Hollywood Vampires: UK & European Tour 2026
This summer, Hollywood Vampires returned to the road, taking their particular brand of old-school rock ’n’ roll across the UK and Europe. Alice Cooper, Joe Perry and Johnny Depp spent the summer moving through arenas and festival stages before a final run of European dates took them through Italy, Croatia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
Photos by Wanda Martin & Attila Kovacs
FOXES caught up with the Vampires in Budapest, on the penultimate night of the tour, where they took over the Papp László Budapest Sportaréna on September 8 — and where we photographed the band live.
For a group whose very existence is rooted in rock ’n’ roll mythology, there was something refreshingly uncomplicated about seeing them on stage. No attempt to reinvent rock music, no need to make it fashionable again — just a group of musicians playing the songs they love, very loudly, and clearly still having an enormous amount of fun doing it.
And they sounded genuinely great.
From the first songs, the band was tight, loud and remarkably alive, with none of the feeling of a celebrity side project simply going through the motions. Alice Cooper remains an extraordinary frontman, effortlessly commanding the stage, while Joe Perry delivered the kind of guitar playing that reminds you immediately why Aerosmith became one of the defining rock bands of their generation.
Johnny Depp, meanwhile, seemed perfectly happy being part of the band rather than its centre of attention — playing guitar, occasionally stepping up to the microphone, and sharing the stage naturally with musicians who have spent most of their lives on it.
The Hollywood Vampires have always existed somewhere between a band and a celebration of rock ’n’ roll history. Their name goes all the way back to Alice Cooper’s infamous 1970s drinking club in Los Angeles, whose circle included the likes of John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson. Decades later, Cooper resurrected the name with Perry and Depp, turning it into a band that also pays tribute to the friends and musicians they have lost along the way.
That history still runs through the live show.
The Budapest set moved between Hollywood Vampires originals and songs connected to the musicians who shaped them — The Who, The Doors, David Bowie, Johnny Thunders, AC/DC and Aerosmith among them. Rather than feeling like a conventional collection of covers, the songs became a kind of living tribute to several generations of rock ’n’ roll.
There is inevitably something bittersweet about it. So many of the people being celebrated are no longer here. But the Vampires don't approach that history with nostalgia or melancholy. They play it loud.
Perhaps that is what makes the band work. With three names of this magnitude on one stage, the whole thing could easily become an exercise in celebrity, but in Budapest it felt much closer to watching an exceptionally good, slightly unruly house band. Nobody seemed particularly concerned with proving anything.
By the time School’s Out and The Train Kept A-Rollin’ brought the night towards its end, the Hollywood Vampires had made their point rather convincingly: rock ’n’ roll may have accumulated a few more ghosts over the years, but it is very much still alive.
