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Slack Alice

Alice Cooper Trashes The World
(CMV)

Mr nice guy is 95 minutes of leather and black eyeliner at the Birmingham International Arena.

Why release over a hour-and-a-half of Alice's least visual stage show in years? If it is due to the knock-on effect of the massive selling 'Trash' album then why not splice in the promo video footage that even TOTP managed to take to it's stupid little heart and spice up the running time?

As it is, Nigel Dick's sharp sense of direction and keen, imaginative eye is intercut with some shrewed editing. Consequently, performance footage slides into visual trickery and instant snapshot images.

A blood balloon drifts silently and then bursts over the audience. With Alice grinning insanely, cut to a young girl in the front row, her face smeared bloody red. Her smile is as big as the nut's in the leather on stage.

The constantly used shots of the Brummie crowd bathed in a red filter light, intercut with a grimacing Alice or his bare torso backing band tends, unsurprisingly, to dull after around the first 30 minutes.

the set is almost blameless. Witness 'I Love The Dead', 'Muscle Of Love', 'Billion Dollar Babies' and 'No More Mr Nice Guy'. The Desmond Child-inspired 'Trash' pap naturally gets a look in, though vey little in the way of visuals. Ultimately, it suffers both aurally and as a spectacle in comparison.

Throats get cut, hyperdermic needles jar in veins, Cooper changes more times than Madonna, but the lack of dramatics blunts the edge.

If you caught any show on the 'Trash' outing, then you've already seen this from some angle. It's probably for the purists only, and I imagine that even they'll be disappointed by it's final, floundering, overlong execution.