Johnny Depp has zero rock-star charisma
Johnny Depp has zero rock-star charisma
Rob FitzpatrickThu, August 13, 2026 at 12:05 PM UTC
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Hollywood Vampires lived up to their name at London’s 02 - Jim Dyson
The original idea for Hollywood Vampires was a good one: shock-rock legend Alice Cooper drafts in famous pals – Johnny Depp, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry (a real rock star) and Cooper’s guitarist and co-writer Tommy Henriksen – to pay tribute in song to his dead rock-star comrades. Simple, clean, understandable. Yet the reality is rotten. Vampires is a very fitting name for a variety-act victory lap where fans pay to watch superstars feed noisily on others’ entrails. In some circumstances, describing an event as a “horror show” could be entirely positive. But the supergroup’s gig at the O2 was not one of those. It was a tiresomely hammy ego fest with low points piling up like unburied corpses in a dangerously warming morgue.
Depp – whose movie career stalled following his legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard and is now mounting a big-budget comeback as Scrooge in Paramount’s Ebenezer this Christmas – is a true vision of the Hollywood undead. The problem is that while he has all the kit, he’s just not a rock star. He projects zero aura, gargling his way through the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs (accompanied by the sort of “sexy” film you might see in a mid-market ladies shoe salon), stripping away every ounce of its transgressive beauty. Later in the evening, he despoiled both The Who’s Baba O’Riley and Bowie’s Heroes – no easy feat.
Alice Cooper with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry - Jo Hale
The night started badly for the Vampires with 2019’s I Want My Now – a thudding jumble that’s almost, but not quite, a song – and went rapidly downhill. Raise The Dead went on and on, refusing to die despite showing no signs of intelligent life, while My Dead Drunk Friends was, as with all the band’s original material, excruciating.
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Cooper’s own I’m Eighteen raised a few fists and while Perry couldn’t carry a pea-sized tune in an elephant-sized bucket, the vulnerability in his voice when he sang Johnny Thunders’s 1978 junkie anthem You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory provided a rare flash of humanity.
A drum solo followed a bass solo, AI slop filled the screens and it all felt like an airless, formless ball of pointless noise. Cooper welcomed on Ronnie Wood – “the most deadly British vampire” – to lead a wedding-party trot through the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar. For a moment, when Cooper’s 1972 hit School’s Out mashed into Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, it all made sense. Hollywood Vampires have fashioned rock’s own graveyard and our job is simply to clap while they dance on the tombstones. Well, no thanks.
“That guy should stick to acting,” one punter laughed on the way out. Which one? I couldn’t help but think.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
