Alice Cooper and Noel Fielding talk rock'n'roll, drink, drugs and golf
NOEL FIELDING Hi Alice, thanks for talking to us from Hawaii. You haven't bumped into Mick Fleetwood down there have you?
ALICE COOPER Yes, Mick's down here, we do a charity show for New Year's Eve together. This year it was Steven Tyler, the Doobie Brothers, Weird Al Yankovic. It was really very loud, so it was great.
NOEL Wow, that sounds like a brilliant group of people.
ALICE And of course, next year: you!
NOEL I've never been to Hawaii, it looks amazing.
ALICE I can't picture you with a tan …
NOEL There's trees there, right? I could stand in the shade. I can't imagine you sunbathing, actually.
ALICE I don't sunbathe, but I do play golf every day.
NOEL Thank you for doing this: I'm just going to fire some questions at you, and I won't make them too painful. So, you were in a band called the Earwigs, weren't you?
ALICE That was our original band. We were all on the track and field team; we were distance runners. The oddest thing is that to the audience we were probably the most disgusting … we were the Sex Pistols times 20, but everybody in the band were athletes. We came from really wholesome Midwest homes, and our image was just the opposite. It couldn't have been more odd that we ended up being the Clockwork Orange-type band that we were.
NOEL You were all really healthy and fit? The Sex Athletes!
ALICE We ended up not so healthy and fit; rock'n'roll will do that to you. We started out being much more wholesome than the Monkees.
'The Mamas And The Papas, James Taylor – they all had heroin problems! We were meant to be the really badass boys and we drank beer and that was it'
Noel Fielding. Photograph: Neil Bedford
NOEL The Monkees? I heard that they were quite into their party scene at one point.
ALICE It was quite odd: the Mamas And The Papas, and James Taylor, David Cassidy and the Monkees were all on the cover of 16 Magazine, which was like purity personified. And bands like Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath were demonised as the worst things ever for you. But we were all into beer; those other bands were all into hard drugs! The Mamas And The Papas, James Taylor – they all had heroin problems! We were meant to be the really badass boys and we drank beer and that was it!
NOEL And went running!
ALICE Well, in all honesty, when you think of how there was so much energy in the show - back in Billion Dollar Babies and School's Out - you really did realise that most of the guys in the band were athletes, or you would not have been able to do two hours like that on a stage.
NOEL I read somewhere that you were quite influenced by the early Pink Floyd. Is that true?
ALICE You know, there was a time in 1968, I think it was, when we played the Whiskey A Go Go: it was Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin. And nobody had ever heard of either band, we were just two bands. And the next night, we played the Cheetah Club with Pink Floyd; these were just clubs, because nobody had ever heard of any of these bands. At the time, we were all out of money. They stayed at our house for a while. We were just trying to put our money together to get food. At the time, nobody knew if anybody was going to make it or not.
NOEL That's blowing my mind!
ALICE My favourite story about Syd Barrett was, I get up one morning and I went in the kitchen, and there's a box of Corn Flakes in front of him. And, he's watching the box of Corn Flakes the way I would watch television; he was really enjoying himself … I guess the Corn Flakes must have been dancing and singing and doing all sorts of things …
NOEL He was changing through the channels?
ALICE Oh, he was having so much fun with this box of Corn Flakes. And I realised then how out-there he was. He was on a lot of LSD or something.
NOEL Or he was on a different plane. You partied quite a bit; do you feel happier now you've given it all up? You had a good run, didn't you?
ALICE I was right there. We had a club called the Hollywood Vampires. That was sort of like the old drinking club in Hollywood – Errol Flynn and WC Fields, all these great actors, the Barrymores – who could drink anyone under the table. So we created a group which was sort of a modern version of that: it was Harry Nilsson, Mickey Dolenz and Keith Moon and myself, and we would meet at the Rainbow every night and it was sort of last man standing … we would sit there and drink, and just wait to see what Keith Moon would wear that night. One night he would be full-out Hitler, with a sidecar and a motorcycle, and the next night he would be the Queen of England. He would get these immaculate costumes and walk into the Rainbow, and we would just applaud, that's how amazing it was.
NOEL He was a bit like a chameleon wasn't he, Keith Moon?
ALICE When I first got married, my wife did not understand who Keith Moon was. She was a ballerina from New York City, so she didn't even know who the Who were. So, Keith would come over and stay for a week at the house. He would just show up, and he was the thing that wouldn't leave! It was sort of like, we all knew that, and it was cool that he would stay for a week, and then he would go and stay at Harry's for a week and then he would go and stay at Ringo's for a week; he just made his rounds. He was the guest that was always welcome. We would come home and he would be in a French maid's outfit, dusting the house, and he would be like, "Oh 'ello Monsieur Coo-per and Mrs … " And my wife's going, "Who is this?!" He was like your crazy uncle that you really loved because he was so crazy.
'Well, I met Elvis, I met Sinatra, I met the Beatles, the Stones, but the guys that I really admired were the Groucho Marxes, the Bob Hopes, the Jack Bennys'
Alice Cooper.
NOEL Keith sounds brilliant. You must have met a lot of famous people; who was the most famous person you met?
ALICE Well, I met Elvis, I met Sinatra, I met the Beatles, the Stones, but the guys that I really admired were the Groucho Marxes, the Bob Hopes, the Jack Bennys … the real old stars that went back to vaudeville. Which has totally affected you by the way; I look at what you do, and it's total vaudeville.
NOEL I love the Marx Brothers. I read somewhere that Groucho liked your act, that he came to see you.
ALICE He saw the show. He said, "You guys are the last hope for vaudeville," and I went, "Wow, what a great thing to say." My manager was managing Groucho at the time, and he was just sharp as a tack until he passed away. But then Salvador Dalí came to see the show, and he said, "Well, it's surrealism", so everybody had their own take. Fred Astaire would come and see the show, and he would go, "Ah, yeah, I see this whole dancing skeletons thing; I saw that in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein!"
NOEL How old were you when you wrote your first song?
ALICE We were in high school, listening to the Yardbirds, the Who, and after learning all the Beatles songs, and Chuck Berry, we learned from the Rolling Stones how to make it a little tougher. In high school we were writing these horrible little songs, and some of them ended up on Pretties For You. Frank Zappa liked us because he would say, "You've got five songs here that are two minutes long, and there's 38 changes in each one of them!" The great compliment was, he would go, "I don't get it – that's great, that's why I'm signing you."
NOEL I heard that he signed another band – the Tubes maybe – because they cleared a gig?
ALICE No, that was still us! We were playing a big party in LA, with the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love – – all those great bands – and we came on next to last because we were the house band. Everybody in the audience was on acid, of course, grooving on peace and love, and then all of a sudden you hear this DA-NA-NAA-NAAA and there's these insanity-looking clowns onstage. We scared the hell out of these people. They were all on acid, we looked like we'd just come up out of the ground, and we didn't mind a little violence onstage. That audience couldn't get out of the room fast enough. It was like somebody yelled "FIRE!" There were three people left standing: Frank Zappa, my manager Shep Gordon and one of [celebrated groupies] the GTOs. Frank said, "Anybody that can clear a room that quick, I've got to sign."
'Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, all the guys that we grew up with were dead at 27. This was like a signal to us going, you can either live, or die'
Photograph: Sara Lee for the Guardian
NOEL When you decided to give up partying, drink and drugs and the whole lifestyle, how did you do that? Did you play golf back then?
ALICE I hit balls and that was about it. Really at that point it was a matter of survival – Ozzy got there, Steven Tyler got there – where you're either going to stop or die. It's not like, "Oh I'm going to make a really good choice in my life now", it wasn't that. It's more like, I'm either going to fall off this cliff or I'm going to take a step backwards, and I took the step backwards. I think it took getting up in the morning and throwing up blood before I really realised how far gone I was. And Keith had already died, Jim Morrison, all the guys that we grew up with were dead already at 27. This was like a signal to us going, you can either live, or die. I just chose, you know, I'm going to live.
NOEL You love what you do, too. You've made, like, 26 albums haven't you?
ALICE I think I'm on my 29th right now … Back then you made two albums a year, and you toured. That was normal. Now, there's an album every five years; people have just stretched it out now. There was a time in the 70s where the whole thing was, "How expensive was your album"? It was really stupid. It was a prestige thing: "We spent $5m and 28 months making this record … " And I would go, "Boy, it'd better be good!"
NOEL I read once that some disabled people tore a chicken apart at one of your shows: is that true?
ALICE Well, we were at the Toronto Peace Festival and Shep Gordon my manager had put the show together, and he said: "I don't want any payment, what I want is my band to go on second to last." There were 70 to 80,000 people there, and we were used to playing to 70 or 80 people. It was back when we'd open up feathered pillows and CO2 cartridges, and blow the feathers all over the audience so it looked like a snow storm. And the music was just blaring, high pitched, almost white noise at the end of the show. Right before us was the Doors, and after us was John Lennon and Yoko Ono. So I had Jim Morrison and the Doors on the right side, and John and Yoko on the left, watching this show. It was just chaos. The next thing I know, in the middle of this feather flurry I look down and there's a white chicken onstage. I know that we didn't bring it. Who would bring a white chicken to a show? I pick up the chicken. I figure it's got feathers and wings and it would fly, so I throw it into the audience. The audience tore it to pieces! This is the Peace Festival, ironic huh? They threw the parts back up onstage. The next day the paper says, "Alice Cooper rips up chicken to pieces and rips the head off and drinks the blood". So Frank Zappa calls me, and he goes, "Alice, did you kill a chicken onstage last night?" I said no. And he said, "Well, don't tell anybody; they love it!" Now, the kicker to the story of course, is that the first 10 rows of these 80,000 people were all people in wheelchairs. They were the ones who killed the chicken!
NOEL Ozzy's got bats, you've got chickens!
ALICE You guys need to kill something onstage, like a hamster or a foal or something.
NOEL I think our fans would be absolutely outraged! Maybe if there's a chicken with an injury we could heal it onstage, make a small wheelchair.
ALICE You know what would be funny? If you've got Ozzy killing the bats, and me killing the chickens, and you guys were sort of like the emergency squad who try to put them back together …
NOEL … with a stretcher! We could run onstage with a tiny little stretcher …
ALICE … breathing life into the chicken, pounding on its chest, going, "Live dammit, live!"
NOEL "We can save this one!" OK, I'm going to ask you some quick questions; I've had so much of your time. If you had to pick one, who would you prefer: the Beatles or the Stones?
ALICE I gotta go with the Beatles. They were more influential, and nobody wrote songs that were that good. The Stones wrote a lot of great songs and they were truly hard rock personified, but the Beatles affected everybody. I'm still pretty sure they're aliens.
NOEL As a performer: Iggy Pop or Jim Morrison?
ALICE I grew up with both of them … Iggy was the heart and soul of Detroit, Jim Morrison was the heart and soul of Los Angeles; being a Detroiter, I felt more at home with Iggy. Jim had this thing: "I'm going to die, there's nothing that can stop me." Iggy had a survival thing built in, so I've got to go with Iggy on that.
NOEL Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart?
ALICE Zappa! Frank was the maestro. All the musicians looked up to Frank as being the Leonard Bernstein of rock – the know-all. That goes for Clapton, the Beach Boys, the Beatles. Everybody looked up to Frank.
NOEL OK, this one's easy: leather trousers or golf slacks?
ALICE I gotta go with leather trousers; I look so much better in leather trousers. If I was on the PGA tour, I'd be wearing all-black out there.
NOEL That would be amazing! We should bring out a range of gothic golf clothes! If you haven't already done that it has to be done.
ALICE You know, if you can deliver the goods, be out there in the top 25, shooting five-, six-under, then well, why wouldn't you? Have all the full makeup on!
NOEL I could be your caddy!
ALICE That would be perfect.
NOEL All right, last one: Noel Fielding, or Russell Brand?
ALICE I've got to go with the Noel Fielding thing! You know, the very first time I saw the Mighty Boosh, I said, "Oh my gosh, I'm in Dennis Dunaway's head!" Dennis [the original Alice Cooper bass player] was so bizarre and he thought the way that you guys perform. And he was always very funny, thought provoking; I thought, "This is what Dennis's brain must be like."
NOEL That's an amazing compliment, thank you. I'm going to let you get back to Hawaii now.