Whitesnake’s Tanya O’Callaghan — ‘If you can’t live on the road with people, you’re not going to cut it. It isn’t for the faint-hearted’
Playing with the likes of Guns N’ Roses and The Corrs, bass player Tanya O’Callaghan talks about the journey that led her from Mullingar to her current tour with the legendary rock band Whitesnake, as well as the animal rights campaign that is her passion
"When bassist Tanya O'Callaghan is not playing with Whitesnake, her services are in demand for a wide range of big-name hard-rock bands." Picture by Natalie Ford
Tanya O'Callaghan
“I have to be realistic,” she says. “I love it when I hear someone saying their diet is 90pc plant-based, and they’re moving to being fully plant-based. But I also love to hear someone who eats meat and saying they are now actively eating much less than before.”
Tayna O’Callaghan uses her music platform to promote veganism. Picture by Melissa Castro.
Tanya O'Callaghan, left, and Reb Beach from Whitesnake perform outside the Vikingship arena on June 02, 2022 in Hamar, Norway.
"When bassist Tanya O'Callaghan is not playing with Whitesnake, her services are in demand for a wide range of big-name hard-rock bands." Picture by Natalie Ford
Tanya O’Callaghan was only one year old in Mullingar, Co Westmeath when the English hard-rock band Whitesnake released their massively successful self-titled seventh album in 1987. It went on to sell eight million copies worldwide and consolidated their status as an arena-sized phenomenon. A rereleased single, the glam-rock anthem Here I Go Again 87 would become one of that year’s defining hits.
Fast-forward 35 years and O’Callaghan is a central part of the Whitesnake experience as their bassist. The band still packs out huge venues and in May they played Dublin’s 3Arena as part of a multi-date European tour. O’Callaghan is the first and only female to be part of the veteran group who first got together around the time Bono and friends were thinking of forming a band.
She might just be the most famous Irish musician you’ve never heard of. When she’s not playing with Whitesnake, her services are in demand for a wide range of big-name hard-rock bands. But more of that later. Right now, it’s all Whitesnake and when Life magazine video-calls her, she is in her London hotel room having finished the UK leg of the tour. A flight to Germany is a matter of hours away. There’s promo to be done there before another flight to their gig in Copenhagen.
“It’s breakfast in London, lunch in Germany and dinner in Denmark,” she says with a grin. But the thrill of playing Ireland will stay with her for a long time.
“It was a very emotional show for me because I hadn’t been home in two-and-a-half years due to the pandemic,” the US-based musician says. “So my first time back in Ireland was playing a show with Whitesnake. It was so great, partly because it was the opening night of the tour. All sorts of things that needed to be ironed out happened, various problems that you’d get with any opening night, but it was wonderful to be playing back home.
“We were all joking afterwards and the guys were saying, ‘Why couldn’t we play her home country, like, five nights in, when all the problems are out of the way?’”
Not that the punters seemed to notice. Fan message boards were alive with talk about how scintillating the 2022 version of the band is, with 70-year-old frontman David Coverdale rolling back the years.
O’Callaghan makes for a striking presence in concert. She’s not one to stand motionless next to the drummer with her bass. Instead, she prowls the stage like a consummate rocker, headbanging in time to the beat, her distinctive blonde dreadlocks flying.
Life on the road is intense — our interview had to be rescheduled a number of times due to last-minute touring commitments — but she loves the buzz.
“It’s the life I know and love. I’ve been doing this for 10 or 11 years and even before that on the slumming-it level. I’ve been a road-dog for half my life. Living out of a suitcase is not for everybody, but once you get into the flow, it just becomes who you are.”
A return home meant a whistle-stop trip to Mullingar. “I got to hang out with my granny,” she says of 94-year-old Phyllis O’Callaghan. “She’s my screensaver.”
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Home, now, is California, specifically the small town of Joshua Tree. She lived in Los Angeles for years before that but it’s had no impact on her Midlands accent. “I needed nature. I was sick of the city. A lot of artists have a love-hate relationship with LA. It served a beautiful purpose in that it got me into a scene that became my career and, basically, got me to where I am now. But I needed a small-town life and now Joshua Tree is a bit like my desert Mullingar!”
Returning to rural California makes for a sharp contrast to the touring life and intense session work in studio. Whitesnake may be occupying her time now, but her CV groans under the weight of work for the likes of Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and Steven Adler of Guns N’ Roses. She has also worked with Extreme, 10cc’s Kevin Godley and The Corrs.
“She has a unique sense of her own style both musically and fashionwise, and therefore has a huge stage presence,” Sharon Corr says of O’Callaghan.
She describes herself as a freelance musician and is quick to point out that while she gets to play some of the world’s biggest venues, she doesn’t make superstar money. “Far from it,” she quips. Unlike many musicians who start off on conventional acoustic or electric guitar, the teenage O’Callaghan gravitated straight towards the bass.
By her own admission, she isn’t a very good guitar player. But the bass — that’s a whole other story. She’s made the instrument her own. “I was very lucky from the early days in that I worked with amazing drummers. Now I’m playing with [veteran heavy metal drummer] Tommy f**king Aldridge. I mean, c’mon! Every night, during the set, we walk off stage while Tommy does his drum solo and it’s one of those ‘pinch me, how did I get here’ moments.”
She got there through ferocious hard work, innate talent and an Irish charm that can’t be taught in networking schools. Her early days in music, naturally, weren’t nearly as thrilling.
“When I first started, I was incorporate wedding bands and I’d have to learn 30 or 40 songs really fast. And you were having to keep up with people that were years ahead of you. It’s hard work, but that’s how you earn your dues.”
Having realised she worked especially well in hard-rock bands, she relocated to the US and soon doors were opening. Did being a female bassist help get her noticed? She winces.
“The female musician thing, I hate that. There are loads of prominent female musicians now, but we have to normalise it.”
Has it become more normalised since she first started playing in household-name bands? “Definitely. But it also depends on the girl in the band, what kind of personality you are. I’ve been really lucky in that the bands I’ve played with have been like bands of brothers. But you’ll get situations outside of that that wouldn’t happen to men in bands — almost accidental insults. It’s hilarious, but you’d have [roadies] saying, ‘Do you want me to help you plug in your bass?’”
She tends not to let such chatter get to her. She knows her own worth. “You’re there because you’re good at your job. You’re never going to get hired because you’re a chick. And it’s not just about being able to play the music. If you can’t live on the road with a group of people, you’re not going to cut it. It’s a life that isn’t for the faint-hearted.
“You don’t hear it as much any more but there used to be this stereotype of bringing a woman into the touring unit: ‘Is it going to be weird? Is she going to be moody?’ Every single guy I tour with is a thousand times moodier than me!
“I love the guys I’m on tour with, but I was just thinking the other night, when they went off on something, and I was outside looking in, that if I did that I’d be told, ‘Oh, she’s just hormonal’.”
Ireland has produced several very famous bassists, not least Phil Lynott and Adam Clayton, but it’s Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood whose playing thrills her. “He’s so unusual how he plays. There’s nothing typical about it. The bass will come in on the 11th bar. “A lot of my favourite bass players are local session-heads — friends that play really beautifully. But I grew up loving a lot of prog stuff, like Tool, and I ended up working with Maynard [James Keenan, Tool frontman], which was really cool, and as someone who loves Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones’s bass-playing was, like, genius.”
Although she fostered an early love of music, the idea of being a musician was something that came to her later. “I didn’t plan to be a musician at all. If you’d told me at 16 that this would be my path, I would have laughed. But without sounding too hippie — or whatever the world wants to call it — if there’s a higher purpose to my career, it’s me having a platform to discuss something that means everything to me.”
That something is animal rights. She has been a vegan since childhood — she stopped eating meat after her brother joked at the dinner table that the beef on her plate had come from one of the cattle in a nearby field.
“In fairness, my family really supported me,” she says, adding that such a lifestyle choice wasn’t always easy in the Midlands of the early 1990s. “There were no vegetarian/vegan options when I was a little girl in Mullingar — even when I was in my teens.
“It was only when I moved away that things really started to pick up in Ireland — you’d lads like the Happy Pear coming along. But now when I go back, I’m blown away by how many options there are” She believes that eating a plant-based diet is far easier than when she was a child. “If you think something is going to be hard, it will be hard. When there was little choice, eating out and being vegetarian or vegan was much more of an effort.” Now, she notes, the good news is virtually every restaurant can accommodate those who want to avoid meat.
Some vegan activists are puritanical in their belief that everyone should move to a plant-based diet immediately. O’Callaghan is not one of them. Hers is a more considerate approach and she believes it is worth celebrating when meat-eaters actively decide to reduce their intake of animal products.
“I have to be realistic,” she says. “I love it when I hear someone saying their diet is 90pc plant-based, and they’re moving to being fully plant-based. But I also love to hear someone who eats meat and saying they are now actively eating much less than before.”
“I have to be realistic,” she says. “I love it when I hear someone saying their diet is 90pc plant-based, and they’re moving to being fully plant-based. But I also love to hear someone who eats meat and saying they are now actively eating much less than before.”
“I love it when I hear someone saying their diet is 90pc plant-based, and they’re moving to being fully plant-based. But I also love to hear someone who eats meat saying they are now actively eating much less than before.”
For her, vegan advocacy is muchmore about encouragement than admonishment. “I always tell people, ‘Everyone’s vegan but they also eat meat’. We’ve this problem with labels. You mention ‘vegan’ and people go, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that’. But there are vegetables and spuds and rice everywhere.”
She doesn’t limit herself to vegan restaurants. “Some of the very best vegan meals I had were in steakhouses. They have the best, freshest produce. Everyone in the band is like, ‘Sorry Tanya, you can’t eat here.’ And I’m like, ‘I can eat anywhere — let me just have a quiet word with the chef.’”
O’Callaghan is adamant that far greater numbers would reduce their intake if they were aware of the realities of intensive meat production and the unvarnished truth about slaughterhouses.
The vegan movement could hardly have a healthier, more radiant-looking spokesperson, but she cautions against the idea that all plant-based diets are equal. “You can be a very unhealthy vegan very easily,” she says, in reference to many of the ultra-high-processed faux-meat products on supermarket shelves. “I tend not to say ‘vegan diet’. For me, it’s all about wholefoods and plant-based.”
There is a growing market in fashion for those who want to move away from goods made of animal-hide and O’Callaghan is keen to make her mark in the fast-growing vegan-leather market. Together with Italian company Miomojo she has created a holdall bag. She steps away from the video call to go to retrieve the bag — it’s stuffed with clothes. “It’s entirely made from recycled plastic bottles!” She has been able to road test it on tour with Whitesnake.
“I’m going to be doing a limited series of bags with them,” she says, “and hopefully a vegan leather jacket and boots as well. It’s about walking the walk and talking the talk for me. I want to have every single aspect of my life about animal welfare and sustainability. Even my tax guy — he plants trees in the rainforest when you pay him.”
