We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game we played.

Every game.

It could have been our first win of the season and we sang it. It could have been another week of an unbeaten run and we sang it.

Win, lose, draw, the song belonged to the ritual. And maybe that is how I will always remember Angry Anderson.

He can’t be beaten. Not really.

He played a bikie in “Housos” who was basically impossible to beat in a fight. He sang “Suddenly,” one of the biggest power ballads to come out of Australian television, and somehow even a song from a completely different universe still sounded like Angry Anderson.

That is the trick with Angry.

You could put him anywhere and he remained Angry Anderson.

Hard rock band. Bikie comedy. Soap-opera power ballad. Mad Max. Rose Tattoo.

It didn’t matter. The voice came with him.

Gary “Angry” Anderson died on 21 September 2026, aged 79, after suffering a cardiac arrest.

And I keep coming back to the music. Because that is where I first knew him.

Before Rose Tattoo, there was Buster Brown.

Buster Brown formed in 1973 and released “Something to Say” the following year.

The drummer was Phil Rudd.

Yes. The same Phil Rudd who would leave and join an early version of AC/DC.

Anderson kept going however Buster Brown ended in 1975, and Anderson would soon become the voice of a band that would define Australian hard rock in a completely different way.

Rose Tattoo.

Peter Wells formed the band in Sydney in 1976 because he wanted something tough. Something built around slide guitar.

The first great statement arrived with “Bad Boy for Love.”

It was written by Ian Rilen, who left to form punk group X before the single was released. Geordie Leach, Anderson’s former Buster Brown bandmate, eventually joined the lineup that recorded most of the debut.

And then there was the production team.

Harry Vanda and George Young.

So when Rose Tattoo arrived in 1978, there was a lineage.

The blues had crossed the Atlantic. British bands absorbed American blues. British rock came to Australia. Australian musicians absorbed all of it.

And then they made it sound like home.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw

“Rock N Roll Outlaw” sounds like a mission statement.

The blues-rock vocabulary of Britain and America is all over Rose Tattoo, but the important thing is what they do with it.

We talk about the Rolling Stones, Cream, Free, Led Zeppelin. We talk about AC/DC.

But underneath all of that is the original source material: Black American blues musicians like Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Albert King whose music was absorbed, reinterpreted and fed back into the world through British and Australian rock.

Rose Tattoo didn’t invent the language. They spoke it with an Australian accent.

“Nice Boys” is probably the easiest entry point. If you don’t know the Rose Tattoo version, you may know the Guns N’ Roses version.

“The Butcher and Fast Eddy” is Angry in storyteller mode.

Someone got stabbed. Here is what happened. Next song.

“One of the Boys” has that Status Quo pulse. “Remedy” is AC/DC with the volume turned up. “Bad Boy for Love” is the obvious classic. “T.V.” is twelve-bar blues.

No dissertation required.

“Stuck on You” is the curveball, almost a love song, with a melodic acoustic guitar figure underneath the chorus.

Then “Tramp,” with “Let There Be Rock” energy, and “Astra Wally,” which feels like the offspring of “Tramp” and “T.V.”

Ten songs. No wasted motion. Just get on with it.

The band toured America and Europe, recorded an unreleased album in Los Angeles, and came home. Then, in 1981, “Rock N Roll Outlaw” started charting in Europe.

So they went back. That’s the music business.

Assault & Battery

Three years after the debut came “Assault & Battery”.

This is where my relationship with Rose Tattoo gets interesting.

I don’t think it has the same collection of songs that immediately grab you by the throat. But I think the band is getting better.

Better musicianship. Better lyrics. More ambition.

Start with “Magnum Maid.”

“We’re never gonna catch the criminals / As long as they’re runnin’ the show.”

That is the eternal rock and roll conspiracy theory. The criminals aren’t hiding. They’re running the place.

Then Angry turns the gun into a character. The “Magnum Maid” isn’t just a weapon. She’s salvation. Revenge. The last thing a desperate man has left when every institutional answer has failed.

By the end of the song it feels like you’re lying in the gutter with two bullets left.

No cavalry. No government. No committee. Just the gun and one last decision.

That’s Angry’s world.

When the system doesn’t work, you don’t write a submission.

You reach for the Magnum.

“Sidewalk Sally” takes the opposite approach.

“She knows what she is selling.”

“French or Greek don’t cost much.”

No university degree required. You know exactly what is happening.

Scarred For Life

The third album arrived within a year in 1982

No three-year gap this time.

The opening is a knockout.

“I grew up fast on a working class streets.”

“First thing I learned was life don’t come cheap.”

That’s Angry Anderson in two lines.

Not a victim. Not a hero. A battler.

Somebody who has been punched around by life and decided to punch back.

Then comes “We Can’t Be Beaten.”

And there it is.

The song we used to sing after football. The song that makes the whole thing personal for me.

“If you want to be in my gang…”

That is the invitation. To belonging. Stand with me. We’ll start something. We’ll fight for something. We’ll make some noise.

The song is simple. That’s why it works. And it isn’t really about winning. It’s about refusing to accept defeat as an identity.

“Juice On The Loose” is basically “Bad Boy For Love” with another coat of paint. And again, I like it.

“Branded” is where Rob Riley becomes impossible to ignore. He co-wrote “We Can’t Be Beaten,” “Scarred For Life,” “Branded” and “It’s Gonna Work Itself Out.”

“I’ve had enough and now I’m gonna fight back.”

Again, Angry doesn’t write a self-help book. He writes a chorus.

Then there’s “Revenge.”

The song contains lines about immigrants, religion, unions and government that reflect a particular strain of working-class Australian grievance. Some of the language is explicitly hostile and exclusionary.

You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But you also don’t need to pretend the song doesn’t exist.

The underlying emotion is easier to recognise than the politics, someone has taken something that belonged to me.

My city. My work. My country. My life. My dignity.

That is the engine underneath the song.

Angry is giving voice to a worldview that is angry about a world changing underneath him.

The problem is that the song doesn’t stop at describing that anger.

It assigns blame. Sometimes the artist is documenting the ugliness. Sometimes the artist is participating in it. Sometimes it’s both.

Southern Stars

Then came another lineup change.

By 1983, Rob Riley, Dallas Royall and Peter Wells had all left.

Anderson and Geordie Leach rebuilt the band again, and “Southern Stars” arrived in 1984.

And this is where I disagree with the people who want every great band to make the same record forever.

I love this change. The blues rock is still there. The boogie is still there. But the choruses are getting bigger. The songwriting is evolving.

It’s not Rose Tattoo abandoning Rose Tattoo.

It’s Rose Tattoo trying to work out what Rose Tattoo sounds like four records into a career.

If you make the first record four times, you haven’t preserved your identity. You’ve preserved your business model.

“Southern Stars” is more AOR without becoming AOR. The guitars still have dirt under their fingernails. But there is more melody. More space. More ambition.

And lyrically, Angry is at his most openly political and philosophical.

“The ghosts of Eureka are calling to me now.”

“I wanna live my life under Southern Stars.”

Anderson described the album as being about the spirit of Eureka and said its patriotism was intended to extend beyond Australia to humanity as a whole.

That’s important because “Southern Stars” is really an album about freedom.

“Let Us Live” strips it back. Let us be what we want to be. Let us go where we want to go. Let us say what we want to say. Let us live our own lives.

Not necessarily left. Not necessarily right. Just leave me alone and let me live.

“Freedom’s Flame” and “Death Or Glory” turn that idea into mythology: tribes rise, soldiers arrive, fires burn, people refuse to surrender.

Again, Angry isn’t writing a policy paper. He’s writing mythology.

And then there’s “You’ve Been Told.”

The riff takes me straight back to that Richie Blackmore school of blues-based hard rock.

But lyrically?

This is Angry enjoying himself.

Women. Bourbon. Drugs. Cigars. Rock and roll.

Just a bloke telling you exactly what he likes.

And finally:

“The Radio Said Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead.”

Of course it did. Somebody always says it’s over. And then some idiot plugs in a guitar.

That is the joke.

Rock and roll doesn’t survive because the radio says it should.

It survives because somebody somewhere still needs it.

Suddenly

Anderson went on to play Ironbar Bassey in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Rose Tattoo eventually gave way to his solo career.

Then came “Suddenly.”

A song that could have destroyed the whole image. Instead it became another Angry Anderson song.

It found a much larger audience when it was used for Scott and Charlene’s wedding on Neighbours, reaching No. 2 in Australia.

The same voice that had spent the previous decade singing about street fights, criminals, revolution and rock and roll was suddenly singing a giant romantic ballad on television.

And it worked. That is Angry.

His 1990 solo album “Blood from Stone” produced “Bound for Glory,” a No. 11 hit.

“Life’s tough / So what? / I’m alive.”

“I’ve been down / Seen hard times / But I survived.”

He could have made an entire career out of that sentence.

Rose Tattoo eventually reunited, and I saw them on the Guns N’ Roses “Use Your Illusion” tour.

They rocked. And I was more than happy to cross Rose Tattoo off my list. The Gunners are a different story. I’ve already written about that.

And that is where my musical journey with Angry ends.

I haven’t listened to the “Pain” and “Blood Brothers” albums from the 2000s.

I will.

And maybe that is the best way to remember Angry Anderson.

As the voice that refused to soften. The little bloke with the enormous presence.

The voice that could sing about a street fight, a revolution, a woman, a working-class battler, a Magnum revolver, Australian freedom or a wedding on Neighbours and somehow still make it sound like Angry Anderson.

He wasn’t supposed to fit neatly. Neither did Rose Tattoo. And that’s probably why they lasted.

We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game.

I think I understand it differently now. It wasn’t really a song about being unbeatable.

Nobody is.

It’s a song about standing up with your people and deciding that losing isn’t going to define you.

Angry Anderson spent fifty years doing exactly that.

The band changed. The members changed. The sound changed. The country changed. He changed. But he kept getting back on stage.

One more tour. One more record. One more song. One more fight. Until there wasn’t another one.

And now we sing it without him.

We can’t be beaten.

Maybe that’s the point.