Despite the overwhelming success, the going has never been smooth for Rose Tattoo. Through battles with addiction, personal tragedies, refusal to compromise despite being prompted to do so by the industry, the band survives to this day. Regardless of periods of inactivity that have sometimes lasted for as long as 6 years, and tragedies such as the recent loss of guitarist Peter Wells to prostate cancer in March 2006 followed by the loss of bassist Ian Rilen to bladder cancer later on that same year, Anderson, the band’s irreplaceable leader, keeps carrying the Rose Tattoo torch. The band’s most recent record, Blood Brothers, released in 2007, is a testimony of his relentless creative drive and devotion to the band’s signature style. It’s an intense, hurtling, at times heartbreakingly reflective record, but, above all, a testimony to the fact that the conflicts that sparked the band’s blaster fuse back in 1976 still continue to inspire Anderson today.

The new record, the impulses and emotions behind it, and the band’s 2007 tour when Rose Tattoo supported Guns’N' Roses with Sebastian Bach, and later Motorhead were some of the topics we touched upon in our interview.

AO: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with us, we really appreciate your time.

AA: My pleasure entirely.

AO: I’d like to jump right in and talk about your latest release Blood Brothers. The first thing that I noticed while listening to it was the production. To me it sounded sleeker than your previous album PAIN. Was it a conscious decision to do it differently this time around?

AA: PAIN was recorded more along the lines of a series of jams. People were just having very basic ideas for songs and it was recorded very live. The band was live in the studio. It was a rather big room, so… We record like that anyway, and actually Blood Brothers was recorded the same way. But the main thing was that it was jam behind the disk, and with Blood Brothers we did it here, in fact, in a very good studio technologically speaking, without taking away the fact that it does and has produced some live-sounding and some very fresh-sounding albums over the years. A lot of different artists have used it from in the old days, bands like INXS and a list of really, really successful bands and artists from all styles of music.

But I think the other thing is that Mark Optiz produced it, and his history goes way back to the Alberts with us. And I think that some difference between Pain and Blood Brothers is in the fact that Pain was done in Germany, in a very old studio, almost a rehearsal studio situation, which added to a very live approach. Like I said, it was a series of jams, and with Blood Brothers we had a far better idea of song structures in most cases, and we were able to get some sounds sonically that were bigger and bolder. In the old days to achieve some sort of sound we had to play very loudly and try to mike it at different angles and from different positions in the room.

Just to mention Mark Optiz, our producer, he was a nineteen-year-old freshly out of school and he went to Alberts all those years ago and said, “I want a job as a tape operator to work up to be a producer.” And they said, “Okay, start sweeping the floor, son, and tomorrow night you get your first job.” It was a Friday night, a downtime from 12 to 6 in the morning, and he said a bunch of lads came in and he got to run the tape, and, of course, his first job was us. We rolled in from a gig; we were all plastered. Of course, in those days not many people had seen anything that quite looked like we did or behaved like we did. He spent most of the night, as he describes, carrying behind the desk hoping that none of us paid attention to anything he was doing. But all he was really doing was pressing the “Record” button. We were there to record a whole lot of ideas and covers and stuff. It was funny because over the years with Alberts he engineered but never produced and it was his first production of a band all these years later. So our relationship with Mark Optiz goes back to the very beginning. Like it was ’77, I think, was his first time there.

AO: I have to confess that listening to the new album was like catching a breath of fresh air. These days when all sorts of stuff lands on your desk--shredders, computer geeks, pseudo-visionaries and what not—but among all this your message remains refreshingly clear. How do you manage to retain the freshness and the sincerity of your music?

AA: I think that in a very romantic sense we just have a very old-dog approach to playing music anyway. There is an old saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” and possibly we are old enough dogs by the time we got to where… Most of us have been playing since our early teens. In those days you’d usually start playing at school or very soon after that and you can’t form long-lasting relationships and you can go on for years. So you become an old dog very early, musically speaking. But we’ve always had one approach to rock’n’roll, which is to keep it as close as to the inspirational source of thirty or forty years ago that we were into. I never wanted to become sophisticated as it were.

As a lyric writer, I remember talking about Bon Scott the other day in an interview with some people in America, and we have a very similar approach. I remember having a wonderfully drunken conversation with him one night and he said, “Are you aware of a singer called Alex Harvey?” And I said, “Vaguely. I’ve heard the name.” And he said, “Get a couple of albums.” And I did. During the conversation we were talking about lyricists and their approach to lyrics. We both had the same ear, Bon and I, and the same views as others, like in the American sense of John Mellencamp, in a contemporary sense, but mostly other singers who want to keep the lyrics almost naïve so that there is clarity there… In other words, so that it doesn’t become difficult for people of all walks of life to identify with, particularly the people who inspire the songs. We’ve always written songs for and about the kind of people that we are—misfits and people who basically make a very early conscious or unconscious decision not to run with the crowd. Those are the sort of components that make… And the other thing, of course, is that I’ve never lost my fascination with the blues format, so to speak. I still listen to the blues singers who have influenced me as an eighteen- and nineteen-year-old. I’m still listening to them at sixty-one. I make no apology for it. The music I love the most is the music I love the most.

Now, I’ve got three sons and they are into hip hop, so they might remember their teenage years with as much affection as I do. I hope they do because the memories that I have are quite wonderful. Those influences are there all the time. I don’t want to write overly clever songs. I think that I write clever enough lyrics anyway. It’s not so much an ego, but after thirty years of writing I realised that if you write something that makes sense to people whose parents were possibly children when it was written--I’m getting e-mails and MySpace correspondence from people all around the world who are sixteen or seventeen who say, “We bought a copy of your first album or your third album, whatever, and that’s me you’re talking about.”—so then you know you’ve done something right as an art form, if you like. But, of course, you can only know after thirty years, because if your music stood the test of time and still influences sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds the way it was first written, it means that art, form-wise, it stood the test of time.

AO: Talking about your blues influences, on “City Blues” off the new album you show a completely different side of yourself. It’s a spaced-out tune compared to anything else on this album, or even on the previous album. Would you care to share what inspired the vibe?

AA: With Pain it was very much our first album after several years, so there was a long time. That particular line-up had never recorded before. We recorded as weekend bands, like a bluesy weekend band we’d record an album in a couple of days, but we never recorded as Rose Tattoo for all those years. So it’s very much like, “Who’s got any ideas?” So it was a very… The other albums and this album were written predominantly by myself and one or maybe two other people. But the first album was predominantly… it goes under the publishing “Rose Tattoo”, but predominantly Mick and I wrote most of the songs on the first album. Robin Riley who came in to play guitar on Scarred For Life, predominantly he and I wrote most of those songs. And the other songs that we did collaborate on, of course, I wrote with Peter, and each one contributed check-listing-wise, I suppose, a quarter to a third of each album.

And Pain was everyone threw in ideas, as I said, it was like a jam situation. So the process on Blood Brothers was that I’ve written the majority of the lyrics before we even went into the studio, which is the only other time I’ve ever done that was with Scarred For Life. The songs were not fixed, not to the point where we just went in… There has always been a certain amount of jamming and finding out where the song can go with us.

We’ve never enjoyed the recording process, it kind of comes with a certain amount of pain involved because we get bored very easily and we don’t like to rehearse a lot and we don’t like to spend a lot of time on structuring. It’s not that we are not interested, it’s just that we don’t like spending a lot of time. I suppose that the first thing that interests you anyway is that first initial spark so the more you fuck with it, the more it recedes into the background, if you like. So we don’t do that.

I think that one of the things that really helps with playing was that it was obviously the first album that I’ve done without anybody else in the band. Apart from Peter and I the line-up has changed over the years from one to the other. There is a core amount of people who have come in and out of the band, but it was very difficult. The album nearly didn’t come about because grief is a funny thing. And I kind of thought, “What do people expect? Do they expect me to not go on because the other founding member was no longer with us? Do they expect me to do a tribute to him?” And then in conversations with people I sort of said, “Well, what I’ve got inspiration-wise is the same energy that we’ve always had.” I wanted to write a new album because we have always believed that the band is bigger than the individual. And possibly AC/DC have proved that you can revive the integral part of that, particularly with the singer. You can survive guitar players, drummers, but carry on with such an indelibly distinct singer.

So I don’t know if Rose Tats could go on without me, or even would be bothered, but certainly it was difficult recording an album without Peter, so the album was very difficult for me emotionally. I had to sort of drag myself into the studio, but I convinced myself that each time that I walked through the doors that this was what I truly wanted to do. So it was a labour in love in as much as… All the albums are, of course, this is true of any album of mine, but the one song that I actually wrote for the band because it is me, I suppose, is signing off with Pete and possibly the band. I don’t know if we will record another album. But “Once in a Lifetime” it’s just that. That was the moment that I personally came to… And I wrote the lyrics just after seeing Pete for the last time weeks before he died. And I basically told him, apart from telling him how much I loved him, I told him I couldn’t come back and wouldn’t. He understood what I was talking about because he was lucid in those days. Because of the work that I have done over the years particularly with children, I know that those last few weeks usually people are in so much pain to the point where they don’t really relate well, if at all. They kind of drift in and out of consciousness. There is no real need for an exchange of… It’s wonderful for the loved ones to be there in those last moments to hold their hand. I didn’t want to be there when he slipped away, so… In the time between the last time I saw him which was a couple of weeks before, and the time when they told me that he’d gone, I wrote the lyrics for “Once in a Lifetime”.

AO: You’ve been involved in charity work for quite some time now. Was it since the ‘80s?

AA: Yea, mid-‘80s. In ‘85-‘84 the band decided that the band wasn’t the way we really wanted it anymore. If we’d have gone on from then on, we would have been pretty much just going through the motions. So we decided that we weren’t going back to America, we weren’t going to spend the next three or four years on a bus and tour endlessly and try to write love songs and stop swearing and spitting on the stage, and stop… Basically that’s what the American record company wanted us to do, to become a really pale representation of our real selves. And we weren’t really prepared or able to do that. You can dress a dog up as a cat but it will always be a dog.

And there were other pressures, like we were dealing with people in the band that have had heroin habits, and we were dealing with the fact that we were all hopeless drunks and most of us had some sort of dependency on drugs of some description. As I said, there was heroin addition in the band… It made it very difficult in those days to hold the thing together. So we didn’t. And, obviously, we decided we were tired. We were very unhappy at the time. So we decided to take a couple of years off, which turned into six. But just roundabout that time I started work with street kids.

I was visiting some friends in jail, and an older guy who was… well, I suppose you can describe him as a gangster, he was turned around by a Christian organisation that was visiting him. He was a long-term prisoner and he said to me one time while I was visiting there, he said, “When I get out, I’m going to start a halfway house for young offenders to try to turn them around.” He said, “You command a lot of respect, love and affection from these young guys in jail, I think you could possibly do a lot of good.”

So he got out of jail about a year later, which was around 1984, and I used to visit him, and we used to sit and talk to kids about… you know, if I could relate to them, if they had a physically and emotionally abusive father. I was a surviver of childhood sexual abuse. I dealt with a dependency on alcohol and drugs and with bad behaviour, and making a go of it anyway, so I was able to talk to kids on the same level.

And then I came to the notice of daytime mainstream television in Australia. I was asked to get on and talk about the sort of things, like the red light area that I was frequenting socially, and also the halfway house, which was in a place called Kings Cross which was notorious in Sydney for gangsters, and drug addiction, and prostitution, and all things ugly. I think they invited me on television more as an oddity more than anything, but because I just told them the truth, apart from the fact that it was great TV because it was quite sensational, it rung a bell, I suppose with people and I was asked to come back and be a regular. So I was actually given a weekly spot and I worked on a midday show. It was from midday to 1:30 in the afternoon.

AO: Was that on Channel 9?

AA: Yes, it was. And we worked that show right up until ‘91. I went and worked for A Current Affair with Ray Martin. He originally came from 60 Minutes. Actually, they give him the midday show and he turned it from being a very magazine-type show into a very informative program. I got my shot at it and I became the kind of person, almost overnight, from someone who parents wanted to keep their children away from to someone who mothers and fathers said, “I wish my kids could hear someone saying some of the things he’s saying.” Because, let’s face it, the public have very strange ideas, sometimes particularly of the very young teenage kids when they start to display the natural progression into the most painful period of their life, which is adolescence or puberty.

Anyway, in the early ‘90s he went across to A Current Affair and I followed him in their special project. I was given a show, Challenge, which was based on an English show with a woman called Anita, I think, and we did some quite amazing things between ‘91 to ‘98, and doing some extraordinary things, too—building things and raising money for community-based projects. It was an extremely popular show. It was a huge rater for television itself, made me… I was a very high-profile TV personality for, probably, 15 years.

AO: I heard rumours that you are planning to retire the band. Is there truth to this?

AA: Oh, yes. I think the band’s run its course. In fact, like I said before, it was about from one foot to the other in those last two years leading up to Peter dying. He couldn’t even tour with the band. We were still touring Europe without him. We were trying to keep a positive attitude that sooner or later he could come back and continue with the band, which, of course, never happened. So in one moment he is not there anymore and it’s really difficult sometimes to come to terms with it. You think, “I don’t really want to do another album. I don’t want to play anymore. I don’t want to tour.” But then a few days later I’d feel better and I’d think, “No, no, no, the band should go on. It’s still relevant. It has things to say.”

Having done that last album, the record company said to me, “Will there be another album?” And I said, “I can’t say there will be and I can’t say there won’t because I truly don’t know.” That’s why I’ve taken a couple of years off because I didn’t really want to tour this year. We did extensive touring last year because the album was fresh and we toured twice here in Australia—once with Motorhead, once with Guns’N’Roses—did two tours of Europe. And I really didn’t want to go back this year, but I was persuaded against my better judgement, and it was a great experience because it really cemented in me… I knew in the first week of a five-week tour that I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t want to do it, and when we came back I said, “I don’t want to even talk about it for another couple of years.” Unfortunately, you feel pain because there is loyalty of the people who have supported the band all those years, etc., etc., but the other thing, too, is that I haven’t said that I won’t go back and tour. But for now, no.

AO: Tell me about that tour with Guns’N’Roses last year. Did it bring back the memories of your first Australian tour with them back in ‘93?

AA: Yeah, yeah. Our relationship goes way back to mid-‘80s We first met them, and then, of course, we didn’t know it was them, then. I don’t think they were Guns’N’Roses at the time, but we were touring America with Aerosmith when we first met the young Guns’N’Roses-to-be. I remember where Axl recalls a conversation where he and Slash and the others came and said, “Look, we think that’s the best thing that we’ve ever seen. We just think it’s so cool we’d really like to do what you were doing.” I don’t remember them ever asking permission, but it was sort of, “We really want to do it,” and I said, “Well, you know, the way we play rock’n’roll is the ‘Long Live Rock’n’Roll’ sort of thing.” And later they, of course, became hugely successful not playing like us, but being influenced by us. So years later, I remember I lived in America, in Los Angelis, in ‘89 doing a solo album called Blood From Stone, and I was spending a lot of time with Slash and Duffy, and just clubbing and hanging out. And we’ve always had a very, very close relationship. So it was really cool last year to do that tour, particularly through Australia, because Australia has been well-aware of the relationship between us and them. I’m not sure if other parts of the world, particularly America, is aware that… Although, if you read MySpace, the scene, if you like, is aware, but certainly not on the mainstream level.

AO: I have one last question, it’s a bit goofy, but I hope you don’t mind.

AA: Ha-ha-ha! I like “goofy”!

AO: OK, I’ll give it a try then. If you were granted an answer to any question in the universe, what would you ask?

AA: Oh, it’s a beauty! If I could have an answer to any question in the universe!

AO: Yes, what would you ask?

AA: Phwow… It’s a beauty! [After a pause.] You see, philosophically, I accept the frailty and the idiosyncrasy of men, so I don’t wonder about world poverty and why we keep fighting wars, and all that because I accept it at a level of understanding. I don’t agree with—I think that man needs to—there are certain things that man does as a species that is his folly, but also this is something to struggle against. If there was no poverty and wars and injustice in the world, there wouldn’t be as much for men to struggle against. So it’s not like, “Why is there world poverty?” I pretty much understand why there is world poverty. There are very educated people. I mean, I read voraciously since school because I’ve never been very good at school and I was told by a very smart teacher that my great love for books and literature was something that was going to serve me well and probably educate me far better than the school system. And he was very accurate about that. [Pauses] Gee Whiz, that’s a classic! I wish you’ve asked me that a few days ago. That would get me time to think about it! An answer to any question in the universe!

AO: Most people give rather predictable answers to this question. I’ve put it to a lot of musicians and most people say that they would like to know what the purpose of us being here is. All American musicians I’ve ever asked that never really stopped to think about it twice.

AA: But a lot of Americans still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for planes flying into the towers. They can’t quite come to grips with the fact that their own government is working against them. So it’s naïve and crushingly ignorant of people, their inability to accept the realities of life.

AO: But it’s only the new generation of American musicians who really support the establishment propaganda. Which to me is quite amazing because I grew up believing that rock musicians should be, if not activists like John Lennon, they at least should be aware of certain things.

AA: I really don’t think, and maybe it’s overly romantic, but I think it’s realistically romantic, that if you are going to become an artist of any kind on any level, I can’t think how you can even resist temptation not to become involved in other parts of life. I think that spiritual search is part of… Writing songs and performing songs is such a soul-baring experience—and thank you for the earlier compliment about keeping the honesty and the integrity of it. It becomes necessary to bare your soul, I believe. I read a lot of biographies of the great artists, whether it Leonardo da Vinci or Schubert, whatever, and the great writers. These are the people who need to reach out so that they can touch within. So it’s a wonderful experience of reaching out to other people so that you can actually explore your inner soul, to get an idea of how your soul works and what it is, what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like. But really, if I could have a… I don’t know, I’ve got several books about the beginnings of creation, if you like… Are we alone in the universe? I don’t think so, but I’d really like to know. Are we going to touch another species out there? I mean intellectually, would we be able to communicate with them, would we one day see them? In other words, will there be a reaching out, will they be coming towards us? It’s one thing that fascinates me ever since I was a kid. You see the first movies of some species coming from outer space, and you think, “It’s gotta be right somehow!”

AO: Do you talk from experience? Have you experienced any?

AA: No! No! It just fascinates me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, don’t get me wrong, but I kind of think form time to time, you know, “Will it happen in my lifetime?” I’d love to… Even if in my lifetime we’d pick up a pulse or a signal from out there. I suppose it won’t change my life anyway, but still. I remember Carl Sagan sad many, many years ago that just mathematically, regardless of what the Christians say, or whatever, but mathematically the probability is that there are other races out there. In other words, the difference between them and other species is that they actually bring intelligence or a form of a thought process to the way that they live. There could be lost species out there that have no…what we assume is intellectualising of their life process. We don’t really know, but we assume that. That’s what I would like to know: “Are we alone?”