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Prime Cuts

Alice Cooper
Prime Cuts - The Alice Cooper Story
(Castle Music Pictures)

The prospect of The Alice Cooper Story untold on video screen before your very eyes is an exciting prospect without a doubt, and 'Prime Cuts' does go a long way to telling that story.

Boasting choice cuts such as 'Ballad Of Dwight Fry', 'Elected', 'Billion Dollar Babies', 'Welcome To My Nightmare' and 'Only Women Bleed' all the way up to 'Department Of Youth', 'Poison' and newie 'Hey Stoopid', you would indeed expect this to be the ultimate Cooper item.

That it isn't is not so much down to Castle Music Pictures being inept, but more to the fact that at an hour-and- a-half long, you just can't justice to Cooper's career.

'Prime Cuts' concentrates, wisely, on Cooper's early career, with words of wisdom from the great man himself, Slash from GN'R, Ozzy Osbourne, producer Bob Ezrin (who resembles, for all intents and purposes, a yuppie) and manager Shep Gordon. Hence there's much from the likes of 'Welcome To My Nightmare', 'Killers', 'Billion Dollar Babies' and more.

It's interesting to note that Castle have also managed to include material from 'Trash' which Epic undoubtably hold the rights to. However, what 'Prime Cuts' doesn't do, is spend enough time investigating the 'Special Forces', "Flush The Fashion', 'Dada' and 'Zipper Catches Skin' era Cooper, when the man's career entered the doldrums.

Neither is there much from the renaissance albums 'Constrictor' and 'Raise Your Fist And Yell'. Surely 'Teenage Frankenstein' and 'Raise Your Fist And Yell' itself would have gone down a treat?!

Ultimately, 'Prime Cuts' is a good outing for Cooper-philes, and is an intriguing 90 minutes of entertainment. However, the ultimate Alice Cooper story still awaits being captured on video.