Ok, here’s the thing Blogger. I’m reasonably happy with my choices in life. On the whole. I make decisions, pick favourites and stick by them. Most of my decisions in this area have made me happier and certainly I now surround myself with more cheery things. But recently, I’ve started to doubt it, just recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my former love Alice. It’s Madness, of course it is, Madness, total divine Madness all the way, but still….Alice.
I should make clear at this point, rather than later on, that I am talking about music here and not revealing some sordid secrets of my love life - I just wanted an opening that misled you into wanting to read what I have to say. The Alice in question is not beautiful, smiley, funny with lovely smelling hair and boobs. In fact he’s ragged and old and wrinkly with messy hair and a giant albino boa constrictor called Katrina, he is Alice Cooper. Yes, you do know him, he did “Schools Out for summer!!”
Anyway, my point is this. Just recently, I have been listening to a lot of Alice Cooper, as you probably all ready know because Spotify now tells Facebook everything - I can never listen to a cheeky bit of S Club again without it grassing me up to all my friends, wanker.
(Er…I don’t do that)
This is all kinda interesting to me and literally no one else, because the other day, I was wondering into town listening to my iPod and in between all the ska, Weird Al, clips from Radio 4 comedy and classic rock that make me feel varied, random and interesting when I shuffle all my tastes, this insignificant Alice Cooper album track tucked away at the end of his 1991, Top 47 bothering album Hey Stoopid came on.
For no adequately answerable reason, I hadn’t heard that song in fucking years. It’s one of my few very favourite songs, I don’t listen to on a weekly or, at least, monthly basis. So I’m having a little walk, thinking about this song, what it means and all the clever little tricks and bits of post-production he uses to make it creepy. All stuff that I think makes me appear deep, analytical and clever. It actually makes me look like a fool who isn’t paying attention to where he’s going and keeps tripping over loose paving slabs or walking into lamp-posts and shoppers. But as I tripped and stumbled into town, it occurred to me that this was the first rock song I can ever remember hearing.
It certainly wasn’t the first rock song I heard. At the moment of my birth, I’m informed that Bohemian Rhapsody was playing - I have a lot of love and respect for my mother for bringing me into this world and more for my dad for not saying “keep it down, I like this one” and letting go of her hand to air guitar to the loud bit. Also, it’s the last track on the album, so there isn’t a chance in hell that it’s the first rock song I heard! But what can I say? Memory can be a fucker.
Bear in mind, I was aged somewhere between 8 and 10 I’d guess, and my music taste up until this point had been largely the fare of school discos and the nightclubs at Haven Holiday Camps(or “singing and dancing” as my young very literal child’s brain called them. I probably called pubs “drinking and puking” too). Now it goes without say that after some Blue slushpuppy (coz it’s obviously the best) and an overdose of Panda Pops, I’ll jump around to any old shite. I think BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! I WANT YOU IN MY ROOM. LETS SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER FROM NOW UNTIL FOREVER was my favourite song for a while. Back in the days when you were too young to know if a song was about sex - I guess it’s the “until forever” bit that’s confusing but then “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom, I want you in my room for about 5 minutes then I just want to not fall asleep in the damp patch” was never gonna chart.
Any rock I had listened to from my parents collection was more of the “safe” (that’s a terrible word to describe it, I apologise for my lackadaisical attitude to finding pertinent synonyms) more pop-py stuff. So when I got bored of my pop mix CD and went looking in my dad’s CD collection I found Hey Stoopid and listened to Wind Up Toy for the first time. It elicited a reaction I didn’t know music could. It scared me. At that stage I was pretty much scared of everything by the way: the noise the pipes made in our house at night, the big cupboard in the corner of my room I rarely looked in but once saw a spider when I did, being told off by Mrs. Witchell, the millennium bug. But this song kinda got to me, it was weird and creepy. But it was also kinda exciting and loud and had lots of good words (this is me trying to express the thoughts I had when I was 9, not just being a shite writer). Instead of ignoring it, I decided to listen to it over and over again a hundred times, which was how I responded to anything exciting as a child. I watched new Postman Pat videos until I could quote it. I would slide the CD off the shelf and try not to look at the cover, I couldn’t articulate really how it made me feel, partly coz fear is a really primal, deep and affecting emotion, but also coz at that age nobody had yet taught me the phrase “That is some fucked up shit.”
Then I grabbed some big 90s headphones, plugged them into the big 90s stereo, slid the CD into the drawer between the tape-deck and turntable…look what I’m trying to say is this happened in the past! Before I could do this kinda thing on my computer in the comfort of my own bedroom. Back in primary school I thought I was pretty clever coz Mr Hutton the computer teacher let me help him fix machines coz I knew them, it now occurs to me that computers were just stupid. So in those days where Windows 98 ruled, I would sit in the corner of the living room listening to this album. Sometimes skipping straight to track 12 or stopping at track 8 which is also fantastic.
As the 00s raged and computers grew up - remember the days when the internet was so small Askjeeves was an effective search engine? - I started looking up this Alice Cooper bloke. I’d probably listened to a few of his albums that my dad had by then. His 2003 albumThe Eyes Of Alice Cooper is the first album I ever bought…I say bought, but I pestered my dad for the money. I ended up reading about this stone-cold-sober reformed alcoholic Christian golf-playing old man. Ok, a golf-player who goes on stage every night with a sword and a snake and has his head cut off, but a golf-player nonetheless. Not very rock and roll is it? I think I prefer him for that though, the fact it’s all an act it’s so much more impressive. In terms of his big over-the-top live shows I guess Lady Gaga is the current equivalent (she’s even cited Alice as an influence), and I think I would have a lot more time for her if she could confine her weirdness to a stage between the hours of 7 and 10, and didn’t turn up on Jonathan Ross with a phone on her head. To be fair, back in his youth Alice basically lived the life of his on-stage persona (with less murder and more drinking) until it all but killed him (his From The Inside album partly written while he was in an asylum recovering is phenomenal and blows away every image you might have of his music from his reputation).
This wasn’t my thinking at the time, but what with now wanting to be a writer it seems that I probably like it more that it’s all a story. I don’t particularly like horror in rock, I also love Pink Floyd and went through a Lordi phase after the 2006 Eurovision song contest, but mostly I don’t listen to horror rock. I like lots of it, but nowhere near as much as I like Alice. As I said at the start, I’m more a lighthearted happy ska man. But with Alice, every album tells a story, but better than that, every song tells a story in it’s own right as well. That’s incredibly clever. If you asked me to compile a list of the most underrated writers of all time (and even if you don’t I’ll definitely write a blog about it soon) he’d be up there. His narratives and ideas are so good that in 2011 he released an amazing sequel to his 1975 masterpiece Welcome To My Nightmare. All through his discography are subtle ballads and slow songs and works of beauty too.
These days he’s not seen as the hardest, edgiest rocker, just in the same way The Beatles don’t seem quite so ground breaking because rock has evolved and moved on since, but they started it. I guess these days screemo is the new hardest rock, most of those bands were influenced by Alice, but it’s not the same for me. Screemo is like car horns, the Daily Mail letters page, and the comments on tripadvisor.com: an angry, inarticulate noise. It’s like “Ok, I get that you’re angry. Just calm down. Chill out. Stop shouting and write me a song that tells me why.” Alice’s songs also have a fantastic sense of humour to them, and a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek which I massively love. There is nothing worse than music that takes itself too seriously.
So there you go, I recommend you check out some Alice Cooper for sophisticated, good rock and story telling. I also recommend you check out my friend Lee’s blog for more proper music reviews that aren’t secretly all about me and my adolescence: http://unacclaimedmusicfan.blogspot.com/2012/02/44-and-angels-airwaves.html
And finally to reward you for sticking through my chat about me and Alice Cooper, here is a more mainstream Alice hit and a video with boobies in it. Enjoy
“The world needed bad guys and music. We needed the ultimate rock’n’roll villain…Enter the Coop…the original punk…and the original goth, glam, shock rocker”-Rob Zombie
“When Alice comes on the stage, it’s like a mythical character. He’s still my favourite rock star.”-Vincent Furnier
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