Olga Sommerová

filmmaker

Radio Luxembourg with its jingles was holy and international for me.

I was born in 1949, my brother was eight years older than me. He was a handsome, two metres tall blue-eyed dude not the least interested in socialism, dressed like a Teddy boy and used to listen to rock-and-roll, and I admired and loved him. He got scarlet fever during the war, there were no antibiotics and in the 60´s dialysis did not exist yet. He died in 1964, at the age of 23, of kidney failure. But till this period I used to spend time with him as his loving little sister. I remember that we had an old Telefunken radio at home, where the station of Radio Luxembourg was constantly set. It played continuously at home. My brother taught me to how to dance in our living room, these were my dancing lessons because after his death with my fifteen years I was so heartbroken that I had no mind to visit a dance hall. I was twelve or thirteen when I listened to Paul Anka or Elvis Presley with him. Radio Luxembourg with its jingles was holy and international for me.

When I made a film about Marta Kubišová who told me she had learned to sing from Luxembourg, I knew that this sequence had to be in the film. I asked my friend Miloš Skalka, editor in the Czech Radio and expert of pop music, to provide me the jingles of Radio Luxembourg. In a pub, he gave me a detailed lecture about all the radio stations that broadcasted western music at the time of the socialist murk.

I knew the pub „U Veverky“ in Bubeneč exhibited old radios, and I decided to make the sequence about Luxembourg with Marta there. When Marta saw the film for the first time and heard the jingles, she turned to me happily, remembering these old times. And I was also happy remembering my beloved brother Petr.