[Susan Foreman]

Live review

Alice Cooper delivers a horror show in Auckland | Stuff

"Alice Cooper is holding a machete in his right hand and a baby doll by the neck in his left while he howls, "Goodbye, little Betty."

As he raises his machete and prepares to deliver a killer blow, two fully grown man-babies rush Cooper, bundle him into a straitjacket, then force his head down into position on a giant guillotine.

As the guitar rush of Dead Babies comes to a close, an executioner shouts, "Die!" and Cooper's head is lopped off, only to be picked up by a giant mutant baby who celebrates his decapitation by smacking it like a bongo drum.
He may be 72, but Alice Cooper's still got it.

Ridiculous? Of course it is. Cooper is one of the original shock-rockers, a horror conductor who's been delivering tongue-in-cheek nightmares like last night's one at Auckland's Trusts Arena for seven decades now.

At this point, as Cooper heads to Christchurch for the next leg of his Ol' Black Eyes Is Back world tour, it's as good a time as any to note that the golf-loving, leather-clad Californian rocker is 72 years old.

Yep. He's 72, and he's still rocking hard.

In a week when Elton John walked off stage early in Auckland with walking pneumonia then postponed the rest of his New Zealand shows for a year, and both Ozzy Osbourne and Swedish metallers Opeth postponed North American tours over health concerns, it's pleasing just to see Cooper arrive on stage looking a picture of health.

Sure, there are a few nods to the years behind Cooper, as well as his fans.

Outside the venue, friends greeted each other in whispers, and it was so quiet you could barely tell a rock show was about to go down.

Inside, the queue for free water was as long and orderly as the one for beer, while chairs were laid out and numbered in an orderly fashion.

Yes, a sit-down heavy metal show is a first for this reviewer, and it might have been a first for Trusts Arena too.

Thankfully, once Cooper arrived on stage at the polite time of 8.50pm, those seats were abandoned and fans soon clamoured to get near the front and set about the important business of rocking out.

So did Cooper. He arrived for his "nightmare castle" dressed the part, delivering Feed My Frankenstein and No More Mr Nice Guy in tight leather pants, a billowing red shirt, black gloves and boots.

His voice is raw and pockmarked, perfect for the kind of 70s-flavoured riff-rock delivered by Cooper's impressively energetic band, including guitarist Nita Strauss who occasionally threatened to steal the show with her infectious enthusiasm.

But this wasn't just geriatric theatrics. It didn't feel like Cooper was going through the motions, despite, at 72, it's a miracle he can pull those leather pants on himself.

He didn't just make it all the way through his Trusts Arena show in front of a few thousand last night; he seemed to be fully enjoying himself.

As a result, the show got better as it went on.

During Raped and Freezin', Cooper shook his hips, clapped his hands, then waved a red flag around like a matador.

On Fallen in Love, he added flourishes of harmonica, and on Muscle of Love, he shook his maracas like he was doing free weights on fast forward at the gym.

Hilariously, during I'm Eighteen, a song that's 49 years old, he brandished a crutch as a joke, waving it around, using it as an air guitar, then throwing it away casually over his shoulder.

By the time the bizarre baby-themed duo Billion Dollar Baby and Dead Babies arrived, with ghoulish figures overwhelming the stage and a cannon shooting streamers over the front rows, Cooper had fully warmed to the task.

And he wasn't done yet. For School's Out, he invited Elton John's band member Davey Johnstone on stage to let him have a go at finally finishing a show.

"Elton says hi," joked Cooper as he waved the crowd goodbye. Now that's how ageing old rockers really get things done."