Rose Tattoo

Scarred For Live Cleopatra The mighty Aussies in their live prime.

This is the way you wannna hear Rose Tattoo, caught at their raucous, rowdy best on stage. And this five-CD box set featuring brusque, no-nonsense live performances from 1980 to ‘82, when the Aussie band were in consistently stunning form.

In essence, these are official bootlegs, as there’s been no attempt to finesse the sound or fix any mistakes. What you get is the full-on Tatts experience.

The first two discs are from Sydney in 1980, and on home territory the band are formidably fiery, with the slide guitar of Pete Wells and the hoodlum vocals of Angry Anderson treading an eruditely dirty path between garage and metal. The third CD features the band’s landmark set at the 1981 Reading Festival, when they showed the awestruck crowd their full repertoire of filth, fury and anthemic thrust. The fourth disc sees them back in Sydney in ‘82, while the fifth is a show from Washington DC at the end of the same year, with tha band again the fiercely combative.

This box set is a great reminder of why Rose Tattoo are so revered by those who love unkempt, noisy rock’n’roll.