Loved it, loved it! What a fun, silly night of theatrics, over-the-top makeup, big hair and flamboyant fashion – and that was just the middle-aged men in the crowd! Alice Cooper is a true entertainer and knows what works in his shows. The hits were there, the laughs and the roaring energy of the band. Fun, Fun, Fun!

The night started as soon as I got out of the cab when I was swooped upon by “Alice Cooper’s Dad”, a bearded chappie in a ruskie hat with a remarkably distinct Australian accent for a man who lived his whole life in the USA. By the time I had collected the tickets, we’d been chatted up by every member of Alice’s band and my friend had kept one of Thorpie’s band company while he had a smoke. Not bad for the first 10 minutes – very rock n’ roll!Billy Thorpe and what I take to be the new Aztecs were very good, he is a great talent and has a talented band supporting him. The first song, the title song from his new album Children of the Sun, went for 15 minutes, it was a funk-rock meld and was quite catchy but a bit long for an unfamiliar song and the first song of the show. The danger of doing a song this long that the crowd is unfamiliar with is that any other new material you follow up with sounds the same and makes it hard for the audience to stay engaged. I found the first few songs to be very similar, good songs but not what the majority of crowd had come to hear. I enjoy hearing the new songs and they are obviously vital to the longevity of an artist but where Alice Cooper shows real nous is by mixing the new songs in with the older stuff that he knows the crowd wants to hear. The flipside of this argument is that perhaps the artist doesn’t identify with those songs from the start of their career or have changed so much since then, but Alice has gone from hardcore alcoholic singing Welcome To My Nightmare to Christian conservative teetotaller singing Welcome To My Nightmare, it probably doesn’t fit him anymore either but it is part of the stage persona Alice.

Billy has a large body of work and picked good songs for the band. His band is not dissimilar from Alice Cooper’s band selection: exceptional musicians pulled together to play well written songs. Million Dollar Bill was a great tune, quite a bassy, drum heavy song and Rock Me All Night got the crowd singing and dancing. The thing that I admire in a front man is the gracious thanking of his band and this was done really well by Billy. He even let the bass player have a solo but they were all upstaged by the keyboardists solo – he was dry-humping the leg of his keyboard, after dancing around with it as one might dance with a mop, he got a little too frisky and knocked it over. He retrieved it and hid under it whilst lying on his back on the floor like a cockroach before proceeding to then kick over cases on the stage. He must have died a million deaths but it added a bit of personality to his solo! Billy ended his set with Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy) and it was awesome. We sang, danced and did duets with the people around us, singing into my hand mike!

Alice Cooper burst onto the stage in a gunfire of drums, light, smoke and guitar. His tattooed band of blurry aged musos, kicking into life and providing the perfect support to the shock rock legend. Opening with Department of Youth, the crowd was straight on its feet where they stayed for the entire show. Alice strutted, leered, prowled and crowed. It was just like a rock show should be! He followed up Department of Youth with the title track Dirty Diamonds as he dangled strands of fake diamonds from his teeth and threw them into the crowd. Still in the capitalist vein, he moved onto Billion Dollar Babies and strutted the stage with a giant sword with big US greenbacks impaled on them, shedding them as he sleazed through the song – perfect! Lost In America which was a great social commentary about youth showing that he still gets it, reinforced by What Do You Want From Me, where he whines about sacrifices made for his main squeeze like not calling his other girlfriends, even the dirty ones!

The first sight we get of the theatrical dancing parts performed by Calico Cooper, is in the song Go To Hell. There is always a girl who dances in the Alice Cooper show, it adds to the chintz of it all, Deftones won’t be adding a dancing banshee to their show anytime soon but for Alice Cooper it is perfect, I thought it was a hoot! It is around this part of the show that Alice does Feed My Frankenstein and builds this man-monster in a coffin behind him on the stage, all but the head.

The next song was Black Widow, that classic track from Welcome To My Nightmare and the band wailed on this track, just peeled the paint of the walls, particularly the solo from drummer Eric Singer. This is also the song where we see two very tall scarecrow creatures enter the picture for the first time. My question is, does he bring scarecrows from home? Are they dual-purpose roadies? They don’t do much and I think it would be the cushiest job in rock!Alice then brings out the riding crop that we so love to see him prowling with and he did No More Mr Nice Guy before bringing out the big guns – Welcome to My Nightmare, yippee!! Throughout the show, Alice has done shorter versions of the songs in order to cover more ground and keep the pace high, this is where you wish you got the whole song. He moved seemlessly from Nightmare into Steven, from the same album and we see our banshee dancer reappear as they act out the wife-killing elements of the song before moving straight into Only Women Bleed. Here is Alice wandering around the stage, singing from the heart about the plight of women, oblivious, while his daughter crawls around his feet fake bleeding! She comes back to after-life and then it launches back into Steven while they fight and stab and the scarecrows come back and put Alice into a straight jacket which he wears for the next two songs, sitting dramatically in a single white spotlight.

Fade to black…The lights come back and the guillotine is being wheeled onto the stage. Poor old Alice is manhandled into the guillotine by his banshee and the scarecrows before losing his head. One of the creepy scarecrow things parades the discarded head across the stage before placing it on top of the Frankenstein, the monster is complete. In a flurry of smoke and darkness the spotlight hits the coffin to see Alice come to life and belt out School’s Out before the encore break.

He returns to the stage and does the 1980’s hit Poison, school disco anyone? It was so much fun, he did the whole song and I was one of the “Your Poison” girls, he sang and pointed straight at me twice. He finished the night with Wish I Was Born In Beverly Hills that saw Paris Hilton’s throat ripped out by her little dog Tinkerbell. It was a really enjoyable night. Alice also did a great job of introducing his band, who played an amazing show! We filed out, dodging air guitars and flailing fake drums from drunken punters, fully charged from an evening of killer classic rock. So much fun, I wonder if I could get a job as a scarecrow…?