Holywood Vampires - Holywood Vampires, album review

Half and Half

A celebrity super-group covering rock classics is probably a certain earner, but it is risky in the artistic authenticity stakes. This album with core members Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry probably achieves six of one and half a dozen of the other.

I imagine seeing them live is quite a celebrity-watch-buzz, and inherent fun whether good or bad, and on record it is less immediately successful, though it will inevitably be how sacrosanct originals are to the listener: as with all covers, that's the first hurdle for the coverer to leap.

That being the case, mine is an inevitable compromise over just how much I like the first and am then prepared to accept the successive [and these will be forming a long queue with this list of originals].

I was disappointed with My Generation, thinking this should be a natural, and it wasn't, and I thought Whole Lotta Love couldn't possibly be a success, and it was: Cooper supplanting Page with his own harmonica solo. Spirit's I Got a Line on You is an expansive take on a great song; The Doors' Five to One/Break on Through [To the Other Side] get a fulsome take, and Itchycoo Park is 'modernised' successfully as AOR.

Hendrix's Manic Depression is depressed by the vocal, and Jeepster is cheated of its glam, again by the vocal that falttens out the melody. Schools Out/Another Brick in the Wall, however, is polished by the lead and harmonising vocals: this is a rouser.

The band-penned closer My Dead Drunk Friends is a peon to the excess that these performers will have vampirised across all their veins in their various days.