Hollywood Vampires

Wembley SSE Arena

Night of the living dead.

“Here’s one for a Vampire who didn’t die – me!” declares Alice Cooper as his two co-stars, Joe Perry and Johnny Depp, crank out the intro to I’m Eighteen. It sums up the tone of this tribute to the pantheon of dead rock stars by two gnarled survivors and a wannabe.

The weight of clichés surrounding rock-star stiffs could have made the show a mawkish occasion. But Cooper had already made his attitude clear on the Hollywood Vampires’ album back in 2015 with his song My Dead Drunk Friends, and its defiant chanted chorus – ‘We drink and we fight and we fight and we puke and we puke and we fight and we drink… and we die’ – that has a vehemence on stage that isn’t on the record.

If the album had a tinge of novelty about it, the show has a loud, relentless momentum of its own, with the cadaverous Cooper stalking the stage as baton-wielding ringmaster flanked by Perry and Depp’s roaring guitars. There isn’t much interplay between them, but then there doesn’t need to be.

The number of covers in the set-list has been updated. “We just lost Malcolm,” Cooper shouts over the opening riff to The Jerk. The band embrace Ace Of Spades, obviously, and even ‘Heroes’, which is recited and sung by Depp, whose “gaunt appearance” has had the tabloids in a frenzy of fake concern. Whatever, this is not a band in which to flaunt your tan.

If that song is the audience’s cigarette lighter/mobile phone moment, then for the band it’s their ferociously inspired version of punk poet Jim Carroll’s little-known gem People Who Died.

Hugh Fielder