Author: smngrx01

Forget Marilyn Manson, forget the Sex Pistols; when it came to shocking the self-appointed guardians of international morality to the core, Alice Cooper pretty much wrote the handbook.

Flaunting a sketchy past swathed in urban legend and cunningly fabricated falsehoods concerning witches, ouija boards, dismembered chickens, blurred genders and necrophilia, Alice Cooper succeeded in outraging the forces of decency to an unprecedented degree over the course of his casual early-70s transition from cult notoriety to mainstream ubiquity.

Cooper’s infamy was such that in May 1973 Leo Abse, the incumbent Labour MP for Pontypool, spluttered in the House of Commons: “I regard his [Cooper’s] act as an incitement to infanticide for his sub-teenage audience. He is deliberately trying to involve these kids in sado-masochism. He is peddling the culture of the concentration camp. Pop is one thing, anthems of necrophilia are another.”

The nation’s leading censorial nanny figure, Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, offered eager support to Abse’s campaign to ban Alice Cooper from returning to the UK. But as public reaction veered in the general direction of hysteria, sales of Billion Dollar Babies (Cooper’s most provocative recording to date) soared stratospherically; then, as now, controversy sells, and in 1973 nobody was selling more than Alice Cooper.

Of course, back in those days Alice Cooper were a band; five individuals who had translated a shared fascination for the mop-tops and the macabre into a million-dollar industry that had not only brought them universal vilification as depraved, corruptive pariahs, but also celebrity beyond their wildest dreams.

The quintet’s story begins innocently enough in Phoenix, Arizona, when track athlete Vincent Furnier is volunteered to organise the Cortez High School’s autumn 1964 Letterman Talent Show.

Unfortunately, no one seems to boast any discernible talent, so Vince encourages some friends to take the stage as The Earwigs where they mime along to Beatles records while wearing Beatles wigs. Guitarist Glen Buxton can actually play his instrument. And while drummer John Speer fumbles his way around the rudiments of percussion, bassist Dennis Dunaway hones his craft with the benefit of some valuable lessons from Glen.

The Earwigs metamorphose into The Spiders; they play local Battle Of The Bands shows; and they replace their departing rhythm guitarist John Tatum with ex-Cortez High football star Michael Bruce of The Trolls.

Following a move to LA in spring ’67, the fledgling Coopers, now known as The Nazz (but not for long, thanks to Todd Rundgren’s band of the same name), replace John Speer with fellow Phoenix émigré Neal Smith and set about endearing themselves to the Sunset Strip in-crowd by hosting regular séances.

Soon enough – now that they’re mixing in a social circle that includes The Doors’ Jim Morrison and Love’s Arthur Lee – Miss Christine (of The GTOs: Girls Together Outrageously, the world’s first all-female rock band) arranges for the band to audition for Frank Zappa’s Straight label. The somewhat over-eager Coopers famously turn up for their 6.30pm appointment at 6.30am, but find their naïve tenacity amply rewarded when Zappa offers them a record deal.

Two days after changing their name to Alice Cooper they are taken on as the house support band at the 20,000-capacity Cheetah Ballroom, where they gradually build a following in spite of the fact that their vocalist – having ditched the name Vince in favour of the infinitely more noteworthy Alice – had taken to wearing full make-up and a pink clown costume.

Gradually, the winning Alice Cooper formula takes shape, and after recording a brace of feet-finding collections on Zappa’s Straight imprint (1969’s Pretties For You and ’70’s Easy Action) the band sign to Warner Brothers and, with Canadian whiz-kid producer Bob Ezrin at the controls, hit the peak of their form with three set-piece collections released in rapid succession: June ’71’s Love It To Death (the album that shocked America), December ’71’s Killer (the album that conquered America) and July ’72’s School’s Out (the album that conquered the world).

School’s Out, bolstered by the enormity of its anthemic title track, quickly attained the accolade of being the biggest-selling album in Warners’ history and, thanks to a frenzied tabloid press virtually foaming at the mouth with a level of hyperbolic vitriol unseen since the advent of the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper became the most newsworthy and controversial band on the planet. But now came the difficult bit.

In the face of blanket condemnation from the great, the good, the humourless, the pious and the post-pubescent, the band needed to consolidate their position. Specifically, they needed to make the greatest album of their career: an over-inflated Grand Guignol masterpiece; an ostentatiously offensive, flashy, crass and unbelievably expensive combination of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Busby Berkeley positively guaranteed to expand the generation gap to Grand Canyon proportions.

In short, they needed to make Billion Dollar Babies. Following School’s Out was always going to be a daunting task, but with band morale at an all-time high no one involved harboured a shred of doubt that they could not only do it, but also do it in style

“I knew we had a great team,” Alice remembers today, “and when you’re that age you think you’re indestructible. I don’t think we really conceived of how big School’s Out was. We were really flying by the seat of our pants back then. You’d do two albums a year in those days, and two world tours to go with them. But, again, we considered ourselves indestructible, so we didn’t feel pressure at all.” “

We had other people doing the doubting for us,” Dennis Dunaway smiles. “It was us against the world, basically. Even after we were successful and surrounded by people telling us how great we were, there were always plenty more ready to share their opinion that we weren’t.”

Reflecting the dogged buoyancy and inner confidence that kept their spirits high in the face of blanket media condemnation – and also in the grand show business tradition of ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’ – the band elected to celebrate their newly elevated status in the album’s title itself.

“The Billion Dollar Babies concept was simply making fun of ourselves,” Alice Cooper says in retrospect. “Here was a band nobody would touch three years ago, and now we’re the biggest band in the world. We’d look at each other and go: ‘We’re like billion dollar babies’.”

“We were getting voted best band in the world over Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. We’d look at that and laugh. I almost called up McCartney and said: ‘Listen, we didn’t vote on this’. Led Zeppelin we would give a run for, but when it came to The Beatles and the Stones we were embarrassed to be ahead of them in anything.

“Billion Dollar Babies was our most decadent album. It was reflecting the decadence of a time when we were living from limousine to penthouse to the finest of everything including… well, the finest of everything. We couldn’t believe people were actually paying us to do this. We would have done it for free, because we were just a garage band who happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

Despite gigging themselves to a virtual standstill, appearing in every print publication in existence and working on a movie project titled Good To See You Again Alice Cooper (finally released in 2005 through Rhino Home Video), the band were still on a creative high and writing songs of exceptional quality.

“We’d been writing pretty much constantly since Easy Action,” Michael Bruce recalls. “So by this point we had really started to come into our own. We were on an upward spiral.”

And with this confidence came a desire to push the envelope even further into the arena of the bizarre.

“Dennis Dunaway had a lot to do with the insanity of the band,” Alice admits. “I let Dennis be as surreal as he wanted to be. He and I were both artists in school and were both really into Salvador Dali. Also, Dennis did a lot more… let’s just say experimental stuff, than I did.”

We were getting voted best band in the world over Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles

“I was always the crusader for the avant-garde,” Dunaway agrees. “Anything that we would come up with that sounded like anyone else, I was always there to change it. So the songs would always be under attack from me if they didn’t sound unusual enough.”

Making sure that the Coopers’ collective vision was realised in the recording studio (no matter how unusual it became) was a man generally regarded to be the band’s sixth member, producer Bob Ezrin, who had helped to hone the Alice Cooper sound since Love It To Death.

“It was like two trees growing next to each other.” Alice explains. “Bob Ezrin was ready to produce a band, and we were ready to get a producer. He was a young guy with a theatrical background, and we were a rock’n’roll band that wanted to be theatrical. Bob Ezrin was our George Martin.”

“I don’t want to underestimate how important Bob was,” Neal Smith cautions, “but I don’t want to overestimate it either. In getting our sound on record Bob was hugely important, but Billion Dollar Babies was a team effort. His biggest achievement, I think, was helping create Alice’s character. Because between Easy Action and Love It To Death a character evolves vocally that pretty much solidifies into the real Alice Cooper, and Bob had a lot to do with that.”

“Bob definitely came along at the right time,” Dunaway says. “Mike Bruce’s songwriting had improved leaps and bounds, Neal and I had improved across the board, and Alice’s voice had matured – gotten much stronger and less nasal than the early days – but when Bob came along we were still trying to fit a million ideas into each song. It took him to come in and say: ‘No, this isn’t a song, this is a whole album’ to finally focus our direction.”

The Billion Dollar Babies album was recorded in three stages. Initially a mobile studio from New York’s Record Plant was parked up outside The Cooper Mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the basic backing tracks were laid down. After a couple of months of furtive recording in between their myriad other commitments, the band flew to London’s Morgan Studios to record overdubs and vocals, then returned to the Record Plant for mixing.

Unsurprisingly, given the band’s penchant for partying and their choice of friends, the Morgan Studio sessions in London soon played host to drunken, after-hours jams featuring some of the greatest – and indeed the most indulgent – stars of the day.

“We had access to a lot of the stars here,” Alice remembers “In fact T.Rex, Donovan, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr and Keith Moon are all on that album somewhere, but none of us know where because the session was so drunk.”

“Keith Moon would come down with Marc Bolan,” Neal Smith recalls. “In fact Alice, me, Keith and Marc were sitting at a table one time when Marc kept on pushing at Keith to be in a band with him, which was so funny because I couldn’t imagine a worse combination of two musicians.”

“Harry Nilsson had a really negative effect on the session,” Dunaway says. “We could have got a lot of great things out of that group of individuals jam-wise, or even for use on the album, if Harry Nilsson hadn’t been there, falling drunk on to the mixing board and wrecking it up. The guy could hardly walk, but he’d sit down at he piano and out would come this beautiful voice and beautiful melody. Jeez, I never figured how he could do that.”

Also present at the Morgan sessions were a pair of session guitarist colleagues of Bob Ezrin: Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter who, unknown to many contemporary fans, were often called in to cover for an increasingly ailing and erratic Glen Buxton.

“Hunter and Wagner were definitely on the album,” Alice says. “And we wanted everybody to know it. We weren’t going to pretend like Glen was playing everything, and be phoney about it, so we gave them a credit. Later on I used them exclusively for Welcome To My Nightmare.”

“We knew Dick from Michigan,” Michael Bruce says. “There were always musicians that were better than us in every studio we went. Having him and Steve on the album wasn’t seen as some dark portent of things to come, they were just incredible players. If a library doesn’t have the book you want, you just go to another library. We’d already used Dick on School’s Out and Under My Wheels.”

While in London the band were photographed by David Bailey for the inner sleeve of Billion Dollar Babies. It presented yet another golden opportunity to gleefully taunt their legion of apoplectic detractors, and the band rose manfully to the challenge.

Dressed in diaphanous white silk and surrounded by literally stacks of cash, the musicians casually caress albino bunny rabbits, as their singer presents to the camera a live human baby which is naked except for a splattering of trademark Alice Cooper eye make-up.

“Any chance we got to exaggerate anything, we did it,” Alice says when considering the revolutionary cover design of Billion Dollar Babies. “We made a giant, billionaire’s wallet, and inside it there was a billion-dollar bill: very American; everything big and expensive. And we used the best photographer, the guy we were sure was the guy in Blow Up, because we thought there was going to be models laying naked around the place… and there were a few.

“We brought in a million dollars of real money from Brinks. What you didn’t see in that picture were the two guys with machine-guns who were guarding the money. Everything we did was overblown and the British audience loved it. They loved this big American band that the MPs just hated. The fact we were flaunting it was even better, because we suffered so much at the hands of the press.”

“That cover shoot is actually a recreation of one we did for Love It To Death,” Dunaway points out. “We brought a photographer into the farm we had in Pontiac, set up a brass bed in the living room and posed with some white rabbits that my wife Cindy had. Of course, we didn’t have the million dollars then. In fact the reason those shots never got used was because we couldn’t even afford to pay the photographer’s bill.”

Directly prior to the release of Billion Dollar Babies, a promotional flexi-disc single was given away with the February 17 issue of the New Musical Express. The B-side was short excerpts from the album, while the A-side boasted the exclusive track Slick Black Limousine.

“That was one of the few songs we had laying around,” Neal Smith explains. “It was supposed to be an Elvis Presley, rock’n’roll kind of thing, but in the end it got more Alice Cooper-ish, with rolling drums and dark psychedelics.”

Finally released in March 1973, Billion Dollar Babies, despite being critically crucified for its apparently unprecedented lack of taste, entered the UK chart at No.1. Within days, and with the band already out on the road promoting it to the hilt with their soon-to-be record-breaking Billion Dollar Babies Show, the album had replicated that chart-topping achievement in the USA.

By now the press were in meltdown. Just four days into the tour Melody Maker announced that Alice had been killed due to a fatal malfunction during his I Love The Dead guillotine finale. Almost as soon as this story was eventually adjudged to be false, yet another urban myth had arrived to take its place around water coolers the world over: apparently the baby in the B$B cover shot had been rendered blind by incautiously applied eye make-up. (But before you all rush to tell your friends, obviously it hadn’t.)

The Billion Dollar Babies Show may have been the largest-grossing rock tour in the history of mankind, but it was also one of the most gruelling. Flying from city to city for months on end is one thing, but being beheaded twice a night is something else again.

“Again, you’re indestructible,” Alice explains. “When you’re selling out six nights a week and every night there’s 15,000 people out there you feel no pain. But underneath I was eroding. You couldn’t tell by the stage show, you couldn’t tell by my personality, but every night the alcohol became a little bit more like medicine and a little less like fun.

“By the time I was doing …Nightmare I was ready to die, go into hospital or have a nervous breakdown. There came a point where every time I saw my costume I would almost start crying and almost throw up.”

“The Billion Dollar Babies tour was horrendous the way that it ended up,” Mike Bruce grimaces. “It was supposed to be sixty dates in ninety days, but I think it ended up at almost eighty.”

“You’re pushing yourself on exhaustion,” Dunaway adds. ”You’d be lucky to get to bed by four in the morning, then you’d have to get up to catch an early flight or drive to the next city. But Alice and I were long-distance runners – that’s how we met – so we had this keep-going-at-all-costs mentality that pulled us through some situations where a lot of other bands would have given up.”

“It was gruelling,” Smith concludes, “but it wasn’t unbearable… This band lived for the road.”

And, of course, road-life did have its moments: “The groupie scene was beyond anything you can imagine,” Alice leers. “Go backstage now – if you want to see a bunch of fat guys move amps. But back in the seventies if you went on tour with Rod Stewart and The Faces you’d see anything. It was the golden age of decadence.”

Of course, over the years Alice Cooper has ceased to be perceived as a band at all, and is now popularly considered to be an on-stage persona adopted by the artist formerly known as Vince Furnier – a kind of evil Dame Edna, if you will; a Mister Hyde-styled alter ego so immensely dominant that it’s all too easy to forget that Vince’s golf-loving Doctor Jekyll even exists. Until he chums up to Ronnie Corbett on TV, that is.

Yet although the former Furnier retains exclusive custody of the lucrative Cooper brand – and legitimately so, as it was he alone who initially coined the moniker – the actual development of the finer points of the Alice Cooper character was very much a team effort.

“Alice came up with the name,” Dunaway says, “and I thought it was a genius idea. It shocked me when he first suggested it, but when I ran it by my parents and saw their mouths drop open I knew it was the name for us.

“The name did belong to the band, but we didn’t want people to know that we’d helped Alice develop the character. However, the make-up was my idea, the snake Neal’s idea, and the executions were band ideas.

“The Alice character was born of necessity; in the early days of Pretties For You Alice was shy. He had a temporary case of stage fright, where he’d stand with his back to the audience for the whole set, and we weren’t sure what to do about it. Then at one rehearsal, when the band was still starving in California, I suggested that he develop a different character for each song, because he didn’t have a problem when he was on stage being Keith Relf or Mick Jagger, it was only when we started doing original material he was at a loss as to who he was and what he wanted to project.

“So during Nobody Likes Me he was a lonesome guy singing through a window; for Levity Ball a kind of Gloria Swanson, Sunset Boulevard character that developed into a strong part of the Alice Cooper persona. We had a song called Fields Of Regret that had this sort of dirge-like sermon in the middle that I think was influenced by Alice’s father being a minister, but Alice became this darker, more sinister character for that particular song. And people loved it, so I said: ‘We should write more songs that have that character in them’. It didn’t happen overnight, but by the time we got to ‘Love It To Death’ that concept of the Alice character had really taken root.”

Alice, meanwhile, has rationalised his need to attain Cooper-ism thus: “Alice came out because there were all these Peter Pans and no Captain Hook.”

He also admits to having based Alice’s singular sense of style on Anita Pallenberg’s sadistically seductive Black Queen character from Roger Vadim’s classic cult fantasy Barbarella: “I saw the Black Queen and went: ‘That’s Alice right there’. Black gloves with switchblades at the end, black make-up, with the eyepatch over her eye… that is so good. Then I’d see something else in a comic book. And as I stitched all these characters together, pretty soon there he was.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Alice Cooper were never really perceived as a drug band. “We were way too American for that,” Alice insists. “Too mid-West and too wholesome. We drank, watched football, baseball and horror movies, called our moms, had Thanksgiving dinner and were the most all-American, homespun guys you had ever seen in your life. All on the track team, cross-country team, lettermen, we were just as wholesome as you could get. Church on Sunday…”

Okay, enough already. But is Alice’s memory entirely reliable?

“Put it this way,” Neal Smith says: “Alice is the one who went through rehab. I tried everything that was ever around in those days. Michael, Dennis, Glen and I all did. You didn’t have to buy it, anywhere we went it was always there. But I never liked anything as much as drinking beer, and we probably consumed more alcohol than any other band on the planet.”

Alice had started drinking in Los Angeles and had drunk constantly ever since. He and Glen Buxton would routinely split a case of beer a day, and Alice would never take to the stage with less than a six-pack inside of him. But, as luck would have it, he was an uncommonly ‘functional’ drinker.

“I could get up, drink beer all day, but when it came to interviews I would never slur a word and when it came time to do TV I knew every line.”

“Alice was a real professional drunk,” Mike Bruce agrees. “He was always where he was needed to be, and never complained. So it was a bit of a shock to me when he spoke of his alcoholism. I mean, he was always really thin and ghastly looking, so it didn’t really sink in.”

But while Alice had his drinking under some degree of control, the same could not be said for his drinking partner. “Everybody was worried about Glen,” Alice has said, “because Glen was just not progressing. Everybody seemed to be getting better at what they were doing and Glen just wanted to have his drink, his cigarette and just kind of float.”

Shortly before the Billion Dollar Babies tour, Glen Buxton’s alcoholic overindulgence caused his pancreas to ‘explode’. And following life-saving emergency surgery the guitarist returned to the Cooper Mansion in Connecticut to recuperate. With regular substitute Dick Wagner unavailable guitarist Mick Mashbir and keyboard player Bob Dolan were brought in to paste over gaping cracks in the band’s live sound.

As has already been established, the battery-recharging sabbaticals enjoyed by today’s major stars were simply not an option in the 1970s, and consequently the seriously debilitated Alice Cooper soon found themselves back on the recording treadmill. On this occasion, however, not only was Buxton’s contribution seriously below par, but Bob Ezrin – who had already committed to producing Lou Reed’s Berlin – was also out of the equation.

As a result, Muscle Of Love, the eagerly awaited follow-up to Billion Dollar Babies – was a commercial, as well as creative, catastrophe. That’s relatively speaking, of course – it still succeeded in shifting 800,000 copies. But the band should have been prepared for the worst – they had been warned.

“Bob Ezrin heard the songs and went: ‘Guys, this isn’t up to par’,” Alice admits. “But we were swimming in popularity at that point, we could do no wrong. So it was a perfect example of a band being over-confident. The songs were okay, but put them all together and it didn’t work.”

“We simply wanted to do an album of great songs,” Neal Smith shrugs. “We’d also heard that there was a new James Bond movie coming up, so we wrote The Man With The Golden Gun specifically for that (the band’s contribution was ultimately passed over in favour of Lulu). The major difference with Muscle Of Love was that as it wasn’t a concept album, we didn’t have a show based around it. The previous four had all come complete with an accompanying stage show. I guess we just couldn’t figure out another way to kill Alice.”

“Glen’s problems took priority,” Dunaway adds, “so we weren’t able to work on songs as we had before. We had different musicians coming in, and the whole album sounded much more safe because Bob Ezrin wasn’t there. He’d always been very tolerant of my interest in pushing the avant garde, but that’s not really Jack Richardson’s style.”

“As a producer, Jack Richardson was about as close as you could get to a Bob Ezrin,” Mike Bruce offers. “He also came from Nimbus 9 Productions in Canada, and had even engineered a couple of our previous albums alongside Bob Ezrin. So it wasn’t as much a matter of what went wrong with ‘Muscle Of Love’ as what didn’t go right.

“We’d insisted on packaging it in a cardboard carton; that was another problem. When we toured it there was a truckers’ strike, so we couldn’t use our normal stage set; we would often just turn up and play.”

With their lead guitarist plummeting into oblivion and their sales figures apparently embarking on a similar course, the Alice Cooper group decided to take a year-long hiatus that has so far lasted for three decades. At least that’s how three of them see it.

“The guys were tired of spending all the money on the show,” Alice says. “I understand that, but it’s what got us there. And they wanted to wear Levi’s. So I said: ‘If that happens I can’t be part of it. I can’t be the lead singer in Creedence Clearwater here’.

“In the end everybody wanted to do their own album. So I went: ‘If that’s going to happen, I’ve got to let you know right now that I’m going to take every penny that I have and invest it in the next album [which was Welcome To My Nightmare]. If you thought Billion Dollar Babies was the biggest thing you have ever seen, I want this to be bigger’.

“So, worried about having to watch all of their money go down the drain, they said: ‘You’re on your own’. So I said: ‘Okay. No hard feelings’. At least we knew where everybody stood. Nobody argued, nobody yelled, everybody just went, okay.

“So they all did their albums, and I took Bob Ezrin, our manager Shep Gordon and said: ‘Let’s roll the dice. We’re either going to be totally broke after this or we’re going to be really, really big’. And that’s when I started writing …Nightmare with Dick Wagner.”

“Well it’s not true,” Dunaway insists. “Mike, Neal and I did the ‘Battle Axe’ show [billing themselves as The Billion Dollar Babies] after that, and I think spent more on that than we had on the previous Alice Cooper tour. So no, that wasn’t the reason at all. I also hate that spin about how we refused to wear stage costumes. I mean, who would believe that? Just walking down the street we looked more outrageous than most bands.

“I didn’t like the idea of bringing in schooled dancers. I thought it would make the show too slick and take away the raw edge that was our power. Neither did I like the idea of big, fluffy monsters; I wanted something more gritty – the chopped-up mannequin approach.”

“Well, Alice says that stuff,” Mike Bruce says, “and it’s like he believes it so much that it’s become his reality. But no, it wasn’t that the band didn’t want a stage show, we just wanted to tone it down a little, make it into a funkier, West Side Story kind of thing as opposed to a big, lavish, Billion Dollar Broadway Babes type of thing. We had also been touring to the point where we needed to back off on the throttle and let momentum carry us. The road had taken its toll: physically speaking, our cheques were cashed and the bank was notified.”

“We had come back from Europe,” Neal Smith says. “And because Michael had some material that he wanted to record himself, we all decided to take a year off to do our various solo projects. Michael did In My Own Way, I did Platinum God and Alice did Welcome To My Nightmare. Alice found success on his own with …Nightmare and, what with the continuing Glen situation, we never got back together again.”

And have the former Billion Dollar Babies been left harbouring regrets? Well, as you might expect, some more than others.

“I certainly would’ve loved to have continued with the band,” Smith admits. “I wish that after we’d done our solo projects we’d have honoured what we’d stated and gotten back together to record the ninth Alice Cooper album. And who knows, maybe we will one day.”

“If I had to do it over again,” Bruce reflects, “I’d probably try to keep it going longer than it did.”

“I just wish we’d recorded more,” Dunaway says, laughing. “We never had a tape recorder, and as a result we lost a lot of really good songs simply by forgetting how they went.”

“I wish I’d seen a bit more of those days sober,” Alice confesses, “so I could remember more. Every once in a while I’ll get a flashback – like, because that’s all I can remember: I was driving, Steven Tyler had a gun and we were on some mission. We ended up at my house, but all I remember is a Rolls-Royce, Tyler, a gun and a lot of alcohol. Did we shoot someone and bury them? I have no idea.”

Ironically, while Glen Buxton’s premature death from pneumonia in October ’97 effectively rendered a fully-fledged Alice Cooper reunion impossible, it may well have made it easier for the four surviving members to finally regroup. After all, the band was as much Glen Buxton’s as it was anybody’s, and while he was not in any condition to tour, for his bandmates to have reunited without him would have been simply unthinkable.

But now that their former sparring partner has finally been laid to rest arguably there’s really no obstacle to the quartet sharing the same stage once more. In fact they’ve already done so: at Alice’s Cooper’stown restaurant in Phoenix during the course of the second annual Glen Buxton Memorial Weekend in October ’99.

So could this on-going détente between Bruce, Cooper, Dunaway and Smith ultimately develop into something a little more substantial?

“I would work with those guys in a second,” Alice asserts, before cautiously stipulating, “if it was the right project. I don’t know how we could ever do it authentically without Glen. Mike… [Alice briefly sucks thoughtfully on a tooth] Well, Neal and Dennis are easy. I’ll just say that. They both still play great, but I don’t know if they could do an entire tour. I mean, I’m in really good shape, but we’re not twenty-eight any more.”

“I can’t say whether it’ll ever happen or not,” Neal Smith says, “but if it does it will be something that all four of us will decide upon democratically. It won’t simply be Alice saying: ‘Hey, guys, let’s get together’. And if that time ever does come there would be nobody happier than me.”

“I said to Shep Gordon on the night that I played on School’s Out with Alice at Wembley in 2002,” Mike Bruce recalls, “that it would be nice if we got together to redo the Billion Dollar Babies Show for Europe – do the songs on the same stage set, with Mick Mashbir and Bob Dolan. We never toured Europe with that show.

“I’d love to see something happen with the four of us, but it’s up to Alice to suss it out and put it into his game plan, because he’s the figurehead. The impact of anything that we did would be most felt by him. If it were a success the critics would say he should have done it sooner, and if it were a failure it would be: ‘So, you don’t have it any more, huh?’. So I guess Alice is between a rock and a hard place.”

“Well,” Dennis Dunaway concludes with a sigh, “Neal and I have been making that offer to Alice for thirty years now. I mean, he was supposed to sing on the Battle Axe album, but we couldn’t get a return phone call. It’s certainly not Michael, Neal or I, or even Glen, that have kept this band from ever getting back together. That part I know.”

This feature was originally published in Classic Rock 67, in April 2004. In 2025 the Alice Cooper Band announced a new studio album, their first together since 1973. The Revenge Of Alice Cooper will be released on July 25.

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records.

London metalcore favourites Ithaca have released their final single.

The self-titled song, out today (May 20), comes as the five-piece prepare for their last-ever show, scheduled for Bristol’s Arctangent festival in August. They announced their impending split in October and played their final headline gig at London’s O2 Academy Islington in February.

Listen to Ithaca below.

The band comment: “Ithaca means home, the place you return to when the journey is complete. In this final song, we put this band to rest. Every memory, every tear, every laugh is in here. Thank you for everything. Om namo narayanaya.”

Ithaca formed in 2013 and released their debut album, The Language Of Injury, in 2019. They followed it up with They Fear Us in 2022. It received critical acclaim, including a near-perfect nine-out-of-10 review from Metal Hammer. Journalist Elliot Leaver wrote: “What a triumph this record is. Absolutely essential listening.”

When they announced their break-up, Ithaca chalked it up to an inability to balance their personal lives with the demands of the band.

“There’s been no falling out or creative differences, in fact we’re closer than ever,” they wrote. “We’re just no longer able to balance our life responsibilities with giving you the standard of art that you deserve, and feel like we’ve fulfilled more than our wildest dreams could have imagined in terms of where this band would take us. Now, we’re ready to put it to rest.”

In an interview with Hammer, lead singer Djamila Azzouz added that financial burdens also played a part.

“We can’t afford to be in a band,” she explained. “The point of success we reached with our last album was so amazing, beyond what we ever thought we could achieve, but in order for us to reach the next step up, we would have to sacrifice more than we can.”

Hammer attended Ithaca’s final headliner and wrote: “The energy and excitement can’t be denied, but they also make the knowledge of this band going away an even harsher reality.”

Arctangent will take place from August 13 to 16 at Fernhill Farm, Bristol. Wardruna, Tesseract, Karnivool and one more artist TBA will headline.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

“Take off your clothes!” the singer leers at the thousands of fans surging toward him on the stage. “Let’s see a little skin around here! Let’s get naked!”

It’s March 1, 1969, and Jim Morrison is in full rock god mode onstage at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium. Blitzed out of his mind from a day of drinking, The Doors frontman has spent much of the show provoking the crowd. Many are unimpressed by his antics, though not as unimpressed as the Miami cops in attendance. Their mood isn’t improved when Morrison grabs the hat of one of them and hurls it into the audience.

Then comes the fateful moment. “Do you want to see my cock?” he howls. Reports differ as to whether he actually gets the organ in question out or not, but it’s a signal for fans – some of them naked – to rush the stage, causing it to buckle under the additional weight. “We’re not leaving until everyone gets their rocks off!” Morrison cries above the chaos, his provocation fulfilled.

They finish the gig, but four days later, six warrants are issued for Morrison on obscenity charges. Soon afterwards, he gives himself up to the FBI in Los Angeles.

The incident in Miami has become a key part in the myth of Jim Morrison. Yet perception of the singer as Lizard King – the carefully-curated persona that cast him as both shaman and poet, the primal, sexualised spearhead of a new revolution – demands more than a superficial glance at his notorious rock’n’roll exploits. To truly understand the transformation, one must dig deep into the seething cauldron of his formative years, a period characterised by isolation, erudition, grandiose delusions and a peculiar brand of artistic self-absorption that would lay the groundwork for one of music’s most magnetic figures.

Jim Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida, 200 miles up the Atlantic coast from the location of the riotous scenes he would provoke nearly 26 years later. The son of Admiral George Stephen Morrison and Clara Clarke Morrison, he was called ‘Jimmy’ by friends and family and would remain so throughout his youth.

A pivotal moment in Morrison’s early years has become a cornerstone of his mythos. In several interviews, he claimed that, while driving with his family and grandparents one morning, they came across a fatal accident involving a group of Native Americans who had been killed in a truck crash. He liked to say that as they drove past the wreck, the soul of one of the victims passed into Jim’s body, infusing him with centuries of wisdom and power. Though just three or four years old at the time, Morrison cited this incident as a revelation that unveiled the mysteries of mortality. In his autobiography, Riders On The Storm, sceptical Doors drummer John Densmore describes the tale as “a leap of faith if there ever was one.” True or not, the story embodied Morrison’s quest for higher consciousness and his propensity for vivid myth-making.

His upbringing was defined by physical and emotional upheaval as his father was shuttled from one military posting to another across the country. Jim’s early years were a parade of new faces and changing scenery, a relentless motion that must have bred a profound sense of restlessness. This life of constant flux and displacement was bound to leave a mark, and it transformed young Jimmy into a tempestuous adolescent.

It was after the Morrison family relocated to Claremont, California that his rebellion first flashed brightly. By sixth grade, he was a model student and an athletic standout, but underneath the surface was a simmering cauldron of defiance. The seeds of his iconoclasm were evident when he was expelled from the Cub Scouts for disruptive behaviour and for disrespecting his den mother – a prelude to the more public spectacles that would define his later years.

He bullied his younger siblings, often to shocking lengths. In 1955, during a family ski trip, Morrison’s reckless behaviour nearly ended in tragedy when he piloted a toboggan also containing his two younger siblings straight toward a barn, impervious to his sibling’s cries and mother’s screams as he careened toward impending disaster. His father’s intervention averted potential catastrophe, but the young Jimmy’s dismissive attitude towards the incident hinted at a burgeoning contempt for authority and a thirst for chaos.

As Eisenhower-era conformity began to clash with the rebellious surge of rock’n’roll, Morrison’s restless spirit found itself at odds with the stifling expectations of his upbringing. By 1958, his family were living in Alameda, California, 10 miles east of San Francisco. The 15-year-old Jim often skipped school to frequent San Francisco’s beatnik circles, entranced by the radical ideas of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. He hung out at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bohemian City Lights bookstore, where he mingled with the city’s artistic avant garde and became enmeshed in the Beat ethos. His intellectual appetite was voracious, consuming the works of Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche and Norman Mailer with an insatiable thirst.

He also developed a deep fascination with art house films and the intellectual dimensions of postmodern filmmaking. n 1958, the Morrisons moved once more, Alexandria, Virginia, where Jim finished high school with a growing sense of isolation and disillusionment. His final years at high school were marked by a descent into a darker, more withdrawn demeanour. He leaned into a beatnik style that complemented his nihilistic outlook, spending hours haunting the city’s waterfront and immersing himself in books that further alienated him from mainstream society.

His rebellious streak was now paired with a self-destructive edge, and his proclivities for manipulation and abuse became increasingly frequent. His girlfriends bore the brunt of Morrison’s petty cruelties and withering emotional slights. In eleventh grade, he once rode a bus into Washington with his then-girlfriend, suddenly ditching her and disappearing into the city, leaving her alone in hysterics.

After graduating in 1961, Morrison – by most estimations, the smartest kid in his class – had few options, having elected to not submit any college applications. When his family moved to San Diego for the Admiral’s next assignment, Jim was not invited. Instead, he ended up back in Florida, attending St. Petersburg Junior College and eventually transferring to the racially segregated Florida State University in 1962.

There fascination with literature and film grew, but FSU’s lack of a film program was a problem. Morrison’s dreams of filmmaking and poetic glory were stifled by the beer-swilling, football-centric culture of the university. In September 1963, at the age of 19, he was arrested at a school football game when, incensed by what he estimated was the sub-par performance of his classmates on the field, his drunken heckling turned to stealing a police officer’s helmet, drawing a list of charges including public drunkenness and resisting arrest. The charges were later dropped.

It was a disillusioning period for Morrison, but it set the stage for his next big move. When a professor suggested he apply to UCLA’s Theater Arts Department in Los Angeles, which had a film school, the die was cast. In 1964, he headed west once more. This wasn’t merely a geographic shift – it was a leap into the heart of artistic experimentation and intellectual rebellion.

At UCLA, Morrison’s enrolmed in Jack Hirschman’s class on Antonin Artaud, the French playwright and theorist renowned for his radical and surrealist approach to theatre. It endowed his artistic sensibilities with a fresh, darkly poetic dynamism. Artaud’s theories on ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’, with its emphasis on breaking down traditional forms and exploring the raw, visceral aspects of human experience, resonated deeply with Morrison’s burgeoning creative vision. It laid a solid foundation for his future endeavours, both on stage and off.

Imbued with the freedom to fully commit to his intellectual pursuits, Jim cut ties with most members of his family, citing a lack of empathy and support. When asked about his family, Jim would often explain that his parents – still very much alive – were dead. It’s a lie that persisted through their self-titled debut album, which included press materials that identified Jim as an orphan. It seemed essential to Jim’s persona that he shun all trappings of normalcy or anything that gave the impression Jim was just like everybody else. A normal childhood, stable family and even the occasional loan from his parents just didn’t play into the myth.

For Jim, UCLA was a period not marked by stellar academic achievement but by an immersion into a world where he could mould his burgeoning ideas about art and existence into something tangible. He grew out his hair and embraced acid and pot. His final diploma, earned in 1965, was merely a footnote in a broader narrative of creative upheaval and artistic exploration. Those years were less about acquiring a degree and more about absorbing and manipulating the radical ideas of his professors. He began to channel his creative energies into film and poetry. The avant garde spirit of Los Angeles, combined with the libertine and increasingly psychedelic cultural scene, offered him the perfect backdrop for his artistic pursuits.

He’d long been a fan of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and the blazing pioneers of the rock movement of the 50s and early 60s, but nowhere in any reliable account of Morrison’s youth does one find any passion for becoming a musician, let alone a rock star. His musical aspirations were secondary to his broader artistic ambitions, and his eventual foray into rock stardom was as much a serendipitous detour as a planned trajectory.

The first step of this detour occurred on a sun-baked stretch of Venice Beach in the July 1965. As Jim wandered along the sand, he ran into his UCLA film school buddy, Ray Manzarek – a fellow auteur who also played keyboard in Rick And The Ravens. Sitting in the sand, they talked about life, school and of course, girls, before Jim revealed that he’d been writing songs. Prodded by Ray, the uncharacteristically self-conscious Jim reluctantly sang the lyrics to Moonlight Drive, a song that would eventually appear on The Doors’ second album, Strange Days.

It was a revelation. As Morrison ran through one song after another, Manzarek began envisioning their band. Famously, the latter proclaimed to Jim, “We’re gonna make a million dollars.” According to Manzarek, Jim replied, “Ray, that’s exactly what I had in mind.”

In that moment, the seeds of The Doors were sown. This fateful encounter was more than a casual meeting; it was the ignition of a creative inferno that would set the world ablaze. Morrison and Manzarek stood at the precipice of something far greater than either could have fathomed.

By the start of 1966, the Doors’ line-up had coalesced into the one that would carry it through the next five years: Morrison and Manzarek, plus guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. They secured a residence at Sunset Strip club London Fog, before making the leap to the more prestigious Whisky A Go Go.

It was at the Whisky that Jac Holzman, the owner of rising independent label Elektra Records, came to see The Doors play for the first time. Unimpressed, he left midway through the set but, at the insistence of friends, he returned the next night, and the next and the next. On August 20, 1966, Elektra offered the band a deal. Five months later, in January 1967, The Doors released their self-titled debut album.

That album would mark the beginning of new chapter in the life of Jim Morrison, the wayward kid with the volatile personality, grandiose vision and artistic brilliance. The Lizard King was about to emerge from the chaos of his past, ready to confront the world with a blend of poetic darkness and rock’n’roll audacity that would define an era. The future was about to be rewritten in the hallucinatory haze of The Doors’ debut album – a journey that began with a troubled youth and culminated in a mythic legend.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents The Story Of The Doors

Hailing from San Diego, California, Joe Daly is an award-winning music journalist with over thirty years experience. Since 2010, Joe has been a regular contributor for Metal Hammer, penning cover features, news stories, album reviews and other content. Joe also writes for Classic Rock, Bass Player, Men’s Health and Outburn magazines. He has served as Music Editor for several online outlets and he has been a contributor for SPIN, the BBC and a frequent guest on several podcasts. When he’s not serenading his neighbours with black metal, Joe enjoys playing hockey, beating on his bass and fawning over his dogs.

Trivium have shared footage of them covering Steve’s Lava Chicken from A Minecraft Movie in their rehearsal room.

The Florida metal band put the video on social media over the weekend, and are seeking the endorsement of the film’s star, and the original song’s singer, Jack Black.

“@jackblack APPROVED?! 👀🍗🐔” the band ask in their caption. “Trivium shreds LAVA CHICKEN 🤘🏼🤘🏼”

Watch below.

The snippet is the latest in a series of notable social media antics they’ve engaged in in recent weeks. Last week, they put out a video of them covering Seasons In The Abyss, by thrash metal favourites Slayer, from their rehearsal room.

The band have also shared footage of their members and their roadies saving cats from a diesel generator, and they’ve been claiming that they were hoping to surprise-release a new song, only for their management to shoot the idea down.

On Sunday (May 18), Trivium wrapped up the Poisoned Ascendancy co-headline tour with Bullet For My Valentine. The bands played their respective 2005 albums, Ascendancy and The Poison, in full at every date on the run.

The trek ended in controversial fashion. The Poisoned Ascendancy was originally announced in February 2024 and was promoted as a world tour that would fill the entirety of 2025. Trivium and Bullet played Europe and North America from February to May, only for Trivium bassist Paolo Gregoletto to announce in a livestream earlier this month that no new dates would be added. He blamed the lack of further shows on Bullet singer/guitarist Matt Heafy.

Gregoletto and Trivium guitarist Corey Beaulieu later claimed that tours in South America and Australia had been arranged and then scrapped. Bullet issued a statement shortly after that didn’t explicitly acknowledge Trivium‘s allegations, but expressed excitement at returning to the studio to finish their next album. Meanwhile, Trivium singer/guitarist Matt Heafy tried to calm the situation via social media.

Trivium will embark on a short tour of Europe in the summer, including a headline set at Bloodstock Open Air in Derbyshire. They’ve teased that they will play Ascendancy in full at the show.

A Minecraft Movie, starring Black and Jason Momoa, was released to cinemas in April. It grossed $929 million at the box office but received mixed reviews from critics. A scene featuring Black’s character shouting “Chicken jockey!” became a widespread meme on TikTok, with some observers saying it contributed to the film’s commercial success.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Paradise Lost are fucking miserable. Since forming in the rain-soaked North of England in 1988, the Bradford bunch have tried their hand at everything from death/doom to synthpop. However, they’ve never once done it with a smile on their face.

Those 35-plus years of sorrow and dynamism have made this band influential across metal, with the likes of Nightwish, Him, Katatonia and Lacuna Coil all bowing before them. But it’s also made knowing where to start with their 16-album back-catalogue a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, us super-fans here at Hammer have listened to it all in-depth, and this is our ranking of Paradise Lost’s despondent discography from worst to best:

16) Paradise Lost (2005)

Paradise Lost was self-titled for a reason. Ostensibly ending years of synthy and electro-rock detours, it was meant to be the Yorkshiremen’s grand return to the goth metal they’d defined one decade prior. For some reason, though, electronica connoisseur Rhys Fulber remained as producer, turning such would-be anthems as Grey and Red Shift into semi-digitised disasters. Great on paper; deeply befuddled in practice.

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15) Believe In Nothing (2001)

If an album can be “cursed”, then Believe In Nothing was. Recorded after divisive synthpop diversion Host, album eight found Paradise Lost creatively confused and tearing at the seams, as well as struggling individually (singer Nick Holmes admits he was on disorienting amounts of antidepressants back then). The songs proved rather lifeless as a result, hindered even further by flat-as-a-pancake production.

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14) Medusa (2017)

After the band rediscovered death metal on The Plague Within, guitarist Greg Mackintosh promised the next album would be “slower, sludgier and more doom-filled”. That pursuit of darkness led to Medusa eschewing some all-important melody, though. As crushingly heavy as Fearless Sky and From The Gallows were, they struggled to be memorable, and only Blood And Chaos has persisted in the Paradise Lost setlist.

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13) Lost Paradise (1990)

By mixing death metal with the slow-paced solemnity of Candlemass, Paradise Lost’s debut album was ground-breaking. It also introduced some of the idiosyncrasies that would later define them, like the odd lead line from Greg and some ominous choirs. However, this early in the game, the band hadn’t mastered the art of songwriting. While there’s no questioning Lost Paradise’s importance, its individual songs lacked identity.

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12) In Requiem (2007)

In Requiem was the true re-embrace of goth metal that Paradise Lost began pushing the band towards. Although producer Rhys Fulber returned, his electronic undercurrents were repeatedly overwhelmed by the power of the choirs, the guitars and Jeff Singer’s drumming. The Enemy and Requiem were the most imposing Paradise Lost had sounded since Icon, while Unreachable found space to be danceable amidst the doom.

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11) Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us (2009)

Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us was Paradise Lost’s most timeless- and sullen-sounding metal album in aeons. The title track was the song that found immortality, climbing from guitar strums to a multi-layered chorus, yet hidden gems were strewn throughout these 46 minutes. With Greg’s lead playing more prominent in the mix, Paradise Lost well and truly returned to form.

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10) One Second (1997)

After touring Icon and Draconian Times incessantly, Paradise Lost grew sick of their own stuff. So, One Second emphasised keyboards over riffing. The title track and Say Just Words proved to be must-listens, with Blood Of Another and Soul Courageous being underrated earworms. Some observers raised eyebrows at the pop inclinations (which would only strengthen afterwards), but when it sounded this good, it didn’t matter.

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9) Tragic Idol (2012)

Tragic Idol was basically the rawer, angrier sibling of Faith Divides Us…. Solitary One flaunted from the off that Nick Holmes had rediscovered the kind of bark he’d previously ditched after Icon. Then, Fear Of Impending Hell and Honesty In Death offered episodes of immense energy, their tempo picked up by the addition of At The Gates drummer Adrian Erlandsson to the band.

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8) Host (1999)

Some may baulk at Host being anywhere but the bottom of this list, clutching their pearls over the album ditching rock in favour of downtrodden electro-pop. That said, as a downtrodden electro-pop album, this was crammed with quality. So Much Is Lost started things off with one of the best choruses in Paradise Lost’s arsenal, and the infectious excellence kept coming from there.

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7) Symbol Of Life (2002)

The years between 1999 and 2002 are widely regarded as when Paradise Lost drowned in a sea of confusingly disparate electronica. However, Symbol Of Life was top-shelf dance-rock. Isolate was the best (and heaviest) Depeche Mode song never written, Self-Obsessed was upfront enough to cram a 2000s nightclub dance floor, and that Smalltown Boy cover was an aptly gloomy reinvention of a synthpop classic.

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6) Obsidian (2020)

Obsidian felt like the album Paradise Lost built up to for their entire career, with everything that had ever given them their appeal showing up. Fall From Grace leapt off a hopeless-sounding guitar melody to contrast roars against an infectious chorus, then Nick’s vocal lines on The Devil Embraced evoked flashbacks to Draconian Times. Ghosts even revived the band’s turn-of-the-millennium dance-rock flirtations. Brilliantly, diversely depressing.

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5) The Plague Within (2015)

Between Tragic Idol and The Plague Within, Greg and Nick recorded death metal albums with Vallenfyre and Bloodbath, respectively. That energy doubtlessly fed into Paradise Lost’s 14th album, which furthered the desolation of Faith Divides Us… and Tragic Idol using bowel-quaking growls. Every song demanded your attention differently, from the crawl of Beneath Broken Earth to the orchestral bombast of Eternity Of Lies.

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4) Icon (1993)

Paradise Lost fit more standout songs into Icon than most bands do into a whole career. Embers Fire, True Belief and Widow in particular were perfectly placed for where metal was in 1993, endowing groovy, barking, Black Album-esque heaviness with the introversion you could only otherwise find in grunge. Mainstream critics and MTV were basically forced to take notice of the band after this.

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3) Shades Of God (1992)

Shades Of God was the first indication that one soundscape would never be big enough for Paradise Lost, as it pushed the band into thrash, goth and even prog territory. Considering they found their groove in downtempo anthem-making on Icon, this sadly made the guitar chugging of Pity The Sadness and the galloping drums of Mortals Watch The Day one-offs. On the other hand, that scarcity was what made this album especially essential.

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2) Gothic (1991)

After Lost Paradise introduced Paradise Lost’s characteristics, this follow-up focussed more clearly on them, thus defining the parameters of the death/doom subgenre. The crawling pace, string sections, bleak lead guitar lines and clashes of growls with operatic singing all combined to create an album that matched the dread and grandeur of the apocalypse itself. To this day, only a select few acts in metal have ever touched the magnificence of Gothic.

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1) Draconian Times (1995)

There’s a convincing argument for any entry in this list’s top five being the best Paradise Lost album. However, what earns Draconian Times the number one spot is that every second of it was ceaselessly, persistently unforgettable. Enchantment, Hallowed Land, The Last Time and Forever Failure by themselves could open a greatest hits compilation, each one perfectly meshing Sisters Of Mercy with Metallica, matching oomph, nihilism and catchiness. For 12 songs and 49 minutes, that formula’s impact never waned. This remains Paradise Lost’s highest-charting album as a result, and its legacy is so strong that the band still occasionally perform the whole thing in full.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Marshall are known around the world for their famous stage amps and, in more recent years, their wide range of headphones and speakers. Now, Marshall have turned their attention to the TV audio market and have released their first-ever soundbar: the Heston 120.

The design is what you’d expect from Marshall, with the sleek branded soundbar featuring leather-wrapped trims and brushed metal panels – and under the hood the Heston 120 looks to be equally impressive. It features Dolby Atmos and DTS-X and has 11 drivers facing in various directions for a wide and rich soundstage.

The Heston 120 is Bluetooth enabled and integrates with your TV with HDMI eARC or via external devices through the HDMI Pass-through. It also features LE-audio technology including Auracast – and an RCA input allows external music players to connect.

Anders Olsson, senior product manager at Marshall Group says: “We know that soundbar owners use their soundbar to listen to music, yet most soundbars are not built for both music and TV.

“This gave us a reason to exist and an opportunity to really shine with our legacy in music and audio.”

Ed Camphor, audio technology and tuning lead at Marshall Group adds: “We spent hundreds of hours fine tuning Heston 120. It was important to us that we spent equal time and effort on both TV and music, not one over the other.

“Everything inside is tailored and engineered to have very specific roles to give you an optimal audio experience, no matter what you’re watching or listening to.”

Marshall report that the Heston 120 is the first entry in their TV sound range, with further products to be announced in the near future.

The Heston 120 is available to pre-order now directly from the Marshall website, with the soundbar set to ship on June 3.

Read more

• Best Marshall headphones: Explore the range
• The best Marshall speakers: Portable speakers to home Hi-Fi
• Loudest headphones: You want volume? You got it
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Scott has spent 35 years in newspapers, magazines and online as an editor, production editor, sub-editor, designer, writer and reviewer. Scott joined our news desk in the summer of 2014 before moving into e-commerce in 2020. Scott keeps Louder’s buyer’s guides up to date, writes about the best deals for music fans, keeps on top of the latest tech releases and reviews headphones, speakers, earplugs and more for Louder. Over the last 10 years, Scott has written more than 11,000 articles across Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog. He’s previously written for publications including IGN, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record and The Herald, covering everything from daily news and weekly features, to tech reviews, video games, travel and whisky. Scott’s favourite bands are Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cure, New Model Army, All About Eve, The Mission, Cocteau Twins, Drab Majesty, The Tragically Hip, Marillion and Rush.

In 2020 Ultravox released a box set to mark the 40th anniversary of their breakthrough album Vienna. While they’re often regarded as one of the leading lights of 80s synth pop, Midge Ure and Billy Currie took the opportunity to explain why they always regarded themselves as closer to prog than new romantic.

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When it comes to a really good prog-related story, Midge Ure‘s got a corker. “I was once asked to go and meet Rush, with a view to producing them,” he says. ”They were big Ultravox fans. So I flew over to Toronto, and we had a lovely dinner. Then we got round to talking about their album. They asked what my take on it would be, if I were producing. And I said, ‘I would simplify it.’”

He laughs heartily. “Suffice to say I was on the plane home the next day! It was fine, though; I had to be honest. They were brilliant players, and we’d have made a great record together…”

What might have been. While Ure recalls his big brother playing Yes’ Roundabout a lot in the house growing up, he muses, “Too many notes, as they said to Mozart in the movie. Though it’s not too many notes at all – it’s just a skill I do not have. I simply couldn’t do what the prog rock guys do. I asked my friend who played drums in a prog band once what it was like, and he said, ‘You count to 19 and a half, then hit a cymbal.’ Tell you what, though,” he adds, “Billy gets very into textures and augmented ninths and integration of classical structures…”

He does, too. Billy Currie and Midge Ure are here to talk about the 40th anniversary deluxe edition of the Vienna album, the band’s commercial breakthrough, usually referred to as a “synthpop classic.” It’s rather more than that narrow definition implies. While it did contribute to breaking the chart barriers against synthesisers, and that single became a watershed, it was a profoundly original and forward-thinking record in its own right. From the seven-minute instrumental opener Astradyne to the prescient electro of Mr X, the band were fusing sounds and styles in groundbreaking ways. Alongside the underrated multi-tasking of Chris Cross and Warren Cann, Ure and Currie broadened the vocabulary and palette of rock.

Ultravox had already done something of a Lazarus act. When Island dropped them in ’78 and John Foxx and Robin Simon left, despite the brilliance of the first three albums, they found the dawn of the 80s daunting. Currie (violin, viola, keyboards) was playing with Tubeway Army. Ure – nothing if not versatile – had endured rather than enjoyed a pop chart-topper with Slik, gone on to minor success with Rich Kids, and filled in on guitar on tour with Thin Lizzy. The pair were now collaborating on studio project Visage, a New Romantic concept fronted by Blitz Kid Steve Strange.

“We worked well together in Visage,” says Currie. “That’s why I asked Midge to join Ultravox. This line-up integrated more, pooled our ideas. In retrospect we found our own sound; other ‘electronic’ bands weren’t using ‘real’ instruments alongside synths. At the time I wondered why not. We were so pleased to still be carrying on as a band that we pulled out all the stops, and it was great.”

Chrysalis snapped up the revitalised group, but what’s half-forgotten now is that Vienna itself was only the third single – after Sleepwalk and Passing Strangers – from the 1980 album. And it wasn’t until that single came out in January 1981, infamously kept at No.2 by John Lennon’s Woman for one week and Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face for three, that album sales soared.

We were aware of Kraftwerk; we’d picked up on the feel of Europe. Conny opened our minds even more

“It was gratifying, yes,” says Currie, “but it’s such a strange thing. It’s a miracle it was a success at all! When the label suggested releasing Vienna, I got protective, thinking of it as a great album track, and was saying no. I didn’t want it getting slagged off! Then it goes out of your control, selling 30,000 a day; it’s an odd feeling. Anyway, it seems to have stayed in people’s minds, and of course that’s nice to know.”

Back then, Ure was less fazed about replacing Foxx than he was excited about joining a band he thought were “way ahead of the curve.” He adds: “They made the kind of sounds I’d tried to pursue with Rich Kids, but my buying a synthesiser in ’78 had basically broken that band in two. So Rusty Egan and I put together Visage, and
got in one of our favourite musicians – Billy. We’d been playing [third Ultravox album] Systems Of Romance in clubs like the Blitz, and through big speakers that stuff sounded fantastic. I loved what they were doing with technology.

“And in Ultravox, I was the newbie. Their nucleus was there. I didn’t come in to upset the apple cart, but just by being there I changed the dynamic. So it carried along a line, but there was a marked difference now.”

In New Europeans he sings the immortal line: ‘His modern world revolves around the synthesiser’s song.’ At the time, synths were regarded by some punk rock diehards as the spawn of Satan. It seems laughable now, but late adopters feared synths would destroy us all. “Oh yes, very much so,” chuckles Ure. “And I remember the early Queen albums had ‘no synthesisers’ on them! It was viewed as a joke instrument, only used for funny effects. And only the German krautrock bands – Can, Kraftwerk, Neu! – were using them in a serious, interesting way.”

“The spacey stuff in the 60s, and even with Pink Floyd in the early 70s, had been the organ,” says Currie. “When I first got my hands on a synth, that to me was the future! Its atmospheres were cold and icy. It was mind-boggling!”

Producer Conny Plank had serious form in this field. Ure reveals, “When I joined, the guys had already done Systems Of Romance with Conny. And they were going, ‘So who shall we get to produce this one?’ And I was quietly sitting in the corner going, ‘Er, I’d love to work with Conny Plank!’ I was so into learning about production – that’s why I’d put Visage together – and there’s no better way of doing that than being in the room with someone like Conny and learning by osmosis.

“In Britain we rarely heard European music, apart from slabs of Eurovision bubblegum, until Kraftwerk’s Autobahn made the charts. And then we started to unravel all these threads. That mixed in with Billy’s classical training – he was pumping a lot of European elements into his chord structures. We had one foot in the future, one in the past, and were trying to make something timeless.”

“And we’d been touring around Europe a lot,” adds Currie. “We were aware of Kraftwerk; we’d picked up on the feel of Europe. Conny opened our minds even more. He’d introduce us to people. Holger Czukay dropped by the studio. And I can still remember Conny playing us Neu! for the first time. I was even checking out Stockhausen. I was into Bartok and Schoenberg. Vienna itself, though, for me, comes from the late 19th century… I still can’t explain why. The decadence, the haunting sophistication of it.”

The success of Vienna was a major factor in synths becoming part of pop music’s fabric. Yet it was that unique blend of what used to be called “authentic” and “artificial” sounds that fleshed out the grandeur of its architecture. As Ure points out, “If you listen to it closely there’s guitar all over it! Because I’m a guitarist first and foremost. And that’s kind of what makes it work – the looseness. Machines didn’t integrate then; didn’t talk to each other. It wasn’t all locked in and absolutely synchronised like it is now. It was played by humans, who are fluid. So everything was a little off, a little slippy. That’s what a good band does.

“Everyone says Vienna was an electronic track. And yes, it has electronic drums and a synthesised bass, but it’s mainly piano, violin and viola. Everyone seems to overlook that. Those strange combinations, interactions, made Ultravox what it was.

“Don’t forget everything that was against the band – dropped by the label, in debt – but despite all that we got into this incredibly creative little bubble. I was turning my back on some of my previous stuff; I wanted to be in a band that created interesting stuff I could get my teeth into, and might last. Nobody was more stunned than us when it reached a commercial market. It was beyond anything we’d ever dreamed that something as bizarre as Vienna would do what it did!”

Is it true that as Vienna played in the studio while he was striving to write lyrics, he said to Plank, “This means nothing to me”? Ure laughs: “That is a Disney-ism! Maybe it did happen, but… no, it didn’t. That was, in fact, the first line that came to me, along with ‘Oh Vienna.’ Then we spent four days in the rehearsal studio crafting it.”

“And for me,” adds Currie, “the second side has a trippy vibe. We wanted an old-school feel, segueing between the tracks. It was a worked-out album, y’know? We were moving forward with a slight nod to the past. I’ve got some lovely memories of it.”

Vienna is a highlight but it’s nowhere near the best song I’ve written, or best piece of music I’ve played

Where does Vienna stand for Currie, among all the music he’s made? “It’s way up there. I helped [remixer] Steven Wilson on the box set and I’m proud of it. Though I think I peaked on the Quartet album.”

“I think anything so transformational in your life has to be considered major,” reflects Ure, whose varied career – from Band Aid to solo success – has been illustrious by any standards. “It happens to you; you have no control over it. It’s a double-edged sword. It elevated the band to big venues, gave us fresh tools – all great. But then everyone expects Vienna 2 or Vienna 3, which we refused to do.

“I think the follow-up, again with Conny, Rage In Eden, is a more interesting album. Vienna is a highlight but it’s nowhere near the best song I’ve written, or best piece of music I’ve played. My favourites are usually the ones that got away…”

Chris Roberts has written about music, films, and art for innumerable outlets. His new book The Velvet Underground is out April 4. He has also published books on Lou Reed, Elton John, the Gothic arts, Talk Talk, Kate Moss, Scarlett Johansson, Abba, Tom Jones and others. Among his interviewees over the years have been David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Bryan Ferry, Al Green, Tom Waits & Lou Reed. Born in North Wales, he lives in London.

Enter Shikari are to release a live documentation of their biggest ever UK headline show, which took place at London’s Wembley Arena on February 17 last year.

“We put a lot of time, energy, and money into the production, and gave our supporters the show they deserved. Despite some technical issues (like losing a couple of cameras’ footage completely!) we hope that the resulting film reflects what an incredible night it was. The swooping drone footage gives people a perspective you don’t often see, and we think our old friend Oleg Rooz on the edit really elevates it above ‘just another live video’.”

The vinyl editions of Live At Wembley can be pre-ordered here.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

This year’s Memorial Day takes place on Monday, May 26 and it’s a time when the biggest online retailers cut their prices on a whole range of products – and that includes big savings on Lego sets for the whole family.

The first Memorial Day Lego deal to turn my head was the awesome Lego Star Wars TIE Bomber which has been reduced from $64.99 to $51.99 over at Amazon. It’s a 625-piece kit and ideal for younger Lego fans as well as Star Wars veterans.

If Harry Potter is more to your tastes than adventures in a galaxy far, far away, then Walmart are offering the Lego Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle set for $144.49 – that’s down from its list price of $169.99. The 2660-piece kit is packed with details, including the Astronomy Tower, Great Hall, the Chamber Of Secrets, Potions classroom and Chessboard Chamber.

For more great Memorial Day Lego deals, check out my selection below.

Memorial Day deals: Quick links

• Amazon: Up to 35% off music, tech & more
• Walmart: Massive early summer deals across the board
• Best Buy: Big savings on headphones, speakers & more
• Guitar Center: Up to 35% off instruments for Memorial Day
• Musician’s Friend: Save up to 50% on gear for Memorial Day
• Positive Grid: Save big on the Spark smart amp and more

Memorial Day Lego deals

Read more

• Memorial Day CD & vinyl deals: Fill your ears for less
• Best gifts for music fans: Present ideas with a rock’n’roll twist
• Best gifts for metalheads: Heavy-duty gift ideas
• Keep records safe with the best vinyl record storage solutions
• Best Lego kits for adults: Band logos, guitars, Beatles and more

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Scott has spent 35 years in newspapers, magazines and online as an editor, production editor, sub-editor, designer, writer and reviewer. Scott joined our news desk in the summer of 2014 before moving into e-commerce in 2020. Scott keeps Louder’s buyer’s guides up to date, writes about the best deals for music fans, keeps on top of the latest tech releases and reviews headphones, speakers, earplugs and more for Louder. Over the last 10 years, Scott has written more than 11,000 articles across Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog. He’s previously written for publications including IGN, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record and The Herald, covering everything from daily news and weekly features, to tech reviews, video games, travel and whisky. Scott’s favourite bands are Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cure, New Model Army, All About Eve, The Mission, Cocteau Twins, Drab Majesty, The Tragically Hip, Marillion and Rush.