Australian roadie Tana Douglas may well be the only person ever to be formally introduced to Queen Elizabeth II while wearing Doc Martens boots. “She tilted her head slightly to one side, and made what I swear was a ‘hmmmmph!’ before she moved on,” recalls Douglas in her highly entertaining memoir Loud: A Life in Rock ‘n’ Roll by the World’s First Female Roadie (HarperCollins).
Douglas found her calling as a teenager, initially starting out lumping equipment for AC/DC, before going on to work with some of the world’s leading musicians, including Status Quo, Suzi Quatro, Leo Sayer and Neil Diamond (all nice) and the volatile Elton John (“not always gracious”). In her memoir, now published in the UK after its Australian launch, she is open about her personal life, which included an abusive parent, run-ins with pimps and a bitter custody battle over her child. She also details the sexism, violence, drugs, hanky-panky and crazed fans you would expect a female roadie to have encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. There are some cracking stories, my favourite being the one about the strange intervention of an acid-dolling fake preacher during a night in the outback cells.
