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Alice Cooper Conquers London

Darling, Let Him Slaughter You A Little Bit

Alice Cooper returned to London, for the last performance of "Killer", in which he appears on stage with a snake three and a half meters long, with a sadistic pleasure he cuts up a plastic doll and is finally hanged by two guitarists of the group. "Heavy-rock", sex and violence, the ingredients of Alice's provocative style that helped lay bare the hypocrisy of American society.

Alice Cooper arrived directly from America and brought us all to the Chessington Zoo, on the threshold of the green region of Surrey: journalists, photographers, radio, television and a swarm of girls dressed in school uniforms to promote Alice's latest album, "School's Out" (school is finished). We were all there for what turned out to be the craziest press conference London has ever seen. Obviously there were cages with lots of animals, but Alice wanted to entertain us in the corner reserved for the amusement park: the bumper rides, the flying wheels, planes and rocking horses. There was also a small circus with clowns, trapeze artists, trained dogs and horses and the surprise of the evening, a daring stripper. At this point the whole group was so drunk (the wine was distributed at will by the students - who were secretaries of Alice's record company adequately transformed) - that it wasn't long before it turned into a general orgy when a girl of enormous proportions followed the example of the stripper and an OZ journalist joined her for the benefit of the photographers. Alice in the meantime had been assaulted by the stripper and laughed extremely pleased. "The English finally understand everything!" He cried.

Alice Cooper, for those who still don't know, is the most talked about "thing" of the moment in America and, considering how the British press reacted, even in England. Alice is sex, Alice is violence, Alice is rock. Alice is the most outrageous thing that has come out of Puritan America in the last twenty years. And young people love it. They adore him in America, where entire stadiums are filled to see him while he cuts a doll into pieces, while he is hanged guilty of murder or when he plays sexually with a snake 3 feet long. Now, after his performance at the Wembley Pool (the concert given the day after the crazy press conference), they also adore him in England, and 7,000 fans showed this at every point of his spectacular performance.

What is the answer to Alice's success?

"Rock is the most popular thing among young people all over the world," Alice explained. "In rock we have two of the most commercial ingredients: sex and violence. We offer the public what it wants, what it has always wanted since the beginning of the world. And we're not doing anything new, because rock has always represented sex and violence: all we did was highlight these elements, like icing the cake".

Alice, who on stage appears garishly dressed up to look like a transvestite, while offstage he is a pleasant and very nice guy: a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he appeared at the Rainbow last year, a lot of people and many journalists harassed him.

"I believe that most of these people were not aware of our type of show," explained Alice. "We arrived clean and new, and from the stage I could feel that the audience was distant: they were there as a simple observer and this is enough to bring down any musical act in which the artist needs the participation of the audience. I was a little disappointed, because I thought the English audience were more prepared for theater than America. It can be said that the theater was born in England and what we represent is a theatrical rock show. But perhaps they have given too much attention to the scene, forgetting about music, which we do not overlook. Before preparing a show we focus on the musical part which is "heavy-rock", heavy at most. The heavier it is, the more violence and sex there is. They are all related things".

One of the best moments of the show at the Rainbow was when Alice made money fly into the audience triggering a real uproar.

"I did it entirely because I saw all these people with serious and critical expressions and I thought, 'Are these the people who call themselves hippies? Who live on vegetables alone and preach love and peace? Let's see how they respond to the sight of some money'. So I put fifty pounds on a sword and slowly released them on the heads of the audience. As you will remember they killed themselves to get a small piece of the bills. Money has great power over people and I have always thought of money, sex and violence as the least publicized, but the most powerful of commercial ingredients".

Alice Cooper began his career as Vince and The Spiders, a group in Phoenix, Arizona, that played in the same genre as the Yardbirds. "I've always been interested in how to present music on stage," Alice told me. "I almost always used makeup and I always tried to 'act' the music and lyrics we played".

"Did you ever think that your success could reach its current proportions?"

"No, absolutely," Alice answered, laughing. "It all happened suddenly. I started playing with a rubber chicken, treating it violently and in the stories of those who had seen it, the chicken had come alive. For those who told it, I would kill the chicken on stage and for the fourth or fifth person who told it I even slit the throat of the chicken and drank the blood. We got to the point that people stopped me in the street and were asking me if I'd dismembered kittens. Uha! How can anyone be so degenerate as to think such a thing? Then I realized that people need to see any kind of violence. It's all in history: among the Romans who fed Christians to the lions: among the French who crowded in front of the guillotine and so on. Just go on the highway and run into a fatal accident: you can be sure that there will be at least a hundred cars of spectators who want to see the blood. It's all crazy, but if I can satisfy these innate needs with my show, I'm happy to do it with a musical show".

Alice Cooper's father is a religious minister (I couldn't grasp which religion). What does Alice think about it?

"I am not religious, or rather I do not believe in organized religion. There are too many millions involved in every religion and they continue to say that they are only interested in spiritual things; it can't be sincere. But I get along with my father; maybe he doesn't agree with my...techniques but he's happy to know I'm doing something. I sent him my last gold record as a gift for Father's Day".

* * *

Wembley Pool was the only English concert by Alice Cooper and his group and was also the last performance of "Killer". Upon his return to America, Alice will start working on the subject of the group's latest album, "School's Out", where he plans to include a parody of "West Side Story".

The London audience knew that this would be the last chance to see Alice hanged (the highlight of the show) and had arrived at Wembley in large numbers: 7216 to be exact. Surprisingly, there were many very young people who immediately after the performance of Roxy Music, the support group, crowded against the double barriers. The space between the barriers and the stage was full of photographers divided in two halves by a catwalk that went from the stage up to the first row of chairs in the stalls: the walkway would be Alice's battlefield.

And so Alice entered the stage among hundreds of small bubbles of soap that were generated from behind the amplifiers. The lights were very effective throughout the performance and would provide an atmosphere to what Alice did, sang and posed. Alice proved to be the true leader of the 7,000 who shouted his name. First he thrilled them with the aggressive sound of "I'm Eighteen", then he enticed them with sexual moves. When the atmosphere got hot and the barriers bent under the pressure of the audience, that was literally piled up against the stage, moved by the macabre performance of "Dead Babies". He entered the catwalk clutching a doll against his chest, and with sinister psychopathic glances, he first stripped the doll and then proceeded to cut off its hands, arms and legs with a small axe. "Goodbye, little baby," Alice sang as the music grew heavier and more obsessive and the audience fought to take the miserable limbs of the doll that Alice threw. The music then moved to the song "Killer" and the stage was covered with smoke and thunder. Alice, surprised by the killing of the child (the puppet), tried to escape his accusers (the two guitarists quickly dressed in the hangman's clothes) who took him and forced him to get on the gallows that had been revealed to one side of the stage. Everything had happened quickly: the killing, the accusation, the trial and the execution. The organist and the drummer continued to send mournful sounds from their instruments and the crowd, intoxicated by the violence of the killing, screamed "to death". I say, he was really freaking out and the scariest thing was that he seemed really convincing. A noise of chains, the trap door opened under Alice's feet and the murderous singer was hung with the rope around his neck.

There were a few moments of complete darkness and from some pre-recorded tapes violent thunder could be heard that seemed to pierce the immense Empire Pool. But the lights soon came back: and so did the soap bubbles that glittered in the colors of the spotlights. Alice came back, dressed in a top hat and a cane, as if resurrected by the calls of the audience. He sang and threw rolls in the crowd that contained posters of Alice at the gallows: a souvenir of the hanging. Then, suddenly, he said goodbye and left the stage. It was the end of the show. But the crowd did not want to leave, exploding loudly in to calls for Alice and he could reintroduce his faithful snake picking up the show from where he had left it, moving from violence to extremely sensual acting.

No one had mentioned leaving when the group and the... snake thanked and wished them good night. Alice had to g back for another encore after 9 minutes of applause. It was the turn of "School's Out", the main song off the new album, and the audience received a taste of what Alice's next show will be. Alice, the outrageous, the pervert, the symbol of fear of the American bourgeoisie.

(Translated from the original Italian language publication, June 2019)