The Battle of the Bands #1 - Alice Cooper vs Pink Floyd

 Today we see the start of another occasional series of blogs. I'm calling it "The Battle of The Bands". This will be a highly personal and highly opinionated series of blogs, where I look at two bands/artists and their take on the subject, and why I love one and hate the other, whilst looking at some aspects of why. 

We start with Alice Cooper's Schools Out vs Pink Floyd's another brick in the wall. Lets start with a look at Pink Floyd. Back in the dying embers of the 1960's, they were my favourite band. I detailed the story back in 2009.  I loved the whimsy of See Emily Play and I will forever associate it with my first girlfriend. Nearly everyone I knew dismissed it, stating that the Beatles were far better (they never were). By 1972, I'd almost forgotten Pink Floyd. I wasn't overly interested in music then. Nothing much excited me. ON April 26th, Alice Cooper released Schools Out.  Amazing Grace by The Scots Guards was no 1 in the UK. I'd never seen or heard anything like it.

I was at St Vincents at the time. I absolutely hated it. Grown ups would tell me that school is the happiest years of your life. It wasn't it was horrible. Hearing Mr Cooper singing "Schools been blown to pieces" over a vibrant rock backing was perhaps the moment I realised that Rock and Roll was something I needed to explore. There really are no words to sum up how great it was to have an adult elucidating my feelings in a rock band.  

"School's Out"

Well, we got no choice
All the girls and boys
Making all that noise
'Cause they found new toys
Well, we can't salute ya
Can't find a flag
If that don't suit ya
That's a drag

School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks, yeah

Well, we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes

School's out for summer
School's out forever
My school's been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks
Out for summer
Out 'til fall
We might not come back at all

School's out forever
School's out for summer
School's out with fever
School's out completely

Fast forward to 1979. I'd left St Vincents Primary and Finchley Catholic High School and I was at Orange Hill School. This was actually the happiest part of my education by a long chalk. By now, I was a fully committed music lover, with Punk and the new wave of Ska being my favourite genres. I rarely thought of Pink Floyd or Alice Cooper. Things had moved on. Some of my mates, mostly the cannabis smoking fraternity, had got into Pink Floyd. Not the whimsy of Syd Barratt era, that I so loved. After Barratt left, the band became rather serious. It didn't work for me and I had no interest. But then, Another Brick in the Wall was released. My Floyd loving mates informed me that the lyrics were pretty punk. It had an animated video, something I've always loved. 

"Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)"

[Roger Waters & David Gilmour:]
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

[Pupils from the Fourth Form Music Class Islington Green School, London:]
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone

All in all you're just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

[Roger Waters:]
Wrong! Do it again!
Wrong! Do it again!
If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!
You! Yes, you, behind the bike sheds. Stand still, laddie!

I read about it before I heard it and was actually quite excited. I'd not paid enough attention to realise that Barratt, the genius in the band, had left. From the first few notes, I realised that this was not the Pink Floyd I loved. All it did was take me back to St Vincents and horrible nuns making us miserable. 

Music is evocative, and whilst Alice Copper gave us hope, Pink Floyd robbed us of it. Cooper was singing of rebellion, Pink Floyd were singing about the crushing of the human soul.

I think that was the moment I fell out of love with Pink Floyd. To make matters worse, all of my Hippy friends loved the album. I'd be forced to suffer it as they skinned up and bored me about the musical artistry of Roger Waters & co. 

What is quite ironic is that after having hated the song for the best part of 45 years, I now sing the melody when I am at Hadley FC, albeit with new words extolling the wonders of the team.

So for me, in the Battle of The Bands #1, it is an emphatic victory for Alice Cooper, albeit with the caveat that I absolve Syd Barratt from all blame.

As an interesting aside, I was chatting to a customer about music and they asked me what I thought of Roger Waters. My flippant response was "The bloke has caused enough pain, I don't want to think about him at all". I was referring to my dislike of his masterpiece and the fact that it still gives me flashbacks to the most miserable period of my life. My customer assumed I was talking about his stance on Palestine and asked if I was a Zionist and stormed off in a huff before I had a chance to respond. It is not the first time my view of Waters has upset someone, but I hadn't realised he'd been canonised and all his prior sins absolved. As I've zero interest in his music, his stance on Palestine had passed my by. All I can really say is that the political views of someone who's music I really don't like will not make me enjoy their work or be interested in what they have to say, so I doubt I'll be researching Roger Waters views too much anytime soon.

-----------------------------------------------

Music is my life. Without my band, The False Dots, my life would have been impossibly dull. Have a listen to our new single/video if you can. It's sort of Ska/Punk, nothing like Alice Cooper or Pink Floyd!

Thursday  30th May, The Horn, St Albans CLICK FOR DETAILS AND TICKETS enter FD24 for a discount!

Saturday 6th July - Jesterfest, Fortune Green (daytime free gig)

Checkout our brand new single video - We all Love a Party

Disturbing Childhood memories

Occasionally the most innocent of questions can dredge up the most disturbing of memories. When we are children, we don't really understand the world, so we make up a scenario to fit the events that we see that offers some sort of rational explanation. In hindsight, when we become adults, we reassemble the jigsaw and realise that a series of coincidental occurrances lead us to concoct a completely ridiculous fantasy and in basic terms, we got it wrong. I guess that those of us who never get over building these fantastical fantasies end up invading Iraq because God told them to, but generally most of us take a more rational approach.

A recent blog I did answered the 2o questions as posed on Top Tory blogger Iain Dale's blog.
One of the questions was "First Girlfriend/Boyfriend". I must confess, I wasn't completely honest in my answer. For some quite unfathomable reason, I deliberately gave the wrong answer. The reason? Total embarrassment. Even worse, there really wasn't anything to be embarrassed about. The truth is that although the answer is true in as much as I detailed a first stolen kiss, it wasn't true in relation to my first girlfriend. In the late 1960's I was a very successful child actor/model. I starred in many TV adverts, the most notable being a Heinz Baked Beans advert which won an award at the Cannes International festival for best directed Advert. I suspect it may have been the first Heinz Beanz Ad. if you are interested it was the "We can't go on holiday without the beans mum" ad. I was the kid with the holdall.

I got the job because at the screen test I was the only six year old who would eat a plate of cold baked beans. I can vividly recall hearing all of the other kids screaming as their parents tried to force them to eat. I knew what had to be done, so I did it with a smile. The director was rather surprised at my reaction. He asked "You enjoyed that, do you like cold beans". I shot back "No, I like proper food, I was acting". Job done.

In the course of shooting an advert you are at the location for two or three days. If you were good, like me, you got 3 guinnieas an hour, which in 1967 was a small fortune. My acting career payed for my first guitar, so it served me well. Anyway I digress, as I was saying, the shoots were very long and very boring. On one shoot, there was a very pretty girl around my age called Emily. I'd not been interested in girls till I met Emily. Generally the kids were left to their own devices, the crews did their stuff, the mums/ chaperones chatted and in the course of the three days you were busy for possibly 2 or three hours. Emily was my co-star, my little sister in the script. She was at acting school and had dreams of a career as an actress. I was at the local Primary. We hit it off straight away. By the time we'd finished the shoot, we'd mapped the whole of our life together. We'd come up with a winning concept for a blockbuster film, in which we'd star. The idea was simple. There were films for girls, with romance & ponies, there will films for boys with cars and guns and baddies. We'd make films with all of it, so both girls & boys would like them. We sort of used the idea of Thunderbirds where you had Lady Penelopie for the girls & The Tracy's for the boys, but with real actors. She'd run a pony camp and I'd drive an E-Type jag with machine guns & missiles on it. Sound's great?

Not only that, but we'd planned our entire life together. Now as we were only kids, a key part of this was waiting to grow up, but we'd decided that would not be a problem as we didn't want to go out with anyone else. Now my biggest problem was that I had 5 elder siblings who I knew would tease me mercilessly and ruin everything if they found out. As we'd agreed a "no secrets" policy, I let her know my fears. She understood and said "Thats Ok because when we are 16 we'll be famous and so we can get together". We agreed that until then we'd keep our friendship a secret and only discuss it on film shoots when we were in private. It made it even more exciting.

Anyway, when the shoot finished, off I went home. I felt truly happy and contented for the first time, as I knew my life was going to be great. How could it fail? Now this is where things got strange. When I got home, I was listening to the radio in my bedroom. I'd never really listened to songs, but this strange tune suddenly came on. This disturbed me greatly.

I wasn't really listening at first, but when I heard the chorus, I was deeply disturbed

There is no other day
Let's try it another way
You'll lose your mind and play
Free games for May
See Emily play

I realised that I had lost my mind. I had realised that all I could think about was Emily and all I wanted to do was play with her. I had to find out who the song was by. A week or so later, it came on & I asked my older sister Val. She said "That's Pink Floyd. They are into drugs, drug addicts like them". The thing was, I loved the song. It made me feel happy. The trouble was that as soon as it finished, I became racked with guilt. I worried that I was a drug addict (rather strange really as was about 7 and didn't know what drugs were). I asked my eldest brother Laurie, about Pink Floyd. He started to tell me about psychedelia & UFO's.

All of a sudden, I realised the awful truth. Emily was an Alien! That was why she was so different to all the other girls, that was why she was so pretty. That was why I'd lost my mind. Her strange power had transformed me into an Alien controlled Zombie! The worst thing was that all I wanted to be was a zombie, listening to Pink Floyd, playing with Emily. Worse still, I couldn't validate my theory with my siblings as I knew they'd start the "Roger's got a Girlfriend" wind up and humiliate me. I developed a mad interest in astronomy. I bought a telescope. This was a cover to look for Emily's UFO. I was obsessed with this whole scenario for about four or five years, but never told anyone. WhenI was 14 I discovered punk rock and was finally completely cured.

There are a few hangovers. Apart from "See Emily Play" I loathe and detest Pink Floyd. I had this strange belief that Syd Barrett had been knobbled to stop him telling me the truth. I also found their later albums strangely bland and lacking in references to interesting things.

Another rather strange thing is I have an extreme dislike of zombie films. I have this urge to yell at the telly "That's not how it really is"

I also think that combined with my dyslexia, this had a massively detrimental effect on my education as I was far more interested in my fantasy world than anything else.

I never saw Emily again. My mum developed cancer in 1970 and that was the end of my acting career. I'd completely put all of this into a little compartment in my mind labelled childhood fantasy until I did Iain Dale's question, shut the door and locked it. It has made me ask myself one question. I wonder if my children have any such bizarre ideas?