Rock Theatre

Alice pushes shock rock to the guillotine – three-page feature in Music Scene, February 1, 1974.

Alice Cooper had to go further each time to maintain the shock of his performance. His act ends with his own gruesome beheading (above) - the nasty penalty for nastiness. Gary Glitter returned to the simpler Hollywood theatrics of glamour and sparkle, filling the stage with choreographed girls for the finale (top centre) and his own fantastic presence.

THE TERM 'ROCK THEATRE' is getting tossed around a lot these days, but there's nothing very new about theatricality in rock. Anyone who wants to make it in rock and roll has to be either good or weird or, better still, both. Flamboyance has been an integral part of the attraction of rock music since its earliest days.

American singer Screaming Jay Hawkins had a good voice and his version of "I Put A Spell On You" deserved the success it achieved back in the fifties, but his habit of climbing out of a coffin to sing the song did help things along a little.

Our own Dave (Screaming Lord) Sutch has rather more limited vocal abilities, but he managed to keep his career staggering along for some years by using similar if slightly more ghoulish gimmicks as a part of his stage act.

The James Brown Show (where Mr. Dynamite struts his stuff in front of a row of male dancers sashaying their way through the intricacies of the sideways pony with the disciplined precision of a team of robots) relies as much on spectacle as sound for its effect.

The 1967 psychedelic explosion helped to emphasize the theatrical possibilities of rock. The guitar smashing and smoke bomb throwing of the Who, the Move, and Hendrix may seem a little daft looking back, but at the time the effects were shattering. And who could forget the awe-inspiring spectacle of Arthur Brown, robed, painted, head ablaze, being lowered into the middle of his Crazy World by a crane? Even the lighter side of rock has had its theatrical moments, as anyone who ever saw the lunatic Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band can easily testify.

Rock music at the moment seems to be in the doldrums, and one of the ways in which current chart toppers like Gary Glitter and the Sweet have attempted to combat this lethargy is by an increased emphasis on spectacle in their stage acts. Their obsession with glitter hasn't yet affected the basic hard-rock formula of their music enough to be worth examining closely, but there are two current superstars, Alice Cooper and David Bowie, who have begun to explore the theatrical possibilities of rock in some depth.

When Frank Zappa first signed Alice Cooper for his own label, Straight Records, in 1968, it was not so much a tribute to the band's musical abilities (which in those days were a bit limited) as a recognition of the enormous stage possibilities of Cooper's obsession with the freakier and more ghoulish aspects of contemporary America.