6. Alice CooperBillion Dollar Babies
This is the pinnacle of the ‘magic four’ line up. I discovered Alice Cooper when he did School’s Out: I thought it was great. It was all the bits of glam that I liked. It was theatrical in a comical way. Cooper was an American band that seemed very British – there wasn’t a great deal of difference between them and, say, Wizzard to me. I heard School’s Out, went down town with my mum and brought two Alice Cooper albums – Love It To Death and Killer for about five shillings each. I got School’s Out the next week and loved the theatrics. I really got into Cooper – ‘Halo of Flies’ etc. It was horror music, way ahead. I laugh when people try to tell me Marilyn Manson is scary: I think ‘you weren’t around in 71, mate’. Then of course, knowing the albums inside out a year later, out comes Billion Dollar Babies – it has this fantastic opening song ‘Hello Hooray’ which has this amazing guitar part at the start. And then ‘Raped And Freezing’ and ‘Elected’. There was a really dark psychedelic edge to it. They felt like a band in charge of what they were doing. It was glamorous; it was exotic; it was dangerous. That was the kind of stuff that I liked.
