OK, so you know how people are always throwing around the expression that truth is stranger than fiction? Well here is a classic example.

Although his legendary stage antics were built on the suggestion of horror - beheadings, impaling, hangings etc etc - original shock rocker Alice Cooper once found himself in a truly terrifying situation opposite, of all people, late crooner Elvis Presley.

As the latter-day golf enthusiast and author reveals in a long and detailed interview with England's Mirror, in 1971 Cooper found himself in a hotel penthouse holding a gun to Presley's head... with Presley ordering him to pull the trigger.

Cooper tells Mirror: "This was when he was at the top of his game. I'd always been a fan as a kid so I jumped at the chance to go upstairs [at the Las Vegas hotel where they both were staying] and meet him. They frisked me for guns at the door. I don't know why they bothered – when I got inside the place was full of guns.

"Elvis took took me into the kitchen, opened a drawer, pulled out a loaded pistol and told me to put it to his head. I didn't know what to do. I was expecting one of his security men to come in any second, see me holding a gun and shoot me dead."

"But a little voice in my ear was telling me, 'Go on - this is history. You'll always be the guy who killed Elvis.' In my other ear was a voice saying, 'You can't kill Elvis. Wound him and you'll only get a few years.' A fraction of a second later Elvis did a flying kick on the gun, tripped me and pinned me by my neck, announcing: 'That's how you stop a man with a gun.'"

Yowzers! Cooper also recalls for Mirror heavy drinking sessions with his club known as the Hollywood Vampires, including Doors frontman Jim Morrison, ex-Beatles John Lennon and Ringo Star alongside Who drummer Keith Moon, in the legendary Rainbow Bar and Grill in L.A.

He says: "Those guys could drink. When you party with Keith Moon your body really knows about it. One time he stayed with me for a week and I literally wasn't allowed to sleep for seven days. It got to the stage where I'd hear he was in town and I'd hide somewhere because I couldn't face another bender."

Moon died in 1978 as he was trying to fight off his alcoholism, at which time Cooper was locked in a sanitarium as he attempted to deal with his own demons.

"I watched as my friends, one at a time, died as a result of the rock'n'roll situation," says Cooper. "I realized I had to stop or I'd die. People like me are still working now because we stopped just in time."