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Metal Hammer
January 15, 1990

Author: Andy Bradshaw

Wembley '89

Alice is Alice is Alice is Alice. I have never seen Alice give a bad show and tonight is no exception. Complete with new band including shit hot guitarist Al Pitrelli (who worked with new Purple man Joe Lynn Turner earlier this year), the years seem not to touch his performance nor the enduring addictiveness of his songs. If you like 'Welcome To My Nightmare', it was there straight jacket, nurse and all. If you like the Desmond Child stuff like 'Bed Of Nails' or 'Poison' that was there too. The paranoid whips and chains phantasms which weave like polluted innocence from the stage, have the same compulsive repulsion as watching the best and worst in splattervision. 'No More Mr Nice Guy' leaves you wondering if there was a nice guy bit in the first place. Can you really imagine Alice Cooper loving anyone enough to give them his last Rolo? Not a chance of it matey!

A heady mixture of gore and trash merges kaleidoscope-like before the now baying hounds which were mere puppydogs earlier in the evening. Alice finishes with 'Under My Wheels', (a rare feat for a man who had only minutes earlier been decapitated), waves a Union Jack aloft, turns and vanishes into the bowels of Wembley Arena. Somehow Bon Jovi seems a bit tame by comparison!