The Quietus recently conducted an interview with legendary rocker Alice Cooper. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Quietus: For a period of time you drank heavily. Would it be fair to assume that the character of Alice Cooper swallowed you up?

Cooper: I was probably the most efficient alcoholic around — I never missed a show, I never slurred a word. When I was doing acting, I never missed my lines. And then I started realising why that was — when I went to the hospital the doctor would sit there and question me about my drinking and he would ask, "How much did you drink on stage?" and I'd go, "I don't drink on stage." And he said, "What?" I went "When I'm working I never drink." "So when you're up there for a few hours you never drink?" I said "No." "With your acting do you drink when you're on film?" I said "No." So he said, "Alice isn't the alcoholic, you are. You're blaming everything on Alice and Alice doesn't even drink." I had to sit there for a minute and go, "You're absolutely right." When I was actually working, I never did drink. So it's really funny that I pushed the blame on Alice Cooper when Alice wasn't the problem at all. I was the problem.

The Quietus: Why did the original Alice Cooper band break up in the mid-'70s? After all, you were on a high, popularity-wise.

Cooper: The reason why we broke up was because I wanted to keep doing theatrics and they wanted to take all that down and not really work on theatrics anymore. They just wanted to be a band. I said, "People are eating out of our hands just now, we won that war. The war that we couldn't win we won and now you wanna go back?!" I said, "I want a ticket now to a place that nobody's ever seen before." I was already thinking of "Welcome To My Nightmare" and they were going, "Nah, we wanna go back in the other direction." That was really the reason the band broke up. But we never broke up with any sort of negative feelings. There was never a time when Dennis, Neil and I were yelling at each other.

The Quietus: Please tell me about your new album that's due to come out in 2010. What can we expect?

Cooper: I'm not gonna be very specific with you but I'm gonna say this — I'm creating this new character that Alice will be playing. Also a villain. At the same time it's going to be a character that's going to allow Alice to stretch out musically a little bit more. He's a bit of a phantom but what he does allows the music to do a lot of things. It'll be pretty interesting.

Read the entire interview from The Quietus.