Alice Cooper is considered the father of Shock Rock music, that brought theatrical elements to the music shows, in this case presenting shocking scenes to the audience. In an interview with NME, the musician that is currently promoting his new album “Detroit Stories” recalled that David Bowie used to watch his shows as an inspiration.
Alice Cooper recalls David Bowie seeing his shows:
“From what I understand, he used to bring the Spiders From Mars to our shows and say, ‘That’s what we should be doing.’ And I never had a problem with it. David and I got along really well. For one thing, he was going to do something theatrically that was entirely different from Alice Cooper. His music, his early music, I really liked his early, early music.”
“I kind of fell away when he got into dance and got into Studio 54 kind of music. But you know, the early stuff was really right up our alley. It was kind of stuff we went, ‘Wow, listen to Bowie’s new stuff.’
“But yeah, they all came to see us. The only guy that we were at the same time was Arthur Brown. Arthur and I had never met. I had never seen Arthur Brown with makeup on. So it was a coincidence that both of us were doing the same kind of character that was out there. When I saw him, we ended up becoming very good friends. to this day, Arthur is still a very good friend.”
As you were saying, the makeup – I guess it was the first time that we had something like that over here.
“Arthur was more influenced by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Because they both had that operatic voice, they had a range that was. Like, he could go really low or really high, and that’s something that both of those singers had.”
“But as far as we were concerned, we had never, honestly, we were kids from the Midwest, we had never heard of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and he was American. [Laughs] We had heard of The Kinks and The Yardbirds, and all the pretty things and bands like that. But we were not really interested in American blues bands.”