Alice Cooper – "We Didn't Mind a Litle Violence"

How Alice Cooper, veteran shock-rocker and influence on every theatrical rock act from David Bowie to KISS to Slipknot, is still with us at the age of 75 is beyond human comprehension. Alcohol and cocaine couldn’t kill him. The guillotine blades and hangman’s nooses he uses onstage every night haven’t killed him (yet). Even being a part of the 80s poodle-rock scene couldn’t finish him off. If anything, the monster created by the sometime Vincent Furnier is stronger than ever. Joel McIver meets the gothfather.

- By Joel McIver

The rock world today mourns the death of Alice Cooper, who was accidentally killed last night when the safety screws failed on the guillotine he uses in his act,” observed Melody Maker in 1973, its writer Michael Watts having witnessed an onstage malfunction in Cooper’s grisly stage act. Fortunately, Watts was just kidding. At the time, Cooper was 25 years old, relatively healthy despite a couple of nasty substance habits, and already several years into a career where he routinely pretended to off himself every night. Fifty years later, he’s still at it.

Depending on your age and predilection for theatrical hard rock, you’ll know at least some of the many faces of Cooper, or Vincent Furnier as no one calls him. ‘Seasoned’ readers will remember his self-titled band as early-70s anti-hippies, snarling up stages in Detroit with School’s Out and other anthems celebrating America’s inner decay. Later in the decade he split the band and went solo, ruling a drinking club called the Hollywood Vampires and coming very, very close to succumbing to his booze and coke addictions.

In the 80s, Cooper sobered up and stepped into the commercial sunshine, welcomed in by MTV and the hair-metal generation, and since the 90s he’s been a reliable member of the classic rock old guard, living a comfortable life composed of one part golf and two parts onstage pantomime.

His influence remains huge: any rock band formed after 1980 that employs make-up, masks, fake blood and/or amusingly gruesome stage stunts owes him a major debt. When we speak to the veteran python