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Up for a bad time

Rain and mud just add to the atmosphere at Antifest
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By Marika Ley
For The Prague Post
August 1st, 2007 issue

Photo by TARA PUNZONE
The aptly named Casualties bring Jersey City punk to the cow pasture this year.
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Antifest

When: Aug. 3–5
Where: Svojšice u Přelouče
Tickets: 500 Kč in advance through Ticketstream, 600 Kč at the festival
For more information, check www.antifest.cz

This year’s summer festival season has seen some wonderful successes and at least one tragedy. The once-fledgling Mighty Sounds fest in Olši u Tábora grew from 3,000 attendees three years ago to 8,000 this year. The Back to Future Fest, newly relocated to a wonderful site outside Leipzig, had a terrific lineup, but horrible weather and one fatality, with lightning striking and killing one of the producers four days before the fest was due to kick off.
That served as another reminder: Producing festivals is never an easy job. Hours, weeks, months and eventually years of planning all come down to two or three days during which you hope and pray that the gods of weather and attendance smile upon you. Sometimes they do, and other times … there’s Antifest, where it traditionally rains every year.
Having been there once (and dispatching unfortunate colleagues to cover the fest ever since), seeing the refuse of garbage and human flotsam and jetsam, I couldn’t help but think the rain was the gods’ way of saying, “Take a shower! Please! The high heavens can’t take it anymore.”
“Unfortunately, the weather situation was really bad last year,” acknowledges Antifest organizer Jakub “Cecek” Tauber. “It rained for four days and discouraged many people from visiting the festival. The problem is, there is no place to take shelter — it’s all an open space.”
Nonetheless, fans of Oi!, crust, punk and ska from Poland, Germany, Slovakia and beyond continue to gather every year in a cow pasture near Svojšice u Přelovče to join in one of the Czech Republic’s oldest and most, um, respected punk fests.
Antifest turns 13 this year, celebrating its early adolescence appropriately with a slew of bands that simply refuse to grow up. It doesn’t matter that they may have families to support or mortgages to maintain. They’re happy to trudge through the mud to get to the littered stage and play their haunted hearts out.
This year’s musical offerings tend to side with the football fanatics who like to sing en masse. Saturday night headliners Sham 69, who apparently lacked the art school education of many of the bands around the time of their inception in 1976, took a different approach to songwriting. They took chants and songs commonly heard in the stands at soccer games and jacked them up a bit. Sham 69 was among the founders of the Oi! movement, comprised mostly of Britain’s working-class population. Eventually it built a large skinhead following encompassing the left and right political extremes with undecided punks and skins in between.
From the East End of London, the Cockney Rejects (Friday) are equally responsible for the popularity of Oi!, forming in 1979 and singing of the football hooliganism present in the fabric of East Ender proletariat life. The violence mentioned in their lyrics was, and still is, a direct reflection of the sporting life — i.e., beating the crap out of each other, all in the name of defending team honor, most notably West Ham United F.C.
Where is the new blood? While they’re not exactly new, or even recent, the ever-expanding and popular Casualties (Sunday) from New York City should provide some kind of counterbalance to the songs spawned of sports. “We’ve gotten better at our instruments,” says Casualties guitarist Jake. “When I started [with the band], I could only strum downward. We were a lot rawer then.”
As Antifest has grown, so have its problems — no surprise there.
“Of course, it got bigger over the years,” says Tauber. “In recent years, we had some troubles with the safety of the visitors and also the technical service we wanted to provide them with. Although the festival area is not in good shape this year, visitors have nothing to worry about. They can come and enjoy three days of punk and everything connected with it.”
Well, a safe punk fest is a sterile punk fest. So maybe that’s the best recommendation this one can get.
— Marika Ley is
instigator-in-chief of Provokátor magazine.
She can be reached at features@praguepost.com

Marika Ley can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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