Eccentric performers and preternaturally talented showmen, the Alice Cooper band were as much art provocateurs as musicians, one of the few glam acts that managed to slither into the mainstream. It seemed barely more than a blink of a mascara’d eye that saw Vince Furnier – shortly to be rechristened Alice Cooper – Dennis Dunaway, Neal Smith, Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce going from being “the most hated band” in Los Angeles, with the superpower to clear a venue in a single song, to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world.
After the release of sixth album Billion Dollar Babies, in 1973, they were on top of rock’s mighty slag heap, with the album at No.1 in the UK and US and three top-10 singles in the UK in that year. Looking back over five decades with something of a jaundiced eye at some of the lesser metal, shock-rock and hair bands that have fallen by the wayside, it’s impossible to overemphasise the effects that the Alice Cooper band had on music, performance, attitude, social (ab)norms and the outcast teenage audience at large. This was the band that changed the landscape of art, respectability and stage wear with their transgressive songs, morality plays gone amok, onstage executions, boa constrictors and twisted humour.
