Legend is a title that’s bandied about far too liberally these days, and while there are a handful who actually deserve it – there are very few in the hard rock world who are household names that even your grandparents would know. When Vincent Damon Furnier changed his name to Alice Cooper and set out to enrage parents and warp the imagination of the youth of America, little did he realise that he would still be doing it thirty-five years later. While Alice Cooper the happily married family man is enjoying life and playing golf with Kenny G, his alter-ego is hamming it up in the UK as a media personality – be it appearing on comedy programmes and awards ceremonies, or eating gammon with Ronnie Corbett until their eyes bulge.

Unlike a lot of other rock media personalities, Alice also still makes new albums quite regularly, and ‘Dirty Diamonds’ is not only his 24th studio album overall, it’s his 4th CD of the new millennium. Following on from ‘The Eyes Of Alice Cooper’ it continues his back to basics approach, although in producers Steve Lindsay and Rick Boston he’s strangely moved away from noted rock producers.

“These were two guys that I knew who were real music people,” he explains. “I always try to surround myself with guys who are song writers – not necessarily producers or guys who are technical geniuses – I did all that when I worked with David Foster, Roy Thomas Baker and Bob Ezrin and so on – those are the technical geniuses. They were also song guys, but Steve Lindsay worked with all the best song writers in L.A. – and I actually got together with him as a lyricist because he needed songs written for movies and stuff like that. So I said that if I could do that on my off time – that’d be fun to do – and then when I started paying attention to what he was talking about, I told him what I wanted to do with ‘Dirty Diamonds’ and he said “Let me take a shot at producing a couple of songs”. We got in there and started working and it just really all fell into place. Then one of his best buddies was Rick Boston – and I also like to surround myself with people I like, and Rick was this really excitable engineer who was also a great guitar player and a pretty good song writer – and when you get people who are excited about music, you always get good stuff. That’s what the fun of this whole thing was – everybody wanted to write good songs. So we did thirteen or fourteen songs – no fillers – every song was going to be a hit – that’s what we did, and that’s what we got. If you were going to ask me to pick a single on this, I could pick any song on this album and it would have the potential for being a single.”

In another break from tradition, the album was recorded as quickly as possible. “In the good old days back in the 70’s when we were doing ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Love It To Death’, it was the fad to spend five months in the studio and four million dollars on each album,” laughs Alice. “It was “Let’s see who can spend the most money” - and then everybody got smart, it’s so much easier now – especially with pro-tools – we can go into a house and record a song as a demo and it sounds as good as any studio recording – so why go through the whole recording thing in a studio? I would much rather do the whole thing in a more relaxed atmosphere. We went to Rick Boston’s house, took the whole house apart and put drums in this room, guitars in that room, and the band just played together – I didn’t want to layer it and do drums, then bass, then guitar, then piano – I wanted the band to always play together as a band – and that’s what we did. It only took us thirteen or fourteen days to make this album.”

The results are certainly varied, but how will Alice’s fans react to the slices of Rap, Country & Western, and Blues, along with his retro Rock’n’Roll? “Well, I think it was very eclectic,” he says jokingly, “certainly the idea of the country thing couldn’t have been more of a joke – ‘The Ballad Of Jesse Jane’ is certainly Alice’s sense of humour. A cross-dressing truck driver, y’know, is always up Alice’s alley, and that play on words is an Alice trademark. There’s always at least one comedy song on an Alice Cooper album – ‘The Eyes Of Alice Cooper’ had ‘The Song That Didn’t Rhyme’. Songs like those will get more attention than any of the rockers if they’re novelty songs,” he states.

“On the other hand,‘Stand’ was something that wasn’t meant to be included on this album, I wrote it for the Greek Olympics,” says Alice surprisingly. “They wanted something that was a very positive kind of thing for the Olympics soundtrack – they did a series of duets – but when I wrote the song it was never really intended to be on an Alice Cooper album. In the end someone said “Wouldn’t it be great to get a real street rap guy, a Gangsta rapper, to do his thing on ‘Stand’ - so we got Xzibit! I have no problems with that – to me, music is music – and if I’d done five rap songs I could see how my audience might be a little irritated, but when you do a one-off like this and it works, then you can do that. Especially if you have lots of other songs like ‘Sunset Babies (All Got Rabies)’ and ‘Woman Of Mass Distraction’ and ‘Dirty Diamonds’...those are pure Alice.”

I ask if ‘The Saga Of Jesse Jane’ was inspired by someone he knew. “No, it was totally fictional,” he laughs. “Maybe it was my tribute to Johnny Cash, I tried to do an imitation of Johnny Cash on that – and the punchline on it was so good, when the guy’s in prison and says...”Someday I’m going to make somebody in here a hell of a wife”. It was just a very funny comedy song. I wanted to release it to country & western stations and just not tell anybody who it is, just release it under the name of Buck Laraydo or somebody like that, and never tell anybody it’s Alice Cooper.”

‘Perfect’ is another slightly out of the ordinary offering from Alice. “I did my best John Lennon on that,” he concedes. “When I got to that chorus and I thought about how many times - when I’ve played 28 albums worth of stuff - every time I talk to a song writer - and I don’t care who it is, from Twisted Sister to Ozzy Osbourne - everybody says “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to write one Beatles song?” ‘Perfect’ is a real early Beatles song, it was just one of those songs that as soon as it started developing I said we’ve just got to do the Lennon & McCartney thing all the way. It’s a little tribute to them and I definitely used my best John Lennon on that, and I think when McCartney hears it he’ll get it, he’ll understand that’s a tip of the hat to them.”

After 35 years in the business it must be hard to find new things to write about? Alice disagrees, “Y’know, people are always the best subjects because people are always the most ironic, the most hypocritical, the most humorous, the most sexual, so as long as there are people walking on this planet there’ll always be great songs. Other people write about politics – I hate politics, I never write about that – ‘Elected’ was as close to politics as I get. I always find that the adventure of the boy/girl relationship, the adventure of the American way, there are just millions of things to write about. Sometimes I just sit and watch people and go “There’s a good song right there!” A song like ‘Six Hours’ – what a great idea – they only have six hours to have this entire love affair – how would I treat that? So I said, “Let’s just do it all out blues, but make it like a modern blues song” I said to my guitarists, “Go ahead and play some blues riffs, not like a Paul Butterfield blues song but a very modernistic thing”, but the voice and the lyrics make it an Alice Cooper song.”

It’s Cooper’s work ethic that’s helped him avoid being seen as purely a nostalgia act, he never goes longer than a couple of years without making a new record. “Yeah, I never really depend on the past,” says the singer, “I know in my position that I’ve had enough hits, and enough platinum albums where I could just go ahead and do the whole cruise ship thing, and play nothing but the hits. It would do fine, it would sell out and everything, and I do all the hits in the show, but every single time I do them – I’m in rehearsal now at the Coliseum in Phoenix with all this lighting and special effects and stuff – and I’m going “How do I do ‘I’m Eighteen’ this time?” to make it just a little bit different. How do I do ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ and make it something that theatrically will be a little bit more interesting to watch? With ‘Poison’ or ‘School’s Out’ for instance, you’re not going to change the song itself so how do you present it in a different way? That’s really where ‘Dirty Diamonds’ comes in, it’ll be the Dirty Diamonds Review, it’ll invent itself as we’re in rehearsal.” Although with Alice’s image itself it seems he learned his lesson in the ‘Special Forces’ days “It’ll be the classic Alice image,” he confirms. “Rock will never change but there are millions of different ways to present those songs and make them visually more interesting. I will just not go up there and look at my shoes with no background and nothing going on, and just sing my songs. That’s no fun, I want at least every song to have it’s own personality and a little piece of theatrics in it. There are always times when you do things that sound great in rehearsal, but when you do them in front of an audience it doesn’t work. Then there are other times when some ridiculous accident happens and you go “We’ll keep that, whatever that was - it was great” Accidents are usually just those things when you trip over something at exactly the right time, or you make a mistake in the lyrics and the audience react, and you go “I wonder if they would do that in every city?” You let the show evolve from what you’d originally written – if you saw the show in Australia next week, and again in London in November – twenty-five things would have changed. I let the show breathe and not so encased in lead that it can’t move.”

He’s also been on British TV screens a lot recently, having just spent a month in London. “I had a great time on ‘The Kumars’,” he laughs. “When you get on that show, at the end of it you go “What just happened?” The trick is the fact that you’re unscripted but they aren’t, and when you’re working in comedy it’s all timing, so if he asks me a question – and it’s a totally loaded question – I know that the old Grandma is going to pipe in with something. So I have to give her that extra two beats to jump in and get the punchline out, or if I don’t hear anything then it’s my line and I just have to invent something. It really is odd because you don’t rehearse it – they’re rehearsed but you’re not, it’s an interesting way to do it.”

Alice is also famous for never resorting to bad language, which makes a lot of the TV appearances he does a lot less stressful for the producers – not to mention the fact that a lot of TV people are of an age where Alice means something from their youth. “Alice belongs to the British public as much as he does to the American public,” he states, “I probably do more TV work in England than I do in America. I do more Awards Ceremonies and stuff, and I think when they bring Alice out it takes people back to a certain point in their life, the same way as if Elton came up there, or Rod Stewart, or David Bowie – we all kind of represent everybody’s youth. And on top of that, if you can still go up there at this time of our lives and still be funny, and still be viable with your music and have brand new albums coming out, people want you around – they don’t want you to go or fade away. I think they would rather see newer bands fade away – they want the old standards to always be there because they have a link to them at some point in their life.”

It’s also true that a lot of the sarcasm and irony of early Alice Cooper material was recognised first by the British because of their different sense of humour, so Alice is better understood to be just about entertainment and not meant to be taken seriously – something Americans don’t always understand. “Oh yeah, I think people in the UK got the joke way before people in America did, they got the tongue-in-cheek idea that Alice was more Vincent Price or Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, than Vlad the Impaler. Okay, scare the audience – but there’s a twinkle in your eye – there’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek-ness that everybody’s supposed to get.”

A lot of later bands were influenced by Alice, especially visually and from a theatrical angle – and even today the likes of Slipknot, Kiss, GWAR and Marilyn Manson owe him a debt of gratitude – therefore it’s also ironic that Alice’s next jaunt across the UK will be a joint tour with Twisted Sister, another Cooper influenced band. “It’s very funny because I’ve known Dee Snider for a long time,” says Cooper. “I didn’t have anything to do with putting the package together, but they said “How do you feel about touring with Twisted Sister?” and I said, “I think that’ll be a fun show”. We’re doing the States with Cheap Trick and that’s another interesting package. I call them America’s house band because, who doesn’t like Cheap Trick in America, y’know? They had so many hits in America that are just standards, and they work constantly. Everybody in America loves Cheap Trick, and they’re amazingly great musicians.”

Talking of musicians, there’s been another change in the touring line-up, guitarist Ryan Roxie, bassist Chuck Garric, and drummer Tommy Clufetos are now joined by ex-Brother Cane, Witness, and more recently Damn Yankees guitarist, Damon Johnson. “Damon is a big, tall Southern boy, has this real rockstar look, and he’s very experienced,” says Cooper. “Ryan Roxie has been with me for quite a while, and with Eric Dover – I pretty much forced Eric Dover to go finish his album – he’s been working on it for five years now – I said “Don’t pull an Axl Rose on us here, go finish your album – you don’t need to be touring with us right now, you need to be working on your own career.” I kinda look out for these guys as my sons and I said “You need to spend time on your album, it needs to come out – you’ve been working on it too long and you’re not getting any younger, so get out there and do it.” So I said “If I were going to replace you with somebody, who would I replace you with?” and he said, “There’s a guy in Atlanta that I grew up with named Damon Johnson,” and I said “I know him, the guy from Brother Cane?” and he said “Yeah, he plays just like me, we have the same riffs.” So the guy walked in and just fit right in like the last finger in the glove, he’s perfect for what we’re doing.”

Cooper has worked with a veritable who’s who of talent over the years, but he still has a few heroes of his own that he’d like to work with. “There are many – I’d still love to co-write a Burt Bacharach song,” he confides surprisingly. “I’d love to work with him at least once on a movie track or something. Of course I’d love to work with Paul McCartney – in America at least he’s seen as the most prolific writer of great songs ever, but also you can’t really go into writing songs with someone like Bob Dylan and expect to write the lyrics. I couldn’t go “Let’s write a song and I’ll do the lyrics,” that would be pretty presumptuous of me,” he laughs, “but I would really like to do something with Bob Dylan.”

He’s also been putting the feelers out to fulfil his ambition to be a James Bond baddie, but his pleas are falling on deaf ears. “No, I’m still waiting,” he says solemnly. “The older I get the more of a villain I become – but I’ll be waiting – twenty years from now, if that’s how long it has to be then that’s okay.”

As well as being a singer, performer, and restaurant owner, his other great love is, of course, Golf, a subject he’s just as passionate about as music, in fact there’s now a big network of musicians who play on their days off. “I just got revenge last week,” enthuses Alice, “I just beat my nemesis Kenny G – he’s a one handicap and I’m a four, so that finished him off. I’ll tell you who’s a really good player...Adrian Young, the drummer from No Doubt – he’s pretty good but hopefully he’ll be my next victim. Also Dweezil Zappa knows how to swing a club. He hasn’t beaten me yet but he’s getting closer.”