Nazareth - Razamanaz (1996)

Razamanaz is the third studio album by the Scottish hard rock band Nazareth, released in May 1973. It was the band's first LP record to break the charts and was produced by Roger Glover of Deep Purple, who the band was on tour with at the time. "Woke Up This Morning" was re-recorded for this album.

The stories also reveal that Axl Rose is a huge Nazareth fan and Robert Plant owes them some money. They were almost on the plane with Skynyrd that crashed. Nazareth: the completely crazy story.

Nazareth bassist Pete Agnew – the only surviving founding member of the band – tells the story of his band from the Pitfirrane Hotel in Fife. It’s 2004, and here he is sitting opposite singer Dan McCafferty (who died last year – 2022). The two men first met on the first day of school when they were five years old, and when they were asked to sit on the same bench, they became best friends.

They later spent most of their time together in bands. Despite the doubts, Nazareth triumphed over time, experiencing glory and tragedy throughout their career, and have been touring ever since. The band has clearly seen better days, and it wasn’t exactly a bright start. Dan died in November 2022, and guitarist Manny Charlton in July of the same year. But in this old interview, they tell the extraordinary story of how they went from wedding band to rock legend.

“I remember the exact date we went full-time, when it became our main job,” Pete said. “It was July 1, 1971, and our manager said to us, ‘Go pro/go pro and I’ll pay you what you’re making now!’ We were all married at the time, so even though it wasn’t a lot of money, it made it a lot easier for us to get started.”

“But we had to convince ourselves first,” says singer Dan McCafferty, smiling. “We had a few regular gigs and were making a nice side income on top of our day jobs. We decided to give it a year. If it didn’t work out, we’d just go back to work. And it’s something we still do today—every July 1st, Pete or I would call the other guy and say, ‘Do you want to give this musicianship another twelve months?’”

In 1967, Agnew joined his first major band, The Shadette—which also featured future Nazareth drummer Darrel Sweet. “He was only 16, he played drums in a small band, and he would often show up to our shows wearing a kilt—which was sometimes heavily worn,” Agnew recalls. “Sometimes we’d call Darrell up on stage with us, and he ended up joining us.”

Until McCafferty arrived a year later, Agnew was one of the band's two singers. McCafferty joined Shadette under circumstances that were not unlike those in which Bon Scott joined AC/DC: "I was the roadie for the band. When one of their singers decided to quit on the day of a show, the guys thought they'd give me a chance. They'd heard me sing in the van before. But in this case, it was a no-brainer - no rehearsal. I remember Des - he's the one who quit - his yellow stage outfit almost suited me."

McCafferty's vocals were already a trademark of his rawness/rasp even then. And besides the fact that he'd smoked cigarettes his whole life, there's no particular explanation for the harshness or hardness of his voice. "The only thing I can think of is that I was a manual laborer," he says. “If you think about it, Bon Scott and Brian Johnson [AC/DC] both worked really hard all week. Maybe, like me, they brought that aggression/hardness to the stage.

The final piece of the puzzle was Manuel ‘Manny’ Charlton, a guitarist the band had known for years, but meeting him in 1968 inspired them to put aside the rigid Top 40 ballroom set.

“When Manny joined, he was the first one to suggest we write our own songs,” says Pete Agnew, the band’s bassist and backing vocalist. “We hadn’t even thought about it before because we were used as live jukeboxes. Then suddenly Zeppelin, Purple and Spooky Tooth came along, and the possibilities were endless.”