I had him.. Within a moment we played everything we could remember and started debating about the band, like in the old times. With one difference, we became secured middle-aged fellows, who already achieved some respect in their field, which gave us a different perspective on things. Regular rehearsals in Prague in the presence of women and offspring became the rule, just the music style began to split into two different cultures. Song-writer Adolf, who grew fond of falsetto and higher notes and songwriter Brant, who was the spitting sound of the famous Leonard Cohen.

Petr liked my songs but I liked his more and so one day, I had to turn the scales. I decided about him without him and called him to say that our band would be only about him because the distinctiveness of his personality in music expression, interpretation and also in production was much more interesting and unusual than my girly chants. And because as an owner of a production company and a producer I have experience with larger projects, it was clear that this new baby of mine would grow under the wings of my company. At the end of 2008 it was definite that the world would see an album of one person, singer, composer and guitar player Petr BRANT. And so it was.

Adolf Zika