Hollywood Vampires - 20/06/18 - Wembley Arena

The Hollywood Vampires are (de)composed of Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry plus a couple of Alice’s band members and other session types. The name and theme of the band is forty years old and commemorates the drinking club centred around Alice and Keith Moon, along with a couple of Beatles, the occasional Monkee and others of greater or lesser fame sharing a drink at the Rainbow Bar & Grill. The show is an excuse to play songs by those who fell along the wayside. The back of the t-shirt pretty much sums it up.
Janet & I got to Wembley in time to hear the last three numbers by The Damned, who I’d like to have seen more of, but meals and trains take time. Next up were The Darkness. Yes, they still Believe in a Thing Called Love, and according to the first song they played, they’re ‘never gonna stop shitting out solid gold’. Unfortunately, they have the big hit, and then everything else sounds the same but Justin Hawkins is incredibly funny and it was great fun.
Then came the main event. As the lights dimmed, Janet disappeared up the front in hopes of getting to grope Johnny Depp, or something. There was a bit of trepidation before this show. While we’re massive fans Alice Cooper, I’d made the mistake of listening to the Vampires album, which is not particularly good. They’ve come on a bit since then.
They only have a few songs that are written by/for the band, and surprisingly the ones that were attributed to Depp were very good – the one about his Dad especially. Depp bounced around the far side of the stage for most of the night; head down over his guitar, while Alice and Joe Perry did the full rock star strut. I’d never seen Perry in concert before, although I have a few Aerosmith albums. He’s an incredibly good blues player, once he was loud enough in the mix to hear, and when he got to play the blues it was straight out of the American mid-West, even if he is from Boston.
Most of the gig was comprised of covers – some more surprising than others. AC/DC’s ‘The Jack’ was excellent, while ‘Ace of Spades’ was a bit obvious for a nod to Motörhead. It must be said that as the big screen projections rotated through various rock’n’roll luminaries it was the shots of Lemmy which raised the biggest cheers. The covers also showed the strength of Alice’s voice – he delivered the Who’s ‘Baba OReilly’ (way outside his usual range) without a problem – not bad for a 70-year old. Johnny Depp, who had mumbled a few things during the evening stepped up to the microphone to sing ’Heroes’ and did an incredibly good Bowie impersonation. The only Alice Cooper song was ‘Eighteen’ and from the Aerosmith canon we were treated to ‘Sweet Emotion’, which is their finest song and is the definitive statement of Joe Perry’s guitar work. Something I didn’t know was a cover until today was ‘People Who Died’ by Jim Carroll – a horrific roll call of friends lost to drugs, violence and stupidity. It matched the premise of the band so perfectly and I assumed it was an original.
We missed the encore to catch a train, walking to the train trying to digest all that we’d seen and heard. For a bunch of guys jamming a bunch of covers it really was a spectacular night.