Alice

Hello Steve, That was nice! Don’t worry about rambling. I like rambling stories. I’m on my lunch-break now, from doing some interminable course about an Oracle database. Useful, but…

I can’t say I was ever a “fan” of Alice Cooper (or should I say “Vincent Furnier” and try and sound like I know him?). I liked the music. When you’re our age, “School’s Out!” still has a particular ring. I really like the idea of “Eating from the bush”. So much so, that I just walked to the bottom of the garden and picked two of my own apples. The crows have pecked away at most of them but I found two decent ones. They’re now sliced up and sitting on a saucer beside me. Oracle will be just a little sweeter this afternoon.

I like the idea of you and Carol watching and listening from a distance. It strikes me as being just a little naughty, in a child-like kind of way. It sort of reminds me of when Noreen and I were on our honeymoon (gosh that’s a long time ago!) We did a cruise around the Baltic. This particular day, we were ashore in Stockholm and the Swedes had some enormous festival on. Even though we had a cordon-bleu dinner waiting for us on the ship in the evening, we played hookey (at least that was what it felt like) and dined out on ice-cream and hot dogs! (In that order too!)

I know what you mean about Alice being accepted by the establishment. It seems strange. I thought it was odd when I found out that he plays golf as well (and he plays it well, too). I don’t know but I have a feeling that Alice himself considers his situation mildly amusing.

One of the things which I think we’ve lost with the wonders of the internet is some of the idea of “foreign-ness”. Would anyone think of buying an imported disc any more? I don’t know. I don’t buy much music these days. Being a citizen of the world is nice, but I don’t want the world to become homogenous. I want it to be difficult to get some things, just so I can have the fun of finding them and the satisfaction of getting hold of them. And I don’t want to go to the far side of the world and drink Guinness. I know it’s good for the Irish economy, but I don’t want to do it.

When I was in Siberia I had a little money trouble. Nothing serious, but for the first few days I couldn’t find a cash machine that would accept any of my cards (that’s a Pre-pay card and credit cards and debit cards from two different banks, in two different currencies). You can’t buy roubles outside the country, and I’d only got about 50 quid’s worth I’d bought in Moscow airport. I was due to be there for 4 weeks and I was worried I was going to be short of cash. There was a Frenchman on the same course in the same predicament as me. With a little help from the Russians we identified several _different_ banks (no point it trying “Barclays” twice) and one afternoon  set out to try them out. We were successful. We had already agreed that if only one of us was lucky we would do some kind of deal, but we both “struck gold”. He spoke a little English and my French is limited to numbers. In any case we were supposed to be speaking Russian. He looked at me and asked “Pivo?” (Russian for beer), to which my response was, of course “Da. Pivo!” The first bar we found was an “English Bar” serving “Fuller’s”! (Not London Pride, but a made-for-the-market version) It tasted good (especially as an hour earlier I had thoughts of going hungry, never mind thirsty), and it was a blistering hot day, but I didn’t really want to be drinking English bitter in the middle of Siberia. Especially not “…made in Siberia by Britons” bitter!

That’s _my_ ramble over. “Back on your heads.” I don’t know if I should base a philosophy of life on a pop song, but I will try and eat a little more from the bush. I still have my saucer of apple slices to help me with Oracle.

Good wishes to Carol and the family,

Regards,

Tom    

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Tom,

When Carol and I were young, before we were married, we were keen fans of Alice Cooper.

You may remember a record collection with all his/their recordings from the first 10 years of the career.

But we have never been ones to attend live performances.

Our favourite song by Alice is ‘Apple bush, apple tree’ from their first record (in 1969?), not released in UK until late 70s but purchased in 73 as an import by a boyfriend of my sisters.

Anyway this song has proven to be a philosophy of life that we have stuck with.

‘There’s people who succeed, they don’t try hard, they’ve found a way to live with ease, by eating from the bush instead of the trees’

We have always been modest in expectation and see pleasure in small things that are already around us. It helps if you live in the finest little village in all England, surrounded by National Trust property to which we have free access, so you don’t have to work yourself to death to earn the money to buy it all and then worry about maintaining it.

We have watched Alice’s career with amusement over the years, culminating with his acceptance into the establishment, presenting his radio show on the BBC.

So you wait 40 years and in the end.....he arrives to play in the next village.

‘No Mother he is not playing a wedding at the village hall’ although stranger things do happen around here.

Fairport Cropredy Festival you know, but what are they doing inviting Alice to play to folk fans?

Just because he’s old doesn’t mean the music is any different. ‘We play all the old hits as close as we can get to the original sound’ says Alice in an interview for the festival.

It was almost 2 weeks ago, he was headline act on Thursday evening. Some years we have heard every song quite clearly, we are 2 miles from Cropredy and can almost see into the site if we go to the far side of the church yard. We decided it might be fitting to listen in from there. What time do you think the last act will be on? 11 or 12pm? No this is Cropredy and they all expect to be in bed for 10.30pm.

But disaster, by 9.30pm the wind was in the wrong direction, all we could hear was the motorway behind us. So we got in the car and drove toward Cropredy, stopping at a favourite spot of our girls, beside the Oxford canal at a tiny hamlet called Apple Tree. It’s 3 farms spread over half a mile and a group of shanty shacks along the canalside, clearly built without regulations or planning permission, housing people more dedicated than we are to ‘eating from the bush’.

And there he is singing away, unmistakably Alice Cooper sounding really good, about half a mile over the hedge and across 2 fields. The light is dazzling and that’s just the floodlights around the site, we can’t see the stage. The sound is clear although the wind is still in the wrong direction. Carol says she wouldn’t want to be any closer, she is uncomfortable with it pounding in her chest. We lean back against the side of the car and watch the stars and bats swooping around us. When another car comes past we see the air is thick with moths and bats diving between them.

We listened to 4 or 5 songs, I recognised only 1 of them and that not a great classic, and that was enough for us oldies. Glad that we hadn’t been deafened and blinded. We drove on some more but not past the site, through Cropredy village which was quite lively with people leaving the concert, more oldies all looking a bit dejected in their brightly coloured home knitted jumpers. The pub was very popular, running a festival fringe concert, more like traditional folk, they are welcome to it.

Sorry this has turned into an epic, I only meant to write a couple of lines.

Steve