Alice Cooper speaks on his and David Bowie’s stage personas, ‘we’d compliment each other’

Alice Cooper recently sat down for an interview with Louder Sound, in which he responded to fan submitted questions.

Among the many queries from dedicated fans, he was asked, “Did you ever cross paths with your theatrical comrade, David Bowie?”

Sparing no detail, Cooper opens his response by confirming that Bowie used to come to shows when he was a mime artist back in the day, going by the name moniker, Davy Jones. Cooper says, “I remember at one of our Welcome To My Nightmare shows, he brought his band the Spiders From Mars and he was saying, ‘This is what we should be doing.’”

He continues, “But he never did it the way we did it. When we started doing theatrics and still had hit records, that opened up a huge door for Bowie, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground because you could be theatrical and commercial at the same time.”

While their stage personas might have taken different shapes and forms and gone down seemingly different paths, the common ground they shared was what Cooper refers to as an “artistic movement”. “I created Alice as a villain and Bowie created all of his characters to fit who he wanted to be, so I never really saw him as competition, I encouraged him.”

Cooper continues to say that he and Bowie talked all the time. “We’d compliment each other. There was a whole thing about Bowie and Lou Reed talking about my androgynous thing being fake and they were right, of course, it’s fake. It’s a dark vaudeville show and I play a character.”

“Lou and David knew me and knew I couldn’t be more down-the-middle American but I just happened to tap into this character and the image – I knew how to make that character scary, sexy, revolting and funny at the same time!”

Check out the all-time Alice Cooper classic, ‘Poison’.

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