Gary 'Angry' Anderson died aged 79 after suffering a cardiac arrest while on tour in Germany with Rose Tattoo — still fronting the band he'd built from Sydney's margins in 1976. The circumstances were fitting. He didn't stop. The nickname came first from smallness, then from the habit of fighting men twice his size as a member of Melbourne motorcycle club the Vigilanties. He went from Mouse to Angry Ant to just Angry, and the compression told you everything about what he'd learned: strip away everything that softens the blow. His band before Rose Tattoo, Buster Brown — which featured a pre-AC/DC Phil Rudd on drums — cut a record for Mushroom in 1974 and built a following among Melbourne sharpies. But it was rehearsal. Rose Tattoo, formed in Sydney in 1976, were a different order of threat. Slide guitarist Peter Wells gave them their switchblade menace; Anderson's voice — which in Buster Brown had been a competent blues instrument — became something cruder and more committed. The self-titled debut in 1978, the same year as AC/DC's Powerage and the Angels' Face to Face, arrived at the peak of the blood-and-thunder Alberts sound produced by Harry Vanda and George Young. Bad Boy for Love and Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw are stone classics of that genre. Mainstream Australia couldn't handle them. They were temporarily banned from Countdown after Anderson kissed guitarist Mick Cocks on camera. Radio ignored them. Crowds thinned. The redemption came offshore. In 1981, both the debut and follow-up Assault and Battery reached No. 1 on British heavy metal charts. At Reading festival, Anderson head-butted amplifier stacks until he bled. They returned to Australia as conquering heroes. Scarred for Life yielded We Can't Be Beaten, then the lineup fractured. What followed was one of Australian rock's stranger transformations: the ferocious frontman who looked like he'd 'just busted out of Pentridge' became a fixture on afternoon television, a youth advocate, a rough diamond the nation decided it loved. The biggest curveball came in 1987. Suddenly — a power ballad so far from Rose Tattoo's DNA it could have been a different organism — was used to soundtrack the wedding of Scott and Charlene on Neighbours, and went to No. 2 nationally. It was kept off the top spot by Kylie Minogue's Locomotion. Anderson headlined the 1991 AFL grand final half-time show, arriving in something resembling a Batmobile, delivering a legendarily off-key performance of Bound for Glory. By then it didn't matter. He had become something the country didn't have many of: a rocker who'd actually survived. His credentials were burnished by the right people. Guns N' Roses had covered Nice Boys on their Live ?!@ Like a Suicide EP before recruiting Rose Tattoo to support them on the Use Your Illusion tour in 1993. That same year, Anderson received an Order of Australia. In 2006 the band entered the ARIA Hall of Fame. His lineage ran forward too — Cosmic Psychos, Amyl and the Sniffers, even the Veronicas pulled him onstage to do Nice Boys. The debt was acknowledged. Later life was complicated. Anderson moved toward hard-right politics — anti-immigrant positions, an appearance on SBS's Go Back to Where You Came From in 2012, candidacy for the National Party in 2013 and the Australian Liberty Alliance in 2016. He suffered genuine devastation: five Rose Tattoo bandmates lost to cancer; his son Liam killed in 2018. His youth advocacy work had roots in his own experience of child abuse. He was, as the Guardian's piece says plainly, more complex than he was often given credit for. The cartoon character he admitted to performing — Angry, not Gary — was the shell; the actual human underneath had been shaped by serious damage and serious loss. He kept playing anyway. He was still on tour when he died.
