ALICE COOPER
At the age of 71, Alice Cooper is still rocking like it’s 1971, except with mineral water and golf instead of drink and drugs. Heck, that’s how the king (with a girl’s name) of vaudeville rock is here and chatting to Carl Marsh ahead of his Cardiff gig.
So you’ve got a concert in Cardiff coming up: will this be a new show or the same one you’ve been touring for a year or so, now?
Last year we did 193 shows in 193 different cities, so we decided that after two years it was time to change the show entirely. This new show will be the new production, and we will still do all the hits. I’ve probably got the best touring band out there as my drummer Glen Sobel got voted by Drum! magazine as the best drummer in rock’n’roll, and my guitar player, Nita Strauss, just won best female guitar player. So I’ve got a killer band, a great rock band.
How long have Glen and Nita been with this current make-up of the band?
Glen has been with me for about five years, Nita has been with me about three. She is 28 years old, she looks like a Victoria’s Secret model and plays like Eddie Van Halen! It is really hard to beat that combination, and she’s a great kid. She will jump up on stage and tear it up.
When you say this tour will be very different than the last one, what do you mean… or is it all a surprise for ticket buyers?
Well, it’s an Alice Cooper show, so you realise that there is going to be a grand opening and a great closing for the show because that is where all the theatrics all come in. The whole show is theatrical, but we go overboard with the theatrics about three-quarters through. I know that if I was in the audience and I had been watching the Stones, or any other classic bands like The Who, I want to hear the songs – listen to those songs that have brought me there. So we do everything – Under My Wheels, Poison, School’s Out, I’m Eighteen, No More Mr Nice Guy – but it’s just how you produce them on stage to make it visually different than the last time.
When did you come up with the theatrical idea in the first place?
Well, we couldn’t afford anything really expensive early on but we were always absolutely theatrical, it was in our DNA. Even when we were playing in bars, we still had something going on – I would find a bucket and a mop backstage and I’d say, “that’s going to be our prop today!” and turn that mop into 12 different things.
When we started making money, we could say things like “Let’s put Alice in a straitjacket! Let’s have a nurse come out! Cut his head off! Hang him!” – because he is the villain, so he needs to be executed – and then come back for the finale. Then he’d be all in white, like he’s been reborn. The audience loves that. They want Alice to be punished and to come back.
Do you think that you were destined to have the career that you’ve had, and how it has panned out?
I believe that I wouldn’t have been happy doing anything else. At 71, I am in better shape now than I probably was when I was 30! Because I was hanging out with Keith Moon and those boys, and I was going downhill pretty fast [laughs].
I quit drinking and drugs 37 years ago, and it added 40 years to my life – at 71 now, I’m in top shape. Now I can go up and do a two-hour show, no problem. With rock’n’roll there is always this idea that you are producing, you are writing new music, you are always active, and then you get onstage, and in our case, you have got to really produce something big because people are expecting it. And even though we don’t go with lasers and we don’t go with all that stuff such as pyro, I want my show to be much more personal so that audiences are sucked into it – almost like a vaudeville cabaret kind of thing.
Alice Cooper, Motorpoint Arena Cardiff, Sat 12 Oct. Tickets: £48 (sold out – check box office for returns). Info: 029 2022 4488 / motorpointarenacardiff.co.uk