Alice Cooper

From the Earwigs to a genre of his own

Vincent Damon Furnier was born in Detroit on 4 February 1948 and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where in 1964 he and a group of schoolfriends put together the first version of the band that would carry his stage name. They worked through the names the Earwigs, the Spiders and Nazz before settling on Alice Cooper in 1968 — a band name, not a solo billing, a distinction that would matter half a century later. Frank Zappa signed them to his Straight Records that same year.

The first two albums went nowhere. The third, Love It to Death in 1971, produced "I'm Eighteen" and turned them into a touring proposition. Killer followed later that year, School's Out in 1972 and Billion Dollar Babies in 1973, the commercial peak of the original group. What the band built in those years — the greasepaint, the props, the staged executions, the character who was not quite the singer — became the template that a great deal of hard rock and metal has borrowed from since.

The solo decades, the collapse and the recovery

The original band came apart in 1975. Furnier changed his name legally to Alice Cooper and released Welcome to My Nightmare the same year, carrying the theatrical staging into a solo career. The late 1970s and early 1980s went badly: alcoholism and cocaine addiction derailed the work, he was hospitalised in 1983, and he has been sober since, crediting his Christian faith for the recovery.

Trash in 1989 brought the commercial return, with "Poison" as its hit. Across roughly six decades he has released about thirty studio albums and sold more than 50 million records. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 as part of the original band. Away from records he has presented the syndicated radio programme Nights with Alice Cooper since 2004 and runs the Solid Rock Foundation, which funds music and art programmes for teenagers in Phoenix.

Fifty-one years later: The Revenge of Alice Cooper

The record currently being toured is The Revenge of Alice Cooper, released on 25 July 2025 through earMusic. It is the first full collaboration between Cooper, guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith since Muscle of Love in 1973. Bob Ezrin, who produced the band's run of early-1970s albums, produced it too, with sessions spread across eight studios during 2024.

Glen Buxton, the fifth member, died in 1997; archived recordings of his playing appear on two tracks, with Gyasi Heus and Rick Tedesco covering the guitar parts elsewhere. The closing song, "See You on the Other Side", is written for him. Three singles preceded the album: "Black Mamba" on 23 April 2025, "Wild Ones" on 4 June and "Up All Night" on 16 July.

It sold better than a reunion album usually does, reaching number two in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, number nine in the UK and number 72 on the Billboard 200. Reviews were broadly favourable, aggregating to 75 on Metacritic, with four-star notices from AllMusic, Classic Rock, Record Collector and The Arts Desk, and seven out of ten from Uncut. The common reservation was that some of the hard rock writing is formulaic; the common praise was that the four of them still play like a band rather than a reconvened committee.

Devil on My Shoulder, and the man under the make-up

Cooper's memoir, Devil on My Shoulder, was published by Ebury Spotlight on 8 October 2026. Its subject is the split he has lived with since the name change: the character and the pastor's son who plays him. "I was born Vincent Damon Furnier but, seduced by my character's reputation, changed my name legally to Alice Cooper, and in the process lost sight of who I really was," he has said of it. The book spans six decades and takes in Salvador Dalí, John Lennon and Vincent Price alongside the addiction and the recovery.

He is supporting it with an eight-date UK speaking tour, each night an on-stage conversation with a guest host followed by audience questions, with a copy of the book included in the ticket. It opens at Cardiff New Theatre on 11 October 2026 and runs through Cambridge Corn Exchange on the 12th, the London Palladium on the 13th, Brighton Dome on the 14th, Manchester Opera House on the 16th, Stockton Globe on the 17th, the Glasgow Pavilion on the 19th and Wolverhampton Civic Hall on the 20th. Arthur Brown hosts London, Brighton, Stockton and Wolverhampton; the broadcaster Claire Sturgess takes Cardiff, Cambridge and Manchester; the journalist Billy Sloan has Glasgow.

In an interview with CBS Mornings recorded ahead of publication, he put his continued workload down to not feeling settled: "I've always felt that I had to prove myself." He described stage fear as "a good agent to have", on the grounds that it stops him coasting in front of a crowd, and said he would not sell the rights to the Alice Cooper character, drawing a deliberate contrast with how KISS have handled theirs.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The Alice's Attic production was introduced on the autumn 2025 co-headline run with Judas Priest and has been in service ever since. The spring 2026 leg opened at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio on 14 April, after a warm-up at Coopstock; summer went to Europe with the Hollywood Vampires, his band with Joe Perry and Johnny Depp.

The current North American leg began with festival appearances — Louder Than Life in Louisville on 17 September, then West Springfield, Massachusetts and Ottawa — before headline shows started at the OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls on 22 September. Twenty-one headline dates run from 27 October to 21 November, opening in Clearwater, Florida and closing in Reno, Nevada, having gone through Pennsylvania, Illinois, California and Arizona on the way. Those tickets went on general sale on 18 July 2026.

The band has one change. Nita Strauss is on maternity leave, and the Newcastle guitarist Anna Cara is covering, picked with Strauss's endorsement and making her live debut at Cooper's April run of "Welcome To Our Nightmare" shows in Las Vegas. "Anna Cara is a beautiful dynamic shredder in the vein of Nita but with a style of her own," Cooper said of the appointment; Cara's own account was that she had watched his shows on YouTube at fourteen and hoped for exactly this. She plays alongside Ryan Roxie and Tommy Henriksen on guitars, Chuck Garric on bass and Glen Sobel on drums. A separate recent piece of recorded work is "Moving Mountains", written with the country singer Cody Jinks and Bob Ezrin and serviced to both rock and Christian contemporary radio.