Gig review: Alice Cooper at First Direct Arena, Leeds
At this venue for the fourth time in seven years, this gloriously fun high-kitsch pantomime rumbles on with an obvious delight for its hard-nosed riffs and garish gimmicks.
“Well, well, well, Leeds!” Alice Cooper smirks, close to an hour-and-a-half after he sliced his way onto the stage at the First Direct Arena – through a 20ft mock-up splash page, of course, declaring in ye olde English newspaper style that the shock rock pioneer is duly on trial for crimes against good taste. “I finally deign to speak to you!”
The Detroit-born superstar has indeed kept his audience waiting for his first words, but in the interim, it is fair to say that he has kept them riotously entertained.
At 76, the man formerly known as Vincent Damon Furnier – a tremendously goth-horror name in its own right, had he not legally changed it – has been in the business of delivering on the promise of a good time in the name of bad taste for more than half-a-century. It is likely few would have expected the former hellraiser to be here 50 years after the peak of his commercial heyday; fewer still would necessarily have thought he would be packing out these kinds of enormo-domes.
But at this venue for the fourth time in seven years, this high-kitsch pantomime rumbles on with an obvious delight for Cooper and company alike, a 90-minute romp of hard-nosed riffs and garish gimmicks, flavoured through garage-and glam-metal prisms. With a top hat and cane, there’s a bizarre dash of Fred Astaire to the singer’s visual panache, twirling his way through Lock Me Up and No More Mr. Nice Guy; later, he wraps a live boa constrictor around his neck for Snakebite and launches his presidential bid atop a podium in full Uncle Sam regalia for Elected.
This would only go so far without the tunes, the best of which can lay serious claim to their place in the wider pop canon. I’m Eighteen still hangs off its bluesy menace with a terrific loucheness; Billion Dollar Babies oozes sleaze as the main man works his way across the stage with a rapier aimed at unruly photographers.
Poison, the late-Eighties smash that resurrected his fading star, is still a stadium-sized smash, though it is still duly upstaged by the inevitable guillotine fake-out that caps a terrific Ballad of Dwight Fry, complete with Cooper in a straitjacket.
“From all of us to all of you, may your nightmares be horrific!” he cries at the close of School’s Out. It is a blast.