Alice Cooper - Alice Cooper Tried To 'Destroy' Audiences

Alice Cooper Tried To 'Destroy' Audiences

Alice Cooper used to try and "destroy" his audience.

The 'School's Out' hitmaker said his self-titled band didn't understand hippy culture when they first moved to California in 1967, they would purposefully go out of their way to antagonise their crowd.

He said: "When we moved to Los Angeles we didn't understand why everybody wanted to live together. We didn't get the peace and love thing.

"We were from Detroit and we were after Ferraris, blondes and Hollywood. I always said we were the band that drove the stake through the heart of the groovy generation.

"If we knew an audience was on acid, we would try to destroy them. We were everything they didn't believe in - a little violence, a little 'Clockwork Orange' was OK with us."

Alice - real name Vincent Furnier - started to build up his Alice Cooper persona based on the darker side of Hollywood, which he says then struck a chord with the disaffected youth of the time.

He added to the Daily Telegraph newspaper: "The lunatic fringe, that was my audience - the billions of disenfranchised, artistic goth kids who couldn't relate to Abba - all related with that outcast victim.

"But when I quit drinking I didn't want to be that whipping boy anymore. I decided to play Alice as an arrogant villain. An Alan Rickman. A dominatrix. It felt great. People loved that he changed and ended up in control. And that's how I've been playing him for 30 years."

Alice is performing a special concert on Saturday (29.10.11) at Alexandra Palace in London, which will see him joined onstage by a host of extreme performers using guillotines, electric chairs, blood stained special effects and eating fire. The event will be filmed in 3D and shown as a programme, 'Alice Cooper's Halloween Night of Fear', on Monday (31.01.11), on UK TV channels Sky Arts and Sky 3D from 9pm.