It didn't get publicised in Cross Rhythms, or anywhere else but Australia's veteran hard rockers ROSANNA'S RAIDERS played England and Wales in October. Andrew Long spoke to two of the band.

Rosanna's Raiders

The jet black Rickenbacker stereo bass begins to drive alongside the double bass kit, forging hard rock thunder, the blonde Les Paul rams it's way mercilessly in, from somewhere beneath a mountain of red hair a shrill voice screams into a headset mike 'We are Raiders... Rosanna's Raiders were in Newport for three days and have managed to play live six times! I was at five of those events and they just got better. They are a hard working band. Dave Palmer, who with wife Rosanna make up two thirds of the band, told me that they once counted the live gigs they had played and came up with a total of over 3,000. Our interview took place appropriately enough, in a Newport interview room.

So how did you guys first get involved in music?

(Dave) "When I was young I always enjoyed a lot of music, and started taking piano lessons around about when I was in grade five at school. One day I was listening to the radio and I realised that the whole music seemed too revolve around one instrument, and that was the bass, so I wanted to play bass after that. Pretty soon I got hold of one and began to learn to play it."

(Rosanna) " When I was in about grade three at school, quite young really, my teacher came in playing a ukulele! The next day he came in playing a guitar. As soon as I heard it I thought 'that's it, that's all I want to do in life, so I asked him if he would teach me to play and he said something like 'go away, kid'. But I kept pestering him and I finally got a guitar and he agreed to teach me how to play. When I was about 10 or 11 years old I played on a radio show and I've just kept playing ever since." How did you come to meet and start working together?

(Dave) "I actually heard that radio programme that Rosanna was playing on because we came from the same area. A while later we met in High School through a couple of mutual friends and one of the guys said to me 'Hey, I'm thinking of starting a band'. We got talking and the next thing you know we had a band going. Both Rosanna and I were playing in the band while we were still at school and then I went to university. When I finished university there were just no jobs around so we kept working with our band and eventually we became full-time and travelled around Australia for about seven years."

Somewhere along the line you became Christians. How and when did that happen?

(Dave) "Rosanna's Raiders were getting bigger and bigger in Australia; we had our own truck, P.A., light show, full road crew, and were doing all the major venues.

Then one night it was just like Jesus turned up on the scene and we met God. God was just there. It was one of those times you look back on and think it was just an amazing experience. One of the sound guys was actually on drugs and his life was totally turned around when he became a Christian; the drummer became a Christian, everybody became a Christian including the road crew and then we were a Christian band, we couldn't help it. That happened to us one night in 1982."

So the transition into playing Christian music was just the natural thing for you to do?

(Dave) "Yeah, we had heard people say that the Devil uses music and we just made the decision that we were gonna use our music for God, so we dropped some of the cover material we were doing, which we didn't think was appropriate anymore and we took a lot of our original songs and began to change the lyrics around a bit and we were a Christian band in about two rehearsals."

What is the full line-up of the Raiders? (Rosanna) "I play guitar and sing and Dave plays bass. We have a drummer and that's it, just the three of us, although we have had other line-ups at times when we've been involved in different projects."

And have you always had the same drummer?

(Rosanna) "We have changed drummers a couple of times; my brother is one of our drummers and we also have a guy called Johno Zaffarese who plays on our albums and also does live work with us. Johno is huge and covered with tattoos. I remember one of the first gigs he ever did with us he stood up on stage and said 'Christians are not wimps and if anyone wants to argue about that with me I'll meet 'em out back later.' Nobody went out to argue with him which is not really surprising."

What kind of venues do you normally play in Australia?