SHOCK ROCK AND AWE FOR ALICE COOPER AND WIND BACK WEDNESDAY

Top up your Coopers of all types, for it is time.

There are unconfirmed rumours that Alice Cooper’s world tour may extend to Australia, and those who saw his shows at the Pandemonium Rocks festival last year would celebrate that (even if not everything at that festival quite made the mark). The pleasure this might time might be elevated with a reunion of (most of) the original Alice Cooper group for a new album, Revenge Of Alice Cooper.

For the not-so-devoted, it is 20 years almost to the day since the man-who-was-a-band-with-an-unlikely-name then-a-solo-man-with-a-woman’s-name took time away from the golf course to speak with me.

That’s a good enough excuse then for Wind Back Wednesday to don the shock rock bib, tease the hair unmercifully, and bite down hard on that fake blood capsule. If 2005 was an unlikely return to centre stage of popular culture, 2025 says anything possible.

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WE ARE WORTHY after all. Mr Alice Cooper, before whom Wayne and Garth famously bowed down in a gesture of abject respect, is in the house and not insisting that I call him Mr Cooper (or indeed Miss Alice).

“Call me Coop. Everyone calls me Coop,” he says with a mix of old school courtesy and the beneficence of one for whom the supplication of minions is a normal course of events.

Cooper is in many ways the benevolent uncle of the hard rock scene these days – he was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit, Michigan in 1948 after all. Respect must be given though for the fact he was doing rock horror shtick before Kiss, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and pervert-come-lately Marilyn Manson, putting on the kind of theatrical shows which brought vaudeville and schlock to the deadly serious rock world of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Even though the ‘80s and ‘90s saw him drop the melodic edge which once graced his garage-rock roots, replaced by anonymous metal and written-to-order MOR, age shall not weary him or his healthy self-esteem. In case you have any doubt about Cooper’s place in the rock world, his self-assurance can make up for any shortfall.

“The kind old uncle eh,” he chuckles, but with a decided edge. “Yeah the kind old uncle that will still blow them all away. I challenge any one of these young bands to stay up with Alice Cooper. I always say the young bands come up but they’ve still got to work hard to match our shows because our shows don’t stop. It’s like a truck going down a mountain: once it starts you cannot stop this show. Twenty eight songs, twenty seven rock songs and one ballad and every single song has some theatrical bit to it. Even if you hate Alice Cooper you’re going to love the show.”

No, he’s not strictly speaking of himself in the third person here for there is the off-stage Vincent Furnier and the on-stage Alice Cooper.

“For the two hours or the hour and 45 minutes that I am Alice, I have to assume his personality, I have to assume his sense of humour, his posture,” Cooper-now-Furnier says. “After the 30 years of being him I’m probably the only one who understands his sense of humour, irony and timing.”

After more than three decades of existence Alice Cooper is what the marketing folk call a heritage act but while he may be of roughly the same vintage, it’s fair to say that Cooper is not competing for the Eagles audience.

“I’ve got the same kind of audience as Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, a real classic rock crowd,” Cooper says proudly. “I’ll have my 50 and 40-plus audience but the first 20 or 30 rows in the front are kids and it’s because the closer you get to the show the more you’re in the show. Tell the readers not to wear expensive clothes if they’re sitting in the first 20 rows [he chuckles again]."

Are those kids there to rock to a recent album like Dragon Town or are they just as excited by something from early ‘70s original band album Killer?

When he was many. Alice Cooper-the-band first time around.

“Almost every kid I know is into classic rock. My son is 19 years old, got his own band but him and all of his friends are into Guns N’Roses, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Iggy and the Stooges. That’s their meat and potatoes,” says Cooper. “They listen to Jet, Rage Against The Machine, but when they really listen to stuff 90 per cent of the time it’s Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath. This generation is very very hip to classic rock.”

He says this like it’s a good thing. It certainly makes very good financial sense but is it a good thing for 19, 20 year olds to be listening to music their parents were listening to? When Vincent Furnier was 19 it’s unlikely he was listening to jive or Rosemary Clooney.

“I think it’s great,” he declares. “For one thing I would hate to be in a new band right now because we were in the generation that created classic rock. We went back to Chuck Berry and stuff like that and created a modern, slick version of those songs. Now bands all they can do is be derivative. They can only go back and be derivative of us.”

So what can those for whom rock music stopped being really exciting a quarter of a century ago expect to see in an Alice Cooper show today? Well, it’s the staples of rock’n’roll: blood, decapitation, evocations of Hammer Horror films, grinding guitars and a man in heavy makeup.

“Maybe 30 years from now I can see somebody putting on the makeup and costume and playing Alice the same way they can play Zorro or Dracula,” ponders Cooper.

Maybe he should franchise it now, have a Japanese Alice Cooper like the Wiggles are doing. It is after all an under-utilised area of rock.

“I said to somebody why shouldn’t Alice cooper be a girl? As long as the character is consistent with the songs. I like the idea that he’s a Halloween character, that makes you as specific as Dracula. When you look at the modern day monsters, in the ‘30s it was Dracula, the mummy, the werewolf. Now it’s Ozzy, Alice, it’s Rob Zombie, Gene Simmons. They’re the new monsters.”

Of course the scariest thing for his audience is Britney Spears, who has for some years now been the sacrificial body, in effigy, for a climactic moment of the Alice Cooper show.

“Britney Spears of course is the most frightening character of all time and by far the most dangerous,” laughs Cooper. “We’re just blood and guts; she goes much deeper than that.”

She corrupts at the core?

“Absolutely. She’s much more sinful than anything we’ve ever done. But I think Paris Hilton should definitely get Cooperised. We could do a pregnant Britney but we’re going to let Britney rest for 9 months until she has her kid. Paris Hilton is by far more absurd than Britney is now. I would really love to see the chihuahua rip her throat out.”

See, who said rock’n’roll doesn’t keep up with the times?

BONUS BITE: THE MYTHS OF ALICE COOPER

The Chicken Killer

“I’ve always talked about that. First of all, a chicken gets thrown up on stage, I throw the chicken back, the audience rips the chicken apart. Next day the paper says Alice Cooper kills chicken. Alice Cooper never killed a chicken on stage. First of all it would be too obvious: Alice would never do anything that obvious. It was the audience and it wasn’t just an audience, the first 10 rows were in wheelchairs, they basically crippled the chicken. That is even sicker than me doing it.”

The name Alice Cooper came from a ouija board session.

“After the fact, after we had already said Alice Cooper is a great name because it reminds us of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane and because it sounds like a sick old woman, so let’s name ourselves after a sweet little old lady and we’ll come out like A Clockwork Orange. After that somebody said ‘oh I ran Alice Cooper through my ouija board and it said she was a 16th century witch’. And I said oh really [in bored tones] how fascinating.”

The pastry gift to his sister from a teenage Alice Cooper (Let’s say it involved the idea in American Pie taken to its natural conclusion and then presented to his sister to eat)

“The pastry gift never happened. Not that I can remember. I think it was something that I thought of and I’m sure someone has done that, but not me.”

Golf is his passion.

“My handicap is four. I read an article in a golf magazine where Tiger Woods was rating celebrity golfers and he said I would not give Alice Cooper two strokes start. It’s a weird thing that Alice Cooper the scourge of rock’n’roll, the man who literally changed the look of rock’n’roll, would also be, if he wanted to be, a PGA pro. It would be like if Marilyn Manson was also the world’s best ping pong player.”

He is a born again Christian.

“I always tell people I grew up in a Christian home and I was the prodigal child. I went away from it, I’ve done everything any human being could do out there and came back to it realising that was more fulfilling to me. That doesn’t dilute my rock’n’roll. If anything it makes my lyrics more interesting.”