Supraphon Release InformationOlympic are celebrating half a century of music-making this year and the great anniversary is marked with a great compilation! Much has been previously released, yet this 5 CD box set is a must-have for all fans of the longest lasting and most successful of Czech rock bands. Almost 120 pieces provide a complete musical picture of the variegated past and interesting present of Petr Janda and his colleagues, spanning the period from 1962 to 2012.The CDs are not divided by decades, but by means of songs they follow Olympic’s musical and personal fates. CD 1 (1963-1970) encompasses the rock’n’roll prehistory with the vocalists Volek, Bobek, Přenosilová, Šváb and Sedláček, the band’s gradual transition to the Mersey sound and style, the hits already sung in Czech and the first three albums. CD 2 (1970-1975) documents the popular period with Jiří Korn, the frequent turnover of bass guitarists and a number of landmark singles. CD 3 (1975-1984) maps the arrival of Broum, the artistic contribution of Hejduk and, most notably, the famous trilogy of monothematic albums and stage projects. CD 4 (1985-1993) bears witness to the band’s return to the song form, rock-style hardening of the sound and Olympic’s stabilisation in the line-up in which the band still exists today. CD 5 (1993-2012) is a montage of the best Olympic pieces from the catalogue of Janda’s label Best I. A., supplemented with two recordings made this May, ushering in the band’s future. The title of a brand-new song spells it out clearly: “We Won’t Change!”Petr Janda and the compiler, O. Zámostný, have also chosen, discovered and rescued precious bonuses and unknown recordings or rarities, which complete Olympic’s audio history with previously unheard pieces. The sound engineer at ADK studio, O. Slezák, reconstructed and improved the technical quality of the recordings, making them dignified witnesses to the great “big-beat” era. The 5 CD box set, with an extensive booklet including an informed text and plenty of photographs, is a comprehensive document of half a century of Olympic, as well as the era and the people who lived through it.The Olympic 5-CD box set: 50 years of a remarkable career; 116 songs and 387 minutes of top-notch music!