Alice Cooper

Vincent Damon Furnier, alias Alice Cooper, was born on February 4, 1948 in Detroit, Michigan. He miraculously survived peritonitis at the age of 11, and soon turned to music: with his first band, successively named The Earwigs, The Spiders and The Nazz, they played the repertoire of their idols, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In 1968, the band reappeared in Los Angeles as Alice Cooper, with Glen Buxton (guitar), Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar), Dennis Dunaway (bass) and Neal Smith (drums). Alice Cooper's controversial personality gradually became one of the band's main attractions: shows included mock executions, mock fights, live snakes and constant references to unbridled sexuality. Frank Zappa, through his Straight Records label, enabled Alice Cooper to release his first album, Pretties for You in 1969. This was followed by Easy Action in 1970 and Love It to Death in 1971, which gave the singer his first real hit with "I'm Eighteen " (#21 on the Billboard charts). Other standards followed, including "School's Out" in 1972 (#1 in the UK) and "Welcome to My Nightmare " (#45 on the Billboard charts) in 1975. Alice Cooper's excesses took him down a slippery slope in the 1980s, but he came back in the early 1990s, notably with the album Hey Stoopid in 1991, which gave him a new lease of life. He collaborated with artists of the moment, such as Guns N'Roses, and made the most of his legendary status on the silver screen, notably in Wayne's World in 1992. He released his last album of the decade in 1994, The Last Temptation , before returning with Brutal Planet in 2000. His repertoire grew steadily over the next two decades, but he still found time in 2015 to form the band Hollywood Vampires, with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and actor and musician Johnny Depp. Picking up the thread of his discography in 2017 with the album Paranormal, he returned in 2021 with Detroit Stories , featuring his hometown and welcoming guests such as Wayne Kramer, Joe Bonamassa and Larry Mullen Jr. (U2). Two years later, his conceptual successor Road took the singer and his band on tour with Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard. In 2025, the singer returns as a group with his original partners Bruce, Buxton, Dunaway and Smith on The Revenge of Alice Cooper, which also features The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger.