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Return of the vomit-stained sailor

ALICE COOPER: "Muscle Of Love" (Warner Brothers)

WOWEE, that Ailce Cooper is certainly a funny fellow an no mistake.

Consider, if you will, the extraordinary range of poses that he and his partners in crime have effortlessly assumed since Bob Ezrin first rescued them from the mouldering vaults of Frank Zappa's Straight label way back in prehistory.

Every album cover tells a story, and each cover demonstrates a different aspect of audience fantasies based on the infinitely adaptable persona of adorable Alice himself.

Ignoring their first two albums — by far the wisest choice anyways — we find the lad's decked out in tasteful neo-drag queen on Love It To Death, and psychotic horror B-movie neo drag for Killer before taking a swift dive into "West Side Story" switchblade punkism for School's Out.

Billion Dollar Babies, their last vinyl manifestation, showed them in the full flush of materialist triumph, flaunting their tawdy gladrags and happy moron grins amidst piles of folding green stuff. A veritable odyssey of image.

Now, where do you think they're gonna end up this time?

Well, once you liberated the album from its massively cumbersome cardboard dressing gown, you find an inner sleeve depicting the band approaching a building emblazoned "Institute Of Nude Wrestling", and they're all dressed as sailors.

On the back of said inner sleeve, they're leaving said building with their nice white navy uniforms ripped and smeared. They're staggering around and collapsing and bandaged, and a military policeman is helping to get them back to barracks. On the insert our battered crew are paying their debt to society by peeling potatoes.

What, as the Silver Surfer once asked, does it all mean?

Christ knows. Personally, I think it's only appropriate that the one-time murderous faggot should now be content to take on the role of a drunken sailor our cruising for pozzy, especially since Alice now has about as much menace-credibility as the Monkees.

When you've finally dumped the packing under your chair and settled down to Get Into whatever is available to be Gotten Into, it speedily becomes apparent that Muscle Of Love is the most consistently enjoyable album that the Coopers have yet emitted.

It doesn't quite reach the peak of the first side of "Killer", but it has two sides to that album's one. Bob Ezrin has taken himself elsewhere (see REED, L) but his successor Jack Richardson and Douglas have done an exemplary job.

As before, the Cooper instrumental ensemble is beefed up by the addition of various sidemen, but for the first time their existence has been made a matter of public record. So call their names with pride: Bob Dolin on keyboards (no, not that Bob Dolin), Mick Mashbir and Dick Wagner (guitars).

The aren't any of the tediously grandiose production numbers that detailed the last couple of Alice numbers apart from "The Man With The Golden Gun" (which is the theme tune from a James Bond movie that hasn't been made yet), and even that is such a neatly observed hunk of pastiche that it would take a far meaner soul than I to ressent its presence here.

Most of the album is tough, chunky no-messin' rockanroll, potential hit single after potential hit single, with "Teenage Lament '74" and "Workin' Up A Sweat" standing out as Alice's best bets for monopolising airtime.

"Hard Hearted Alice begins with an organ intro so much like that of Cocker's "With A Little Help From My Friends" that I did a quadruple-take and leapt over to the stereo to check the label, while "Crazy Little Child" (on which Dolin excels himself with the ivories) takes on Bette Midler at her own '30s swing game and beats the rhinestones out of her.

Then there's that Muscle Of Love thing.

Oh, wow. How risque. How exquisitely brawdy. How fa-a-abulous. How thoroughly tacky. Come on, this is clean, All-American Alice Cooper you're dealing with, not Shel Silverstein or some other stoned rugby-song merchant. Alice's love-muscle is his heart, not his — oh no, I can't say it. Not here. Not to you.

Muscle Of Love stands out as an Alice album purely because of AC's own unmistakable croonings and the plastic outrage lyrics. The band are excellent, but not noticeably individual.

One thing worries me, though. Now that Ac had come up front and dumped all his Phantom-of-the-Opera stage props in favour of a baggy sailor suit, whis is after all far more in character for cuddly, drunker Vince Furnier from Phoenix, what the hell are they gonna do on stage to play this one?

I mean, I've always wanted to see Alice Cooper come on and do Gene Kelly's tap dances from "An American In Paris", but some things just don't bear thinking about — do they? - Charles Shaar Murray

ALICE COOPER: "Teenage Lament '74" (Warner Brothers)

The man in the vomit-stained sailor suit striked back! Alice and that miserable bunch of louse-ridden boil suckers that he dares to refer to as a group, proudly enter '74 with a tasteful pastiche of '50s self-pity all about what a drag it is being a kid and being pushed around by your elders and not being allowed to play guitar as loudly as one would want. Sob. I find it quite startling attractive, but how long are today's kid going to be content to have their fantasies dictated to them by tired old men like Alice Cooper, Gary Glitter and Chinn and Chapman (or for that matter, Steve Harley?). I shall look forward to the opportunity to play this endlessly, but then I'll never see fifteen again, either.