Gompie

Gompie is a Dutch café in Nijmegen, which in 1995 edited the Smokie hit "Living Next Door to Alice", just adding "Alice, Who the fuck is Alice!?" and reaching number-17 in the UK and number-1 in the Netherlands.

Background

The hit "Living Next Door to Alice" was listened to on a regular basis in café Gompie. When the name "Alice" had passed, it was common for the disk jockey Onno Pelser to turn the volume down and the entire café would scream "Alice, who the fuck is Alice?". Rob Peters, director of a small record company, happened to visit café Gompie one evening and experienced this show. He then realized that this could be made into a hit. He approached his friend Peter Koelewijn and one day later the hit was recorded. Gompie was chosen for the artist name.

The single became a big hit in the Benelux and 80 other countries. In the United Kingdom and the United States, a censored version was released with the name "Alice, who the bleep is Alice?": this charted in Britain (though was less popular than Smokie's own re-recording of the track with Roy 'Chubby' Brown) but made no impact at all in the US.