A very engaging documentary that will most likely tell you something you don’t already know.

There surely can’t be much more to tell in the Alice Cooper story, but here we have a documentary about the band, and the man who ultimately was Alice. The disc takes a while to start, about five minutes before we actually get to the title, but it is one of those things that you start watching and before you know it you have watched it all.

The way this is presented is quite interesting as people involved in the Cooper story are interviewed, but you never see then being interviewed during the programme, rather you get to see footage, or pictures, of the actual event being discussed. Things like the band performing right at the start of their careers when they were but mere lads. A lot of this is out there, but there is stuff in this that I have never seen before. The whole lot is here; the chicken, the meeting with Shep Gordon, the meeting with Bob Ezrin and how Cooper met his wife Cheryl. Learn how the band got the idea for ‘School’s Out’ from a U.S. sitcom, see the original album with the paper panties (which I used to clean the record with and subsequently lost), and about the concert where many of these, in all colours, were dropped from helicopters over the audience.

There is quite a bit of stuff in here that I was unaware of, and I thought I was a knowledgeable Cooper fan. What was really interesting to hear was how the Salvador Dali episode, where Dali created a hologram of Cooper, was the very beginning of the end of the name as a band, as, long-time friend of Vince Furnier, Dennis Dunnaway, was left disappointed that he was not involved.

Having met and spoken at length to the surviving members of the original band, I thought that there were bits that were missed from here, but reckoned that to get everything in here would need a running time of around twenty-four hours. However, those bits that I thought were missing were actually covered in the bonus material “deleted scenes” section.  There is also bonus material of rare (?) footage and interview scenes.

A very engaging documentary that will most likely tell you something you don’t already know.  

Andy Brailsford