The crowd are a week too late and a lifetime too old for trick-or-treating, but it's Hallowe'en all year round for Alice Cooper fans, dressed to scare in their tight black leathers.
Metallers have never cared much for the transience of fashion, and the shock-rocker with the panda eyes who named himself after a witch receives a hero's welcome simply for returning to the stage with the same old show he always does. It involves an open coffin, dismembered limbs and a live boa constrictor, and if it is supposed to be a joke, Cooper doesn't let on, though it's equally hard to gauge if it is supposed to be serious, especially in its more misogynistic moments.
When a sexy temptress dances towards him, he flings her back into the shadows. When she returns in a floaty pink dress, he smashes her face in, and she resurfaces black and blue. "Only women bleed," he wails, in some warped form of empathy, but in this show only women are flung to the floor like old coats. The women in the audience - who equal men in their numbers - cheer enthusiastically, treating the dark undertones as mere pantomime, knowing perhaps that Cooper is about to get guillotined himself.
The anthemic choruses of School's Out and No More Mr Nice Guy are so simple that they're timeless. Hits such as I'm 18 ("I'm a boy and I'm a man") and Lost in America ("Mom's looking for a man to be my dad") make it clear that the Detroit-born showman has always been preoccupied by ageing. Like Britney Spears, he plays with themes of adolescence. Unlike Spears, he is 57, and has been in this game for several decades - long enough for the baton to have been snatched from him by the likes of Marilyn Manson, who has taken gothic horror and slut-killing to new lows.
Cooper's advancing years don't stop him from coquettishly sliding his hand down his thigh, or expertly mincing about with a cutlass. He encores with Poison, the song that has everything: delicious lyrics about fateful lust, a chorus that ascends in increasingly exciting fifths, and a duration of three minutes.
Suddenly, the whole Alice Cooper pantomime makes glorious sense - metal is just pop music with better costumes. Then the temptress comes back on stage dressed as Paris Hilton, and Cooper strangles her chihuahua.
· At Birmingham NEC tomorrow. Box office: 0870 909 4133. Then touring.
