(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 13 September 2025 15:00, UK
There’s no greater use of Alice Cooper’s immortal anthem to the end of school term drudgery than its hilariously brilliant presence on The Simpsons.
Opening 1992’s ‘Kamp Krusty’ episode with one of the series’ most classic dream sequences, Bart Simpson and the rest of his elementary class are instructed by their Principal Skinner over the intercom to bring out their “implements of destruction”, it being the last day of school before summer. Cue one classmate whipping out a mallet from his desk, Nelson Muntz lighting the end of a flamethrower, and Bart brandishing an AK-47 in full Rambo gear, ready to honour Skinner’s strict orders: “Now, let’s trash this dump!”
Teacher’s Edition books are torched, a globe is launched out the window, and Skinner gleefully obliterates a box of permanent records. Bart nonchalantly mans a wrecking ball headed straight for the main doors, smashing into its “Springfield Elementary School” sign just as Cooper band’s Glen Buxton rolls out the final guitar attack to his defining ‘School’s Out’ scoring the introductory blast of carnage.
By ‘School’s Out’ drop in April 1972, Cooper was the leading force in US glam. No one could trounce our UK glitter heroes, but it’s forgotten how fantastic the glitzy rock explosion was Stateside, Jobriath, Zolar X, and New York Dolls all marrying trashy garage with a flamboyant sheen that stood as some of the era’s finest examples.
Cooper was the American, dolled-up shock rocker who penetrated the UK pop landscape the deepest, however, briefly sharing an even footing with Roxy Music and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust stature in Top of the Pops land. Starting life as a kooky but fairly uninspired Detroit psychedelic act, 1971’s Love It to Death shed the freak scene’s bohemianism and adopted a harder edge with sharper pop hooks. He’d found his niche. Before long, Killer would arrive eight months later to even greater acclaim in the hard rock world, and Cooper began stringing himself up on his infamous gallows most live nights.
But it was ‘School’s Out’ that flashed serious genius, ultimately standing as Cooper’s defining anthem. Having already tapped into the pangs of adolescent universalism with ‘I’m Eighteen’ two years earlier, Cooper reached even deeper into childhood to pluck out a moment every kid across the nation and around the world could relate to.
“What’s the greatest three minutes of your life?” Cooper told Mojo. “There’s two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you’re just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school, when you’re sitting there, and it’s like a slow fuse burning. I said, ‘If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it’s going to be so big.’”
He wasn’t wrong. Striking with an eureka idea that must have dumbfounded his glitter peers with a “why didn’t I think of that?” exasperation, Cooper and his band conjured a glam anthem packed with God-given riff, febrile end-of-term alarms, and Cooper’s snarling some of his most joyous lyrical anarchy yet: “Well, we got no class / And we got no principals”.
America loved it, the School’s Out album sailing to number two on the Billboard 200, but, afforded extra liberatory escapism among the classrooms of the 1970s’ fusty British school system, Cooper’s clarion call to abandon every comprehensive up and down the country “with fever” won the hearts and fantasies of a generation of kids, ‘School’s Out’ shooting straight to the top of the UK charts.
For a brief moment, Cooper and his ragtag crew gave even the very best of UK homegrown glam a run for their ‘billion dollars’.
Related Topics