Alice Cooper’s exhortation to carry out every kid’s dream and blow school to pieces helped take School’s Out to No.1 in the summer holidays of 1972.
This song just electrified me.The thrill of Glen Buxton’s massive guitar riff. The anthemic chorus. The children’s choir celebrating the start of the summer holidays. Best of all – that school bell at the end. And, when he appeared on Top of the Pops, the sight of Alice Cooper (no relation) himself – a star with a style of his own: a gothic fusion of Metal and Glam’s burgeoning penchant for fancy dress and make-up.
It says a lot about the impact of the shock value of the TOTP appearance that took Alice to Number 1 in August 1972 that I can remember everything about it as if it were yesterday – his black leather trousers, his black shirt unbuttoned to the waist, his horror-movie make-up, his silver sabre (actually it’s an épée, fencing fans) – and the way he pointed it into the camera.
I can even remember the dancing girl in the purple smock who’s into the song so much more than the usual sullen teenagers who had to be prodded by floor managers to shuffle around lethargically in the BBC studio – and the way Alice puts his arm around her at the end and pulls her hair as if she’s a puppet. They’d probably cancel him for that today.
School’s Out never fails to lift my spirits, from the moment that crunchy riff kicks in to the fantastic closing gimmick of the school bell, signalling the start of the summer holidays and the fulfilment of every schoolkid’s dream: “School’s been blown to pieces.”
I immediately bought the album of the same title: a record whose sleeve opened up like a school desk, with the LP wrapped in… and I’m not kidding… a pair of girls’ knickers.