Review
Genre and Mood
Charlie Straight’s “Platonic Johny” is indie rock with a britpop accent, an uplifting, energetic single from a Czech band that sang all its lyrics in English.
Song Summary
It is the eighth of thirteen songs on She’s a Good Swimmer, the band’s 2009 debut, and at four minutes and twenty-one seconds one of its longer ones. Released as the first single on 5 April 2009, before the album, it became the record’s big success. Like every song on the album except one, it was written by the singer, Albert Černý. Reviewing the album, Musicserver heard in it the feel of a stadium, with forests of hands raised overhead.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through “Platonic Johny” verse by verse, so this follows what critics and the credits say about the song and the record.
The Voice
Deník found the album’s sound reminiscent above all of the Beatles, with Černý’s singing recalling John Lennon in many ways.
The Band
Černý sang and played guitar, with Michal Šupák on guitar and programming, Johnny Cienciala on bass and Pavel Pilch on drums. Musicserver praised the musicianship and noted the jazz and classical training of half the band.
The Scale
What Musicserver heard here is size: a song made for a crowd rather than a room.
Concepts in Focus
Credits separate two jobs that listeners often merge. Michal Novák, who had found the band on Bandzone.cz in 2007, produced the album; Dušan Neuwerth and Boris Carloff did the mixing, the balancing of the recorded parts into the final sound, and Ondřej Ježek mastered it. Deník credited the album to Neuwerth’s supervision, a sign of how much a mix can feel like authorship. When critics hear the Beatles in a record, they are hearing choices of mix as well as songwriting.
The animated music video by Vít Haratek spent many weeks in the top ten of Czech charts. Musicserver predicted that it “must win an Anděl next year”; it did, as video of the year 2009. For another band from a small country singing guitar pop in English, compare Mando Diao – Dance With Somebody (Radio Version).
Artistic Context
Charlie Straight formed in Třinec in 2006. Talking to Radio Prague, Černý named Radiohead, Coldplay and Oasis among the bands they grew up on, called the band “retro, I guess” and preferred the label indie pop. They sang in English because, as Cienciala put it, it came naturally to Černý, and because they wanted to play abroad. After a second album in 2012 they split in 2013, and Černý went on to Lake Malawi, which represented the Czech Republic at Eurovision 2019.
Impact and Reception
She’s a Good Swimmer won three Anděl awards in 2009: discovery of the year, album of the year and video of the year for this song, and Musicserver gave it nine out of ten. Two MTV Europe Music Awards for best Czech and Slovak act followed. Play it loud, the way a stadium would.
