Alice Cooper thinks nobody is really trying to shock an audience anymore.
“It’s so funny because it used to be easy to shock an audience in the ’70s. Now nobody’s really trying — we’re not really trying to shock an audience,” the singer said while discussing how his stage show has evolved in a new interview with the 96.1 KLPX radio station.
Cooper continued, “I don’t think anybody is ‘shock rock’ anymore, but those elements still remain in the show because they’re fun to watch. It’s still fun to watch the guillotine and the fact that you really buy in to it because of what happens before that. You’re really concerned about this character Alice up there, what happens. And that’s what I like about it.”
“I want the audience to get involved in the show,” he explained before saying he wants the focus to be on the character Alice. “We don’t do a lot of lasers. We don’t do things like that, because I want the emphasis to be on the character Alice, what happens to him, and what he what exactly he’s doing.”
Alice added, “But all that happens during all these songs that everybody knows — ‘Feed My Frankenstein’ and ‘Poison’ and ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’ and, of course, ‘School’s Out’ at the end.”
Cooper also previously said the shocking acts that made him famous wouldn’t work today. The band started in 1964 and released their first album, ‘Pretties For You,’ in 1969. In their early shows, Alice wore blood-covered underwear over leather pants and used snakes and guillotines.
“We gave the audience everything their parents hated,” he said in a 2021 interview with The Independent. “The way we saw it if you’re driving by and you see Disneyland on the left side and a plane wreck on the right, you’re going to look at the plane wreck. We were that plane wreck.”
On how that would be taken in 2021, the musician noted: “You could cut off your arm and eat it on stage and it wouldn’t matter. The audience is shockproof.”
Cooper is currently performing on his North American summer tour. It started on July 30 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and will end on August 17 in Tucson, Arizona.
You can listen to his full interview below.