Who invented shock rock

Early recordings were darkly psychedelic with influences drawn from Pink Floyd and Jim Morrison, who Alice Cooper idolised. The stage was set. Heavy work schedules and the pressures of success took their toll with Cooper, in particular, being treated for well-documented substance and alcohol abuse in the s.

Suitably rehabilitated we pick him up and welcome him on board for Constrictor , a comeback album that followed three years of seclusion. His second arrival in our fold coincides with Brutal Planet one of those discs that may have passed you by but is actually thoroughly commended for re-discovery today.

Notable for a different sonic slant — more industrial metal than straight rock — Cooper matched grandstanding tunes to well-wrought themes on domestic violence, sexual prejudice and social disorder. If anything Dragontown is even more darkly absorbing as it metes out a recorded battle between God and Satan. But even when things go wrong, Coop always lives to tell the tale.

Things would never be the same again. Still with us? More importantly, beyond all the mystery and drama, behind the masks and the robes, lies a knack for earworm melodies and heavy pop that feels as eerie as it does catchy.

Marilyn Manson The Antichrist Superstar. The God Of Fuck. It culminated with the bulk of the blame for the Columbine massacre at the end of the decade, when two senior students carried out executions in their own high school. Oderus Urungus When Dave Brockie died after a heroin overdose in , heavy metal lost one of its most warped minds and conceptual visionaries.

The man portrayed Oderus Urungus — the humanoid barbarian son of a petri-dish and supercomputer with a penchant for intergalactic warfare — and would also devise equally ludicrous backstories stretching back some 50 billion years for an entire cast of freaky characters.

Here we look back at where it all came from and what controversial heights it eventually went to. He tended to arrive onstage in a coffin and would emerge from it with two horns poking out of his nostrils. Meanwhile, he considered a skull called Henry — which he would regularly set fire to — one of his best friends. The original god of hellfire, before The Prodigy borrowed his line, Arthur Brown and his crazy world were a defining influence on shock rock to come.

Operatic, theatrical and prone to arriving on stage in a flaming helmet, voodoo makeup and cape, his acid-inspired, pyromaniac world was one of manic psychedelia. What is often lost amid the notorious Alice Cooper stage antics is quite how brilliant his songs are. Still, it made Cooper — or Vincent Furnier, to give him his real name — such a king of shock rock that no-one has yet knocked him from his throne.