I travelled with teams around Europe, connecting people with one another. I was responsible for illegal concerts in East Berlin and Czechoslovakia.
In East Berlin, concerts were organised not only by me but also by ‘Pietia’ Wierzbicki with Zbyszek Matera (QQRYQ Productions) from Poland and the help of a local crew. It’s true that when the Wall came down and the Stasi archives were opened, it turned out that many of our German friends were agents of the local security service. And we did have bizarre situations. There were a lot of stops at the border, including x-raying everything: the seams in our trousers, packs of cigarettes, jars of pickles and basically anything they could. American musicians couldn’t just enter East Berlin with their instruments, so they crossed the border as tourists, and we took care of the instruments and equipment on site or brought them over because we could do it as citizens of an Eastern Bloc country. There was an incident with the New York band False Prophets where half the band was not allowed in, but the concert took place anyway.
PZ: Recently I read the Facebook reminiscences of the Washington band Soulside, where they wrote that their tour of Europe in the spring of 1989, and especially their going behind the (then) Iron Curtain, was the most important experience in their career.
AM: Yes, and this is in fact one of the bands that we’re friends with to this day. Now this fall they’ll be coming for the 30th anniversary of that tour, and I’ll be releasing their album from the concert recorded around that time in Rome. For many of the bands who came here then and encountered alternative culture in Poland, the biggest surprise was that in this completely different world, which they had no idea about, there were people just like them, doing basically the same thing, only according to their possibilities.
Back then, there was a kind of rule in Poland that whoever gets here first wins. So those who came to those first semi-legal or illegal concerts automatically became popular. The spoken word was very significant back then, and people told each other that they’d been to such and such a concert and that the band was worth seeing next time. And that’s why there were NoMeansNo concerts in Poznań where the windows were bursting because twice as many people showed up as was the club’s capacity.
PZ: You also worked for a time at the Konkurrent label, renowned for the Dutch underground. How did you get there, and what did it look like compared to the Polish scene of the late 1980s?
AM: There’s no comparison – it was a legally operating, registered foundation that paid taxes and operated like a normal company. There was nothing like that on the independent scene in Poland at that time. The market was completely different, too. Moreover, although it’s a much smaller country than Poland, to this day more phonographs are sold there.
When I was a student, I had to take mandatory military classes. Well, like every alternativist back then, I didn’t want to take part in them, regardless of whether it was compulsory military service or university training, so before these classes I escaped to the Netherlands. I already had some contacts there: people from Chumbawamba and The Ex lived in the house I moved into. I started working at Konkurrent, first packing parcels, and then organizing concert tours on my own – not only tours of Western bands, but I was also in charge of Dezerter’s tour around Europe. And then 1989 happened. It was a turning point, and we had to return to Poland. I still needed visas, but I no longer had any grounds to apply for asylum or permanent residence.