Rose Tattoo: Nice Boys Don't Play Rock 'n' Roll 
Charles S. Campbell-Jones, Contributor KNAC.com
Monday, March 06, 2000 12:27 PM


 The Life And Times And Reemergence Of Aussie Hard Rock Legends Rose Tattoo 

Ignoring the indigenous population, which successive governments have done their best to destroy, Australian "culture" is relatively young and ephemeral. Australia has always been populated by a hotchpotch of peoples - first convicts outcast from the UK, then European and latterly Asian immigrants seeking fresh opportunity. As such, it is usually difficult to identify things that are quintessentially Australian, in the same way that you might say processed pork is quintessentially Austrian or that cartoon characters with unnaturally small mouths are quintessentially Japanese. Of course, cultures are always inherited, but 200 years (since Australia was colonized) is not a lot of time for a nation to personalize that inheritance. 

The same can be said for most Australian popular music, which has generally made little headway in a world dominated by the United States/Kingdom. However, if I had to identify one exception to this rule - music that is at its roots derivative but nevertheless stamped with something uniquely Australian - it would be four-to-the-floor, balls-too-the-wall, sometimes preposterously macho but always enjoyable rock 'n' roll. In the late '60s/early '70s, bands like Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs and Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls pioneered a heavy mix of blues and boogie that sounded something like Black Sabbath performing a Chuck Berry tribute album. As the decade progressed, bands of this genre shed their hippie airs and graces and aligned themselves more clearly with the working class. It was at this time that the three truly great Australian hard rock bands reared their rough heads - AC/DC, The Angels (a.k.a. Angel City), and, of course, Rose Tattoo. 

Of the three, Rose Tattoo were the ugliest and definitely the meanest. They played at phenomenal speed and volume, sported close-cropped (and occasionally dyed) hair even before punk hit town, dressed uniformly in black street clothes and were each covered head to toe with tattoos. Rose Tattoo played their first gig in Sydney on New Year's Eve, 1976, and in the early days only the two roughest Sydney venues wouldn't book them for fear of crowd violence. Over three genuinely classic albums (the subsequent releases suffered a little from the Spinal Taps) - Rose Tattoo (1978), Assault and Battery (1981) and Scarred for Life (1982) - Rose Tattoo made music about sex, drugs and gang violence, shot through a deep belief in the redemptive powers of rock 'n' roll. Their trademarks (aside from excess) were the ripping slide guitar of Peter Wells and the urgent, high-pitched yell of vocalist Gary "Angry" Anderson, who earned the nickname by virtue of his volatile and aggressive temperament. I spoke with Wells, the band's founder, about his life with the "Tatts". 

KNAC: What was the blueprint you had in mind for Rose Tattoo? 

PW: Well, I was walking around in Hawaii with my shirt off, and I used to draw a crowd with all my tattoos, basically. The 'tattoo renaissance' used to freak everybody out, so I thought, "You're going to get noticed doing this." This was '75 - a long time ago. It's different now, but in those days it was pretty out there. So I thought, "I'll get a rock band together and just do it." 

"We used to get pretty boisterous sometimes, yeah. There was a lot of violence."  
KNAC: Something full-on? 

PW: Yeah. See, before that in the early '70s, in Buffalo [Wells' previous band], if we had to do a photo shoot the management or record company would say, "Wear a long sleeve shirt" or "Get a photo taken with your arms behind your back," because the wisdom of the day in those things was that tattoos would never work in rock music. 

KNAC: So, tattoos were rare things back then? 

PW: In the early '70s, yeah. There were only a couple of people [with tattoos] in those days in rock bands - there was Jefferson Airplane and that was about it. 

KNAC: I read that you were inspired to switch from bass to slide guitar by Ry Cooder's work with Captain Beefheart in the '60s. Is that true? 

PW: That's not really true, [although] I used to like Ry Cooder and Captain Beefheart and stuff like that, but that wasn't the reason. The reason I switched to slide was because I really hated all the guitar players in those days. All the guitar players were playing real show-offy guitar - you know, Ritchie Blackmore guitar - and that drove me mad. I wanted it to be a bit more straight-ahead. Not as twiddly. 

KNAC: Slide guitar is a relatively unusual foundation for a band's sound, though. 

PW: In those days it was. There were a few people around playing slide in bands - Mick Taylor, Duane Allman, Rory Gallagher and people like that - but they weren't really in that youth-oriented rock area. 

With those ideas in mind, Wells set about recruiting members for his new band. Enter Angry Anderson, a pint-sized and completely bald bundle of hyperactive energy with sandpaper for vocal chords. Anderson was poached from Melbourne band Buster Brown, which featured drummer Phil Rudd, who went on to join AC/DC. 

KNAC: Was Angry an immediate choice as singer? 

PW: We tried a couple of guys out before Angry came along. The line-up ended up with me and Mick [Cocks, guitar] and Ian [Rilen, bass] and Dallas ["Digger" Royale, drums] and Angry [Anderson, vocals], and then Ian left and I got Geordie [Leach] up to play bass. 

KNAC: Can you describe what it was like to be part of the Sydney music scene in the late '70s? 

PW: A very lively scene. You know, it was pre-drunk-driving and pre-heroin and pre-unemployment and pre-AIDS. It was a very happening kind of place. 

KNAC:You established a reputation for having wild gigs with Rose Tattoo. 

PW: We used to get pretty boisterous sometimes, yeah. There was a lot of violence. 

KNAC: I read that Bon Scott and Angus Young [of AC/DC] occasionally jammed with Rose Tattoo at your earlier gigs. 

PW: AC/DC were touring the world and making a lot of money, and they used to come back [to Australia] for holidays. They used to get up and play with us, and nobody actually knew who they were here. They didn't play anything by AC/DC on the radio here for about six or seven years - not until Bon died [in 1980], really. For a few years, when the Tatts were playing, Angus would come and play with us, and only three people would actually realize who he was. [Bon] was a pretty wild and crazy guy. He was very much your immigrant to Australia who got lucky in a rock band and lived life to the full. He got bloody unlucky - what killed him could have killed anyone. 

Rose Tattoo's self-titled debut album was released in 1978, and to this day it remains one of the greatest straightforward rock 'n' roll albums ever produced in Australia, if not the world. Rose Tattoo is filled with raw, hard-bitten anthems like "Nice Boys," "Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw," and "Astra Wally," along with Rose Tattoo's signature song, "Bad Boy For Love," which peaked at #13 on the Australian charts. The album also met with considerable success in Europe, where the "Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw" single reached #5 in Germany and #2 in France. Heavy gigging in Australia and the release of a second album, Assault and Battery, consolidated the Rose Tattoo's growing reputation. The band moved to England for nine months in 1981, during which they embarked on a number of European tours, including a support slot for Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Highlights of this period include an incendiary performance at the Reading Festival, when Anderson headbutted the amplifiers until blood gushed from his head, and a performance at London's Marquee club that was reportedly only eclipsed by Led Zeppelin in terms of volume. One swooning UK rock critic even went so far as to write that "Rose Tattoo make Motorhead look like the chorus line in a ballet." The band then returned to Australia to record their third album, Scarred for Life, before embarking on a US tour with Aerosmith and ZZ Top. 

KNAC: What were Aerosmith like in those days? 

PW: They were pretty fucked up. It was before their comeback, when they made the rap record. The guitar player wouldn't actually play in the band - they had a fill in guitar player - because he was asleep in the dressing room most of the time. When we toured with them it was kind of weird. ZZ Top were in their pre- Eliminator phase, so they were playing to an older audience - a lot of bikers, a lot of Hispanics. 

KNAC: Was there anything in particular that lead to the break-up of the band in 1983 after that tour? 

PW: I had the shits with our management and the shits with the record company and a bunch of things like that. We came back from America, Digger wasn't too well - he was in and out of rehab and stuff like that - there was a lot of tragedy stuff going on at the time, so I thought it was about time that we called it a day. Angry kicked on and did a couple of bullshit albums with [Rose Tattoo] cover bands and then it sort of fell over. 

KNAC: Since then, in your solo material you have preferred a more stripped-back blues and country sound. Was this a side of you that was always longing for expression, or are these new styles more a product of growing up? 

"For a few years, when the Tatts were playing, Angus would come and play with us, and only three people would actually realize who he was. [Bon] was a pretty wild and crazy guy. He was very much your immigrant to Australia who got lucky in a rock band and lived life to the full. He got bloody unlucky - what killed him could have killed anyone."  
PW: Just a different time, different place. The new thing I've just done is very rowdy, back to Marshalls, back to very loud stuff. We did an album just before Christmas [1999], and we call it Hateball. We've got a deal in Europe and Japan [with SPV] for two albums that's just come through. We're gonna piss off over there and play the same old shit for them again! But there is a vibe for it over there. A Rose Tattoo cover band called Rose Tattwho - American guys - just put their out and in November/December they sold about 1500 copies. It's very postmodern when your cover band puts a record out, and they ring you up and say, "How ya doing?" 

However, the Rose Tattoo beast has continued to show signs of life. In 1993, Guns 'n' Roses, who covered "Nice Boys" on their Live Like a Suicide EP, requested that the band reunite and support them on their Australian tour. All the 1978 members of Rose Tattoo were present, save for Digger Royale, who died in 1991 after a long struggle with drug addiction. According to Wells, the experience was a good one. 

PW: We made a couple of bucks, and spared no expense. [Guns 'n' Roses] were very rich. They spilt more champagne than they drank, dropped more cocaine on the floor than you could imagine. 

KNAC: Listening to some of Guns 'n' Roses early stuff, I sometimes think that it might as well be a young Rose Tattoo playing. 

PW: I don't remember them, but they used to turn up at gigs when we toured America. I don't know where they're from - Axl's from Butt-Fuck, Idaho or someplace - but he used to come to gigs and the guitar player used to come to gigs. They were around for a dozen-or-so years in different lineups, trying to get a record deal. Back in those days what they were signing in Los Angeles was bands like The Knack. There were all these bands [GNR] and about twenty others - Motley Crue was one of them - who couldn't get arrested, just playing in bars and stuff. 

Wells, whose day job is as a tattoo artist in Sydney and who wryly cites "survival" as his main achievement with Rose Tattoo, can't say for sure what the future holds for his best-known musical venture. The original line-up reformed once again for a successful tour of Germany in 1998, but for the time being there are no further plans to tour or record. Part of the uncertainty seems to stem from Angry Anderson, who has over the past decade remodeled himself as a media personality, working as a youth affairs reporter on Australian television, representing charitable organizations, and even performing in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar. 

PW: [Angry] has been hard to get hold of because he keeps hiring and firing managers at an alarming rate, plus he's got some domestic strife as well. I don't know exactly what he wants to do in his life, anyway. He keeps saying that he wants to rock 'n' roll, and then he goes and does something else. The last couple of years it has been bit off and on. But the last gig we played was in Hanover in Germany, and we played to 30,000 people - if that's the way it finishes, it's quite a good way to finish. 

Unfortunately, Rose Tattoo's albums are no longer in print in the US - they are only available from Australia on import. As far as their releases go, it is hard to go past their debut album, Rose Tattoo. Additionally, the Rose Tattoo cover band, Rose Tattwho - featuring members of Exodus, White Zombie, Mordred and Ruffians, along with Peter Wells on slide guitar - recently released A Tribute to the Boys, which is filled with Tatts material, through Nuclear Blast records. That CD is available for US $15 from: 

HS Intertainment 

Blucherstr. 21 

68623 Lampertheim 

GERMANY 

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8:00 PM 3/9/00