I must confess I am not the biggest ALICE COOPER fan. Sure I listened to ‘Raise Your Fist and Yell’… a little bit when black drain pipes, Hi-Tech trainers and ANTHRAX - I am the Law T-shirts weren’t laughed at, along with a plethora of other dodgy 80’s bands. But to be honest old Vincent wasn’t really my bag so to speak. So when I got the call to go see them I wasn’t really expecting much.

We arrived half way through the MAN RAZE set, which featured Phil Colleen from DEF LEPPARD and Paul Cook formerly of the SEX PISTOLS. The music is extremely well played and professionally executed, but to my ears is rather uninspired hard rock. Yes it hits all the right buttons, the songs are well crafted but seems a bit passionless and staid.

So onto the main act of the night, at this point the anticipation in the crowd is very high and it is clear that the band definitely has a friendly audience. The stage is shrouded with a curtain emblazed with Alice’s face and the title of the tour ‘Theatre of Death’, this is torn down and they open with ‘School’s Out’, an obvious opener and the band most of whom are quite young do initially come across as anonymous session musicians, Alice of course is the seasoned entertainer and plays to the crowd as you would expect him to. They blasted their way through ‘I’m 18′ (I guess he has been 18 for many years then!), ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ and ‘Poison’ all of which were slickly executed if somewhat different from their album versions, in particular ‘Poison’. I felt the set kicked up a gear when ‘Dirty Diamonds’ was played, at this point the backing band seemed to have settled and are genuinely enjoying the performance. ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ follows along with ‘Killer’ and three excellent renditions of ‘I Love the Dead’, ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ and ‘Got You under My Wheels’, the latter being particularly spot on.

Of course no review of Alice Cooper can ignore the stage show of which never seems to change – fake blood, guillotines, nubile ladies in nurse’s uniforms, and Alice in a rather “fetching” spider costume. To me this is the problem in a way, Alice Cooper is an anachronism, and it’s no longer in anyway shocking or challenging and comes across a bit fey and quaint. Sure its good fun and I suppose that’s all you can expect but I did find at times the stage show got in the way of the music. Overall however I did find the show pretty enjoyable and to be honest that came as quite a surprise. In my opinon they still should have played ‘Freedom’ though.

Rating: 3.5/5

Photography by Alex Shaw(Alice Cooper Photos)