Review: Alice Cooper, Enmore Theatre, 26th September

The What: Everybody’s favourite scary great uncle Alice Cooper is in town. He doesn’t quite play Soundwave Revolution but he does play his own theatre shows with stadium-sized production values.

And his legion of fans are still as feral as ever. From the wrinkly middle-aged dudes with Alice face paint to the mulleted troops of bogans Alice can still pull ‘em in. Even more amazing considering tickets to this show was $140, money no doubt better spent at the local TAB on a Tuesday morning for most of the punters.

But here we are. The intro is the classic Vincent Price opening, the curtain comes down and Alice appears on one of those stair things they use to get people onto planes. He’s wearing a jacket with 6 arms attached, suited for Black Widow. In fact there’s more costume changes here than at a Kanye West show.

His band appears to be generic looking Sunset Boulevard cruising rock d00dz who won’t look out of place as the 11am band at Soundwave. The muso-for-hire is Australian Orianthi. But none of this excites me. What does excite me is fist pumping classixxx like No More Mister Nice Guy and I’m Eighteen.

Feeding My Frankenstein saw Alice dressed in a mad scientist coat with goggles and gloves (do you see where this is going?). Sparks fly as he tinkers with a machine, smoke shit happens and Eddie’s 12-foot pal FrankenAlice takes a wander around the stage. Very stupid. Very cool. See Nick Lalak’s photo:

The new stuff was fairly terrible to no one’s surprise (for further clarification see U2, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses and The Stooges) but I’ll be damned if his big tracks Hey Stoopid and Poison didn’t go off.

What else? He was hanging around with his fans till well after midnight, so mad props to him. It appears you can play golf every other day, run a successful steak house in Arizona, be the grandaddy of shock rock and not be a dick. Take note Brian Warner.

Verdict: Excellent production values, good performance, irritating band, bogan crowd, overblown ticket prices. And better than Van Halen would have been.

Rating: