LaRM day 90 (Alice Cooper-Cosmetique)

So after a few days rest and relaxation it's back to work and back to Alice Cooper. The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper box set (1999) covers Vincent Furnier's entire career to that date. The first of the 4 CDs is great, covering the first seven years and the Beatles rip-offs that he started his career with (with his band The Spiders) are really entertaining. The stuff on this first CD charts the entire development from cutesy pop-rock outfit to shock-rock lite-metal and is therefore far and away the most interesting. There are some nice demo versions and good selections from Pretties For You, Easy Action, Love It to Death, Killer and School's Out. The second CD has some fantastic stuff on it too, starting with some good choices from Billion Dollar Babies, interesting demos, and odds and ends (the songs he recorded as Flash Fearless Versus the Zorg Women are superbly rubbish), but it all starts going pear-shaped towards the end, with reminders of how lacklustre Welcome to My Nightmare and Goes to Hell are. And from here on in it's increasingly disastrous and there's very little to the third and fourth CDs to write home about. There are some ghastly collaborations (Rob Zombie - blurgh, and utterly inexplicably the Bee Gees) and terrible album tracks from Raise Your Fist and Yell, Hey Stoopid and Trash, but the fact that most of his albums after Goes to Hell only get one or two tracks shows that everybody knows these records are pretty bad. There are some interesting rarities amongst all this stuff but they aren't actually any good and by the time Vincent had started being essentially a cabaret act the Alice Cooper records clearly became a poor second in terms of priorities.

That took a few hours so only time for a couple more, starting with Julian Cope's second solo album Fried (1984). Fried is a legendarily messy and unpredictable record, and one which makes it's unconventionality clear from the cover photo onwards - Cope is shown playing with a toy truck on a slag heap wearing a giant turtle's shell instead of any clothes. Musically Fried is a mix of the kind of clear pop sensibility he showed off in the Teardrop Explodes and a light-headed psychedelia. There are the obligatory backwards guitar solos and unexpected time changes, but the sense of melody is paramount throughout and despite Cope's own clear efforts to sabotage the pop song elements of the record, it's all shot through with great melodies. It's a lo-fi, low-key affair, especially when compared to the ill-judged grandstanding of the records he released either side of it (As the NME described them the vainglorious World Shut Your Mouth and Saint Julian), and it has a much more endearing feel to it than any of his other albums in my view. This is helped a lot by Kate St. John's charming woodwind work which gives the whole thing a delicately pastoral feel which suits Cope's style surprisingly well. I've always found Cope difficult to like on the whole but Fried is a curiously lovely record and one that I always enjoy a lot.

Next should have been the Boxtruck 7" (1993) by Coral but there's no tracking it down on the internet as far as I can tell, so it's on to the debut album by one-time Hoxton hipsters Cosmetique. I Was Born in a Disco Fun Pub (2002) is simultaneously an infuriating demonstration of the casual arrogance of hipsters and a great piece of super lo-fi electronica. These are dismal pop songs which have an air of sticky pub carpets and smelly "cool" dives and are perfect evocations of the kind of pretence that the Shoreditch kids were desperate to affect back in the day. All of which means that it should be a truly godawful album. But it really isn't. The songs are really good and the irony is so very arch that it's genuinely engaging rather than smug. The affected vocal indifference and loose musical delivery (it's all cheap drum machines, broken keyboards and home 4-tracked acoustic guitars and bass) are all part of its charm and there's something indefinably on about the whole thing.