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Australia's Rose Tattoo are bona fide Hard Rock Gods. With songs covered by the likes of Guns'n'Roses, they've maintained their legendary status with ease and authority. In many ways, they represent the very embodiment of the traditional Aussie working class experience, with their street-level lyrical swagger melded to a blues-soaked slide-guitar driven boogie. Peers of klassik AC/DC, they formed in the late seventies and smashed onto the international (particularly UK) Metal scene a few years later.
I caught up with diminutive raw-throater Angry (better known as 'Gary' to his mum) Anderson in a London taxi en route to that night's venue, running over recent gigs the Tatts have performed...
"We did Derby Rock and Blues, which is a biker show run by The Outlaws, which was fantastic, an extremely well-run gig... three days, y'know, thirty thousand people there or something. Then we're doing this little five-hundred capacity tonight, a place called The Garage... thank Christ, it got sold out. Then we're off to Hamburg tomorrow, and on Thursday we do Wacken. And then we drive overnight, that'll be another horror story, up to Sweden. 'Schveden'.
A-ha, fabled land of the Ultravixen... plenty of talent there...
 "Heheha... yeah. They're all a bit wary of us though. They look at us the same way, y'know, you'd look at crocodiles or something... they're fascinating to look at from a distance.. and maybe you don't want to get too close to them. Yeah. Although, a couple of the other fellas have done OK, I just don't have the magnetism I think. Heheha..."
There's something crazily infectious about Angry... he's one of those guys you instantly warm to. So, you've just completed your first 'proper' studio in eighteen years... doing well?
"Apparently. Yeah, it's been out over a month, and particularly in Europe it's got absolutely rave reviews. The few interviews I've done here, they've mainly been for magazines though a couple were for radio, and you know, the radio stations have said they've played it and that they'll keep playing it coz it appeals on a real, true-to-roots rock level, which most people who're into rock music can identify with. Or even people who aren't into heavy rock... they can identify with it, y'know, a saucy tune with a good melody to it sort of thing. But in Europe, all the really heavy rock 'bibles' gave it the thumbs up. Quite amazing reviews actually, I'm really proud (laughs). I'm very proud of that... after eighteen years, you take a big chance. It could have stiffed badly. But it didn't"
I was surprised at the vigour and power of the whole thing, it just sounds so fresh and dynamic. Was it recorded live at all in the studio?
"No. Well sort of half and half. It's the way we go about things. Like the old days... if it takes any more than two weeks, it's not happening, so you should possibly just go down the pub and forget all about it. Then come back in a couple of weeks and have another go. And as usual, we came in unprepared, had to make up half the things in the studio. It was an adventure. For rock albums, for us, we've always recorded that way... gone in with most of the tunes written and a few good healthy and exciting ideas we're interested in, and y'know, see what comes of it."
Lyrically, 'Pain' treads the core Rose Tattoo ground... always the individual against the system. The ordinary guy... pride, decency, standards, morality... does this sum up where you're coming from?
"Well, y-e-ees... I come from a really working class background, there's a working class ethic there, there's a morality attached to it that I think is more 'workable' and more 'real' than the likes of imposed 'religious morality'... I don't think there's anything wrong with the spirituality, but 'dogma demands'. The things that I've been interested in more in my life have been those things that have affected me or the things that I've been deprived of, or y'know... I'd a bit of a rough upbringing as a kid, I went through dysfunction at home, sexual abuse as a kid, and y'know.. I was dysfunctional as a teenager, I found it difficult to fit in and function as a teenager and/ or a young adult, so finding myself in the company of bikers and rockers was were I was comfortable... the kind of people who didn't judge me, and I didn't judge them. And they've been the two simultaneous cultures that I've lived in and out of, and around, for most of my life".
That's just what I was going to ask you... how much of material is actually anecdotal to yourself? You've pretty much just said it's all drawn from your experiences...
"Yes, as self-indulgent as that may sound, it is. The rest of it is sort of observational. I mean, back in the early days, people used to say to me 'You're Butcher, aren't you? You're really him... you killed someone and got away with it?' I said 'No, but I knew him'. You know, Butcher was a real person, so was Eddie. I don't even know what that kid's real name was, so we just used 'Fast Eddie' as a name. So that's a document of a real event (Ed's note - he's referring to the klassik 'The Butcher and Fast Eddie' ditty). It think it was '66 it happened, and that guy, The Butcher, went on to become a very hardened criminal and had a very unfortunate life. But that's the one he chose. But yeah, if it's not from first-hand experience, it's from first-hand observation."
This is your third reformation now, isn't it?
There follows a drawn out pause... "Yeah... Well, the way we look at things, we've spent time apart but we've never actually called it off or said it was over. I mean, other people did, but then again, going back to other people's perceptions... they might not be your own. In our sense, we never actually said 'That's it, it's over'. We just said 'Oh, we're not together at the moment!' Heheha"
You're five guys, five strong individuals/ personalities... the conventional line is inevitably that all is 'hunky-dory', but there's bound to be a more complex process of give and take. How's it working out at the minute?
"Yes, I think it's working well now, better than it ever did in the early days. It was very volatile in the early days. We only had one great binding force and that was the music. I think that's what makes great bands. You bring different ingredients to the pot and stir them all in. If you'd laid them out on the table you might've thought 'Fuck, that's not going to work'... but put 'em all together and it tastes fabulous. I think that's the thing... but we don't have all the interference and the distractions of rampantly out-of-control abuses either. Y'know, we're not sort of five staggering drunkards."
Though that was the klassik Tatts reputation, wasn't it? Apparently, live shows were legendary, chaos, fights, injuries... and that was just on the stage...
"Yehehah... right!"
You read the stories now... I mean, I'm too young to have seen ye, even if you had played Ireland!
"Well, I'm glad that's over, I mean, I'm glad that no-one expects us to do that anymore... it belonged to an era, to a set of circumstances conducive to that sort of thing at the time. Twenty years later, y'got to be kidding... if we did that sort of thing for to long, we'd all be dead."
Aye, it'd be ridiculous if you tried to play-act it...
"That'd be ridiculous. Ha, that'd be absolutely ridiculous."
Time to dispel or confirm an urban myth... I believe there's still an album that's never seen the light of day... true?
"Yeah, it is true, it's um... we had to part ways with a couple of players in the band, because their excesses get on top of them and detracted from their playing, so what we did was we went to being a four-piece band, vocals, bass, drums, and guitar. There was Pete and Digger, and we got a legendary rock player in Australia, a guy called Lobby Loyde, he came in and played bass. And he's a great guitar player of great legend in Australia, one of the greatest rock players I think has ever existed, a real non-conformist and a man who went his own way and suffered for it, y'know, coz he couldn't go with a major label or give over control of his band or music. And he was, y'know, one of the first Heavy Metal/ rock players in the world. Coz he lived in Australia, no one ever heard of him, but he came in and played bass and the playing turned into an incredible, different thing. We got very experimental and went through a wonderful orchestrative-type period. We wrote a bunch songs, the album was called 'Scarred' which, when you look back on it now, was obviously the prologue or prelude to 'Scarred for Life'. It was a really, really interesting collection of songs, but it was quite an intense and dark album."
Angry, you pretty much joined Rose Tattoo at the start, aye?
"I was the second only consideration for a singer. I quickly got rid of the other guy" (laughs)
Ah, he met his end down a dark alleyway one night?
"Hehaheh. Nah, he was hopeless anyway."
Guess at the time you were seen as the equivalent of AC/DC... both from Australia, both came over to Britain to 'make it big', and then there was also the Vanda-Young connection and so on. Did you ever get the feeling that you were doomed to simply live in AC/DC's shadow?
Angry's very stoical, reflective, and thoughtful in his replies... an element of genuine consideration to his answers instead of off-the-cuff 'here's something I prepared earlier'...
"I'll agree that I think a lot of people saw it that way, and I think that unfortunately for the industry that we're all part of, sometimes other people's perceptions can influence, or even in some cases dictate, your destiny. I think that in the mid-eighties when the band started to implode and explode at the same time, we were kind of like suffering from other people's perceptions or other people's views to the point that it was very difficult to relocate. The question you've just asked, I think that's true, but certainly not ever in the minds of the people in the band, and, I would venture to say, even though I've had no social contact with any of those guys (ie AC/DC - Ed) in many years, I don't think they'd ever see it that way either. We were just two very, very identifiable bands, and I think the similarities are to do with the non-physical things... I think that there's a vague similarity in the physical application of playing, but that's very vague, I mean we're pretty much a swing/ boogie-based blues band..."
Regrettably, the taxi chooses this moment to arrive at the venue at this point... where's a traffic snarl-up when you need one, eh? And I didn't even mention 'Suddenly'. Cheers!
Interview and words by Spandex Oo-er.
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