Alice Cooper + Arthur Brown @ Brighton Dome 14th October 2026
Alice Cooper graces Brighton Dome as part of his spoken word tour promoting his latest memoir, Devil on My Shoulder. Alice has published two previous memoirs: Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper and Golf Monster: A Rock ’n’ Roller’s 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict. These books were published in 1976 and 2007 respectively. Bearing in mind that the first book is fifty years old, and the second is all about golf, there is clearly plenty of material to justify a third volume. Alice has done a lot of living in the past fifty years.
Before the show starts, we are treated to a slideshow of photos from various stages of Alice’s life. It is a little startling to see what a clean-cut young man Vincent Furnier was, particularly in comparison to the ‘rock monster’ that he became, at least in some more conservative eyes.
Alice’s co-author, Daniel Richler, introduces first Arthur Brown and then Alice. Alice is in full ‘Alice Cooper’ garb, incidentally. Arthur is here as, in parallel with Alice, he introduced theatre to rock audiences via hit records, although he had his first hit a few years before Alice. Both were initially unaware of each other, and when they did see each other, they both had the same reaction: “He’s wearing my make-up!” Inevitably, they became good friends.
After Arthur leaves the stage, the show takes on an interview format. We are taken through several stages of the development of the Alice Cooper character. We learn that when Alice was in his first band, The Earwigs, they played a venue where there was a guillotine onstage. Whilst they didn’t use it in their show, Alice stowed away the idea of doing so for future use.
As an art student, Alice was very much influenced by Salvador Dalí, and was astonished when the great artist turned up at his graduation show. Dalí created a hologram entitled First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain in 1973. It has since gone missing, and Alice is on a mission to locate it.
Accusations of Satanism have been levelled at Alice in the past, but he emphasises that there has never been anything satanic in his show. He has certainly aimed to scare people, but there has never been any hint of devil worship. Alice comes from a long line of Christians and is a practising Christian himself. His father and grandfather were both pastors.
When Alice was a child, his grandfather told him about an exorcism that he had performed on an eight-year-old boy. When he arrived, the boy said, in a very deep voice, “I know who you are”, to which Alice’s grandfather replied, “You’ll know why I’m here then.” Thus, when the film The Exorcist was released in 1973, Alice found it particularly frightening, as he believed it was based upon things that could really happen.
Alice was known for his overindulgence, but he was very particular about never taking LSD. The reason being that his imagination was already sufficiently ‘weird’ without it being chemically enhanced. The title of the book, incidentally, refers to Alice Cooper being the devil on Vincent Furnier’s shoulder. That particular devil has been drink and drug-free for some decades.
There have been many myths that have grown around Alice Cooper over the past five-plus decades, and Alice tries to clarify some of them, both tonight and in the book.
The ‘chicken killing’ incident is probably one of the most infamous. This happened quite early in the Alice Cooper band’s career and gained them a great deal of mostly negative press coverage worldwide. It’s a great example of no press being bad press; however, as it raised global awareness of the band.
It happened at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert in 1969. It was reported that somebody threw a live chicken onstage, which Alice killed and then threw back into the crowd. What actually happened, according to Alice, was that somebody did indeed throw the chicken onstage. Alice threw it into the air, thinking it would fly. Unfortunately, it didn’t fly and fell into the first few rows of the audience, where it met a rather grisly end.
A few days later, Alice says he bumped into Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. He killed millions of chickens for a living, yet the press left him alone. Documentary evidence seems to point to this meeting actually taking place in 1974, however. Still, never let a timeline get in the way of a good story!
The first half of the show ends with Alice reading a passage from the book about the song Under My Wheels.
After a twenty-minute interval, Alice and Daniel return. Alice reads another passage from the book about the band’s transition from The Spiders to the Alice Cooper band, and also their friendship with the early Pink Floyd. Syd Barrett, in particular, may have been a bad influence on them. It would appear that guitarist Glen Buxton was partial to some chemical amusement and could listen to Syd Barrett’s guitar “for hours”.
Alice (or Vincent – I’m never entirely sure which one is speaking, possibly an amalgam of both!) is joined by his wife Sheryl and his daughter Calico. This is a particularly nice part of the show, as being joined by his family makes Alice seem oddly normal.
Sheryl is 68 years old but looks much younger. She and Alice have been married for fifty years, which is a monument to stability that nobody would have predicted in 1976! Calico is a stand-up comic and is utterly hilarious. She tells us how many of her friends were too scared to come for sleepovers!
Alice and Sheryl have a charity called the Solid Rock Foundation, which provides artistic and vocational training for teenagers. The charity now has several centres across the US. Its aim is to take teenagers off the streets by giving them something more rewarding to do, such as playing music, for example.
On purchasing their tickets, audience members were invited to submit questions for Alice to answer, on the understanding that there wouldn’t be time to answer them all. To ensure fairness, the questions are drawn from Alice’s top hat. One gentleman, however, shouts his question out. Alice deals with this with good grace and politely answers him.
By and large, the questions asked aren’t particularly searching. We learn that very few of his songs are personal, but many are written from the Alice character’s perspective. Unsurprisingly, the book has quite a few Keith Moon stories.
At the age of twelve, Alice survived a burst appendix, much to the surprise of the doctors treating him. Indeed, one of the doctors described the speed of his recovery as “unprecedented”.
All good things come to an end, and so it is with tonight’s show. Alice has been a very entertaining raconteur, and I feel that during our time with him, the audience has got to know him a little. He comes across as a really nice guy.
I might even consider buying his book.
WORDS: MARK KELLY PHOTOS: CRIS WATKINS
More Alice Cooper live on Punkinfocus: Hollywood Vampires and the World’s Second-Best Bar Band (August 2026) · A Night to Remember at The O2 with Judas Priest and Alice Cooper (July 2025)
