We’re here forever, at the bagel pump. Krausberry plays a poetic big beat from Hanspaulka
They seem oblivious to time. On stage, the musicians from the band Krausberry are always loud, the singer Martin Kraus is just as charismatic and their blues-rock sound is unmistakably dense. After 15 years, they have now released a new album called Last Station. “We’re here forever, at the baguette pump, from the Braník can, and it doesn’t concern us,” they report in one song, how they still enjoy touring clubs and concerts after four decades.
“It would be better to talk now,” says the 67-year-old Kraus in the dressing room behind the audiom of Prague’s Malostranská beseda before the first concert of the year. After him, he will have so many beers in him that he is not responsible for what he would tell. Guitarist Mário Císař and bassist Jiří Kredba aka Ježek come straight from the nearby U Hrocha pub. The band members are lively and down to earth big beats even before the performance.
The newly released recording has 11 tracks. Apart from the two that have already appeared on the live album from Malostranská beseda, they are all new. “Initially, I didn’t want to make another record. But every year we write a few songs, try them out and either throw them away or start playing them at concerts. In the end, we made a new album out of them. I’m happy, it was probably meant to be,” says the frontman.
The very first a song called Sara claims to the roots. It was written by Ivan Hlas, a partner from Prague’s Hanspaulka district, where Kraus and his friends started in the early 1980s. On a hill dotted with villas of the First Republic, musicians flowed from one band to another, met for a beer in the smoky U Tyšerů pub or in front of the Baba ruins and played music that determined the direction of Czech big beat. In addition to them, Ondřej Hejma, Richard and Vladimír Tesaříkov, Petar Introvič or Václav Kopta met here.
It was then that Ivan Hlas wrote to Sára. “I first heard it when I was a teenager playing it in a pub and picking up girls,” Kraus recalls. “I still had it in my head that it was romantic and pretty. I can’t write songs like that. I had it hidden for forty years until I thought we’d record it. We just made it a bigger hit,” he describes. “Ivan won’t like it, just like Vladimír Mišík doesn’t like it our Sun grave. The owner of the song is always upset because he felt differently about it and you’re screwing it up,” recalls another cover hit.
The Krausberrys got together a bit by accident. In 1984, shortly after Petar Introvič fired them from his Bluesberries, to which the name of the new group also referred. Compared to the orthodox blues, however, Kraus and his colleagues played harder and rockier. In addition, Hanspaulka began to change. The guys who started here moved away from the villa hill. It was then that Kraus declared that Hanspaulka was “a dead dog and the Tyšers only gnaw on a corpse”. They still don’t like him for it.
“Great music was played in that pub for a long time, but the dog didn’t bark. And suddenly Hanspaulka started to glorify herself, the moment the musicians were gone, it annoyed me,” the singer explains. Instead of the hall on Houtyš, as the pub U Tyšerů was called, which was closed in the early 1990s, the band settled in Malostranská beseda. In addition, she played at another key venue of the big beat scene, Žižkov’s Chmelnica, which she played alongside their manager Lubomír Schmidtmajer.
The hit Šiksa a gadžo was recorded by the band on the album of the same name in 1998. It is still played at concerts today. Photo: Jakub Plíhal | Video: Youtube/MrGoowee
The cover of the new album now refers to Chmelnica. It was prepared by Karel Haloun, the court artist of the Czech big beat and the Žižkov club. In the black and white photo, a small boy watches the pavers repairing the street. “I had a brother Tomáš, a twin who died a few years ago. He is the one in the photo. He was a dispatcher in Týnec nad Sázavou and loved the railway,” Kraus describes, where she got married. song and album title Last Station. “I wanted to put the photo inside the booklet. But Karel looked at me and said: ‘What are you talking about, that’s a clear thing for the cover,'” she recounts.
They recorded the last station in the formation in which they have been performing for some time. In addition to Kraus, guitarist Císař and bassist Kredba, it includes guitarists Štěpán Albrecht and Vít Havlíček and drummer Štěpán Smetáček. “It’s a throwback to the lineup from the early ’90s,” explains Kraus.
The cast has changed several times over four decades, each going through many faces. Guitarist Michal Chroňák nicknamed Růžena and drummer Jiří Zelenka have left a significant mark in recent years. The well-known bass guitarist Vladimír Kulhánek, known among the musicians of Guma, also went through the band.
“Every summer we have a training camp in southern Bohemia, we rehearse, we play, I try to get us to go out for a beer or a bike ride,” the band leader describes how they keep in shape. “However, Štěpán Smetáček would still work. He sleeps until lunch and then forces us to play,” says the group’s leader. During the interview, perhaps to confirm Kraus’s words, he prepares the drums on stage and meticulously picks up their sound with the sound engineer.
He has a drummer on the new album the song Strings, for which he wrote the music and lyrics. “He would have ten here if we let him,” laughs Kraus, who is on the decline as the traditional main author. Strings reflect on a nighttime stroll through Prague. Melancholy and pensive.
The city looks different than before. It’s not ironic anymore Root vegetables from the 1990s, in the text of which Kraus made fun of retired female shoppers. “At the time, Ivan Wünsche and I worked in a vegetable shop on Kulaťák,” he recalls the time when, as a rocker without a permanent job, he helped the former bassist of Jasná páky and Hudby Praha. “Grandma always came to say that her husband was in the hospital and she wanted bananas for him. I gave her a nice one, but Ivan was an experienced greengrocer and knew these tricks. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he told me, ‘because grandma is making things up, she’s just trying it on you, “” describes the creation of one of the band’s hits.
They broke up briefly in the early 1990s, but got back together in 1996, held a comeback concert in Chmelnice and started their best period. Their most successful albums Na větvi, Šiksa a gádžo and Na Hrad from 2002 were added to the two albums released before the hiatus.
“Perhaps we were not active in management and in the media,” Kraus assesses the fact that when people talk about them, they remember Hanspaul’s beginnings, but rarely the later years. “It was clear that we would no longer be the Beatles, so we just played. The ambition dropped, the more we did concerts,” he says.
The song Na veky was composed in a southern style by Mário Císař, the lyrics were written by Martin Kraus. | Video: Krausberry
In 2007, the studio album Nálada followed, and seven years later a recording from Malostranská beseda. She almost didn’t get off the stage. Also in the new song Na veky now, he praises the rocker life. They are always here, they have a baguette, a beer from a can at the pump and go to the next stop. The lyrics were written by Kraus, the music with a distinctive southern line by the guitarist Císař, otherwise a former right-wing politician and until 2008 the vice-chairman of the Civic Democratic Alliance.
They certainly don’t have a spleen in the bottom of beer, although they sang about it in the hit Old Times from the 90s. “The old days are about Hanspaulka, about our beginnings. It was a great time when we were dating and going after girls, we lived only for music. I would go back right away. Being young and wild was not bad,” sums up Martin Kraus. As if he summed up the credo of the band. What about guys getting gray hair, years and extra pounds. It’s still a group from Hanspaulka that enjoys big beats.
Album
Album
Krausberry: The Last Stop
100Promotion 2022