Angry Anderson

Mon 18th Apr, 2011 in Features

Angry Anderson. You might not think that ‘lovely bloke’ would be the best adjective to describe someone so named, but by now most of Australia knows Angry better for his charity work than as the ringleader of those bad boys of rock and roll, Rose Tattoo. While his on-stage persona is larger than life, when you catch him in a reflective moment with a cup of tea (his new addiction) on a Tuesday morning, a lovely bloke he certainly is – quietly spoken, thoughtful, funny, and certainly not lacking in a story or two to tell. Kids, he’s your rock n’ roll uncle.

The Tatts are touring Australia this month with ZZ Top. The bearded Texans are the veterans of this lineup, with 42 years under their belts compared to the Tatt’s measly 35 years, so that’s the point where this conversation begins.

Compared to the guys in ZZ Top, you’re just a young whipper snapper.
Pretty much! The first time we toured with ‘The Top’ was through Europe and they had just released an album after a few years off, as we had. That was in the early `80s. The story goes they were given a bunch of albums and photographs of bands that were happening at the time – we were in those days considered to be quite a unique looking and sounding band. They were looking for an act to take the middle slot that they could see was going to add to the bill.

Luckily they picked us, and we enjoyed the delights of discovering, if you like, the excesses that touring on that scale had to offer. So they were very much in a mentoring role. Then a year or two later we toured America extensively with them, and because of our successful tour through Europe and possibly the fact that we’d become firm and fast pals, they were only too happy to have us back. In America the mentoring role with the young whipper-snappers took on a very paternal attitude – they were on their home turf, they were very much on a high at that time and they showed us the… uh, let me put it this way, delicately as I might: they showed us the sights and sounds and sensations that touring in America had to offer. We were like the country bumpkin cousins from way down under.

Rumours abound that you’re intending to retire Rose Tattoo after this 35th year; is that true?
When you say ‘retire’ there’s almost a finality to that. I mean, it would be silly in this day and age to turn around and say ‘we’re going to quit’. Unless it was a stunt. ‘We’re finishing up’ and then a year or two down the track when we run out of money we come back.

It’s been referred to in recent years I believe as the ‘Farnham Syndrome’. We’re not doing an album this year because it just didn’t happen. Throughout our career we’ve not been prolific with albums, we don’t churn albums out, we do one every now and again when it suits us. We’re not real big on the studio. The tedium of sitting around for hours on end, that really doesn’t interest us and we get bored very quickly.

So having said that, we have every intention of doing an album next year and it will be the last album we do, only because I don’t think that there’s too much more that we can, need or will want to say. All of us have side projects. I’m moving back into having a go about being a solo artist – write, and record in my own right music which is not as belligerently ballistic as Rose Tattoo.

It’s not like we’re going to pull the plug. We still enjoy playing the music that we have created over the years, and we enjoy one another’s company. We’ll tour America this year for a few weeks, mainly to say thanks very much for the support over all these years in our absence. It’s funny, when we were first there we made a bit of a stir but the support has grown over the years and we haven’t toured over there since ‘83. Hopefully the myth and the legend is not bigger than the reality.

Next year we’ll be doing a major tour of Europe and that won’t be our farewell tour, but it will be the end of that level [of touring]. In years to come we’ll go back and do three or four weeks as opposed to eight or ten weeks on the road, and just do the major festivals. The band is still regarded – and I don’t know how long that can last – but we’re still regarded as a viable live act. These days you have to provide a show as well as play great.

According to the promoters over there and the fans, which is the real test. I mean if you go out and you stink, they’re not going to keep coming back and they won’t demand to see you year after year after year. We’ve been lucky with that, that we’ve been able to hold our own as it were, not only with the acts that have revived from our era – Status Quo, Deep Purple, people like that – but also we pretty much hold our own with the younger bands as well. Which has got to do with attitude. One of the things I’ve always known about rock and roll is that it’s about attitude, you got to have the right attitude to carry it off.