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Candles in Connecticut

On the eve of his jet-stop visit to Britain, Roy Carr called on Alice at his New England mansion. The lights were out.

THE MOON WAS low over the forest of trees surrounding Alice Cooper's white mansion somewhere in Connecticut, and outside the outasight I could hear a million crickets making their presence heard as Alice lay prostate on a king-size bed in candle-lit apartment of one of the residence wings.

He supped from an ever present can of Budweiser and allowed his indisputedly-lurid imagination to run riot as he told me of a planned death scene in his forthcoming movie.

It features his death on stage — a bullet-hole through his head ‐ before he goes on to a Holiday Inn-type rock 'n' roll heaven in the skies.

Apart from this, "when the movie's completed it'll be made up of live footage and some specially staged sequences," he told me. "There won't be any theme, or any clear story line that you can follow. Neither will there be an explanation or any apology for what happens. Like our stage act, we'd just present various things to the audience and leave them to worry about forming their own conclusions. We ain't gonna help 'em."

There were no sinister connotations for the bringing of the candles this night; a power failure had plunged the entire household into pitch darkness.

This was creepy enough, but an air of the bizarre crept in when drummer Neal Smith burst in and cheerfully announced that the boa constrictor had escaped from its cage and was slithering about somewhere in the gloom.

"So mind how you go", warned Smith with a smile, "and scream if she gets you".

"Never mind, she'll turn up soon", said the unconcerned Cooper getting into another Budweiser. "Knowing her, she'd probably crawl in bed with someone and curl up on their chest. She's always doing that, bless her." It was a statement of fact which prompted me to tactfully decline an invitation to stay the night and finish the interview as quickly as possible. I motored back to Manhattan as speedily as four wheels would carry me.

I had however, not been all that surprised when our conversation had got around to that of sex or what Alice, symbol of paranoid sexuality, had had to say on the subject.

"Off hand, I can't think of any pop star who hasn't had an ambiguous sex life," he told me.

"If you saw Elvis wearing the kinda make-up he wears on stage in the street, you'd do a double take. It's an ambiguous type of sex thing.

"When Elvis started out he wore bright pink jackets and had a greasy little curl of hair, with the result he was always getting into a fight every night he performed. It was unthinkable and intolerable to look like that in the South."

Cooper switched his mind to the future. 'Y'know, it's gonna get to the point where sex is going to finally break down the barriers between men and women. It's just gonna be sex... sex without any categorisations. It'll no longer be homosexual, bi-sexual, or heterosexual — just sex. And I'm sure that's gonna be happening within the next ten years.

"People should be free enough to realise that sex is fine. "If a man wants a man... O.K. If a woman wants a woman... O.K. Who'se that hurting... is it hurting the norm? After a while the norm is going to be nothing but that. Sex is going to boil down to just one word. People will do just what they want."

Cooper suggested the first signs were evident in the mass accepted acts of himself and David Bowie.

"A lot of girls think bi-guys are real sexy. They see it as an odd type of sex. Not the kind that they're used to, so immediately it's mysterious and very sexy.

"So you can see people are already beginning to accept what was once unacceptable, and now they're feeling free to indulge in whatever they choose, 27 gorillas and 10 girls all in one bed," he suggested. He laughed and spilled his beer.

Cindy, Cooper's flame-haired lady, wandered into the room and enquired as to what we're talking about.

"Sex", confessed Alice.

"Don't answer questions like that," she replied, "they're loaded."

"So am I", quipped Cooper, reaching for another beer.

I retired gracefully. I still have the feeling that something slithered over my feet as I walked, candle in band, to the front door.