(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 27 January 2026 15:20, UK
Picking a favourite singer is a subjective viewpoint that varies from person to person. There’s no perfect answer, and it’s entirely down to personal preference. Alice Cooper’s favourite, however, is one of the more usual selections.
Though he might be more famous for his shock tactics on stage than his deliberations with delicately positioned vocal choices, underneath it all, Cooper is really a big softie. Sure, he likes his on-stage characters to suffer multiple deaths in the name of theatre and, frankly, if his audiences don’t pack a see-through raincoat to sit in the front row and avoid blotting their petticoats with stage blood than more fool them, but really he is just a pop music lover like the rest of us.
And, like so many rock music dignitaries of the 1970s and ’80s, the real joy and love of music came when he first heard the sweet and soulful voices of four Liverpudlians. It means his choice for favourite of all time was always likely to be the great Paul McCartney, a musician that Cooper holds responsible for the birth of his career, along with the rest of The Beatles.
Cooper’s life transformed when he first heard the ‘Fab Four’ in 1963 when they announced themselves in America with ‘She Loves You’. Before then, the singer had yet to establish a music taste of his own and exclusively listened to the songs his parents would blare in the house. While he appreciated what they introduced him to, which included Chuck Berry, The Beatles were different because they were his own discovery. He once said to NME: “The first song by The Beatles I ever heard and it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became.”
For so many rock musicians, the process of hearing the band and the world, as Ozzy Osbourne once put it, turning from black and white to technicolour, a la The Wizard of Oz, is so usual that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. But, looking at the work of McCartney and his counterparts and Cooper, it is difficult to draw too straight a line of connection. But that one tune would push Cooper towards his own stage-laden fame.
Paul McCartney performing with Wings. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Cooper later became friends with John Lennon throughout the 1970s when they were both fully-fledged members of the drinking club Hollywood Vampires. Despite his affection towards the late Beatle, when Cooper was asked to name his favourite 20 singers of all time for a Rolling Stone poll, Lennon was only placed in fifth.
However, both Lennon and McCartney were placed in his dream supergroup when he spoke to The Guardian in 2017. “Keith Moon on drums. Jeff Beck on guitar. Pete Townshend on guitar. Paul McCartney on bass. And then John Lennon on a third guitar! Lennon and McCartney singing together, that’s your whole background,” he revealed.
For Cooper, McCartney is number one, and in 2015, he had the honour of working with his musical hero in the studio. The former Beatle agreed to assist The Hollywood Vampires, Cooper’s band with Johnny Depp and Joe Perry, with their cover of Badfinger’s ‘Come And Get It’, which McCartney wrote for the group in 1969.
“Paul’s a rocker man, you know. If he wasn’t in his band, he would be in a pub somewhere playing with a bunch of guys,” Cooper later told NME about the session. “He just loves to play. You’ll look back and you’ll go ‘Jesus, that guy’s a Beatle’, he wasn’t a Beatle, he was the Beatle, you know, and wrote more songs than anybody, and never has gone back on what he believes, on what he does. You know, he’s just one of the guys. He was just one of the guys in the band. So now when I see him I go, ‘Vampire’. He goes, ‘I’m a Vampire’. But John was a Vampire. John Lennon was one of our nightly guys. He was there every night.”
On the track, Cooper had the opportunity to live out his dreams and share lead vocal duties with his favourite singer of all time. Listen to the collaboration below.
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