Alice Cooper

Few rock’n’rollers have raised hell with quite so much gusto as Alice Cooper. The real-life son of a preacher man, the boy born Vincent Furnier is a Detroit native, but his music only tapped into his home city’s penchant for hard-driving rock’n’roll after both he and his band settled upon the name Alice Cooper and relocated to Michigan from Los Angeles, following a fruitless late-60s spell signed to Frank Zappa’s Straight imprint.

Feeling a kinship with Detroit contemporaries The Stooges and MC5, Cooper and co hit upon their unique sound by mixing their love of high-octane garage rock with a theatrical image which drew heavily from vaudeville entertainment and horror-movie imagery. Though wildly hedonistic, the Alice Cooper band balanced controversy with a commercial appeal, and the best Alice Cooper albums (Killer, School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies) remain era-defining early-70s classics which drew up the blueprint for punk.

As a solo artist, Alice Cooper stepped out with 1975’s brilliantly ambitious Welcome To My Nightmare, and he hit a second huge peak with 1989’s Grammy-nominated Trash. His innate ability to adapt has also led him to high-profile collaborations on stage (with acts as diverse as Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses and The Hollywood Vampires) and screen (everything from the Nightmare On Elm Street spin-off Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare to comedy blockbuster Wayne’s World), and his skills as an all-round entertainer have long since secured his reputation among rock’s glitterati.