Welcome to my Nightmare

Alice Cooper

I suppose if the 60s introduced the idea of rock opera to keep the wheels of industry turning, then why couldn’t the 70s offer rock theatre to squeeze another decade out of this cash cow. I mean it was always threatening to happen after glam was thrust upon us with all its maschilistic questioning.

I remember this album clearly as a ten year old, strange, menacing, other-worldly – it was frightening since there was more talk about it on the playground than opportunity to listen to it. Today I can’t separate it from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, I consider them twins born 3 years apart – a staggered partum. It’s not a big stretch: 2 panto leads performing in a summer musical extravaganza with a crack support band and fabulous arrangements from a world class producer; in this album’s case Bob Ezrin. You can see it, right?

This was Alice Coopers first “solo” album after many years fronting a great proto-punk glam Detroit rock band of the same name, a poor man’s Iggy and the Stooges but with far more business nous. Alice was always going to step out and step up into the limelight.

This album was huge and deserved to be so. Everything about this album is perfect: the idea, the execution, the song-writing, the sequencing, the arrangements, the production. This was a total package masterminded by Ezrin and so you can see why Kiss would become his ultimate projection of musical theatre taken to its logical conclusion. This is also, for its time, the ultimate manifestation of rock record production, far more so than Pink Floyd in my mind. In years to come Hair Metal and Cock Rock would find its template here.

This is a very, very good album with so much more honesty and humour than Ziggy Stardust (We are the department youth, aha, we got the power! whose got the power? We have! Who gave it to you? Donny Osmond! Nooooo!).

More pity me that it’s not my style of music because I’d go nuts for it.