Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Loud'N'Proud, by Nazareth

ON an evening earlier this month, in Penticton, British Columbia, two veteran British rock stars had dinner together.

One was Paul Rodgers, who shot to fame at the tail-end of the Sixties as the powerhouse vocalist with Free and later fronted Bad Company; the other was Pete Agnew, bass guitarist and sole surviving founder of Nazareth, the Scottish band who had released their debut album in 1971.

“Met up with some old friends the other day”, Pete wrote on his band’s Facebook page on August 9, beneath a photograph of him with Paul. “Paul and his wife Cynthi very kindly took me out for dinner before the show in Penticton and we had a lovely few hours catching up and reminiscing”.

Though Rodgers has, in Agnew's words, “pretty much retired from touring these days and enjoying life in beautiful BC” (he released his latest solo album last year), Nazareth are still touring, and still proving highly popular. The original band - Agnew, singer Dan McCafferty (Agnew's best friend since their primary school days), guitarist Manny Charlton and drummer Darrell Sweet - were formed in Dunfermline in 1968, taking their name from the opening line of The Band’s classic song, The Weight - ‘I pulled into Nazareth/feelin’ ‘bout half past dead’. Their debut album, Nazareth, sold well in Germany but not in the UK; the follow-up, Exercises, was released in July 1972.

Both albums had their merits though, as Charlton conceded in 2018, they were perhaps lacking in direction. “Although we played loads of shows with Rory Gallagher and Atomic Rooster”, he said in the liner notes to that year's Loud & Proud! Anthology, “those records came out and didn’t really make much of a connection. Maybe that’s because at the start we thought we could be anybody. We really thought we could be Crosby, Stills & Nash or Elton John”.

Speaking to NME in August 1973, McCafferty confessed to being unhappy with the studio set-up during the recording of the first album. “But there’s one thing [it] has that I still like – excitement, which is another thing we’re about it. We get excited when we play and we try to get it down on plastic”, he added. Exercises, for its part, was ambitious but was, in McCafferty's admission, “too clever”.

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A miracle was now  needed as the band's management was about to pull the plug. Nazareth thought about asking Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page or The Who's Pete Townshend to produce their next album, but Deep Purple's bass guitarist Roger Glover volunteered his services, and the band, who had previously toured with Purple, accepted. The outcome was Razamanaz (1973). Boasting a harder, rockier edge, crisp production and some fine songs, it was a commercial success, reaching number 11 in the British charts and yielding two Top Ten singles in Broken Down Angel and Bad Bad Boy. 

With Glover still on board, their fourth album, Loud’N’Proud, which came out towards the end of the year, consolidated their success. The band by now were touring incessantly - they played some 250 gigs in 1973 as well as writing and recording - and the album built on their success. It sold noticeably well in such countries as Canada, Finland and Germany, and peaked at 150 in the US Billboard charts.

Loud’N’Proud was notable for a riveting version of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight, which Joni herself is said to have loved. When Melody Maker interviewed the band in October 1973 its writer noted that, just the day before, they “had met Joni and played her their version which, they report, apparently knocked her out”.

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The album was completed immediately before Nazareth embarked on a tour of the States. “We finished it at five in the morning and left for the States at eleven the same morning”, Agnew told Melody Maker. “It’s still a rock album with eight songs, five of which are our own and there’s three covers. Apart from Joni’s song, there’s [Little Feat’s] ’Teenage Nervous Breakdown’ and a song we’ve always wanted to do called ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ by Dylan”.

In the words of music historian Martin C Strong, in his recent The Great Rock Bible: Old Testament 1920-1976, Nazareth “rewrote [This Flight Tonight] in startling, stratospheric melodic power”. The atmospheric, nine-minute-long version of the Dylan song (from his third album, The Times They Are A-Changing) remains captivating, and shows the extent of the band’s ambitions.

Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone magazine in May 1974, Greg Shaw observed: “The non-originals provide the best moments. Little Feat’s ‘Teenage Nervous Breakdown’ picks up in power what it loses in subtlety; Joni Mitchell’s ‘This Flight Tonight’ is shocking when heard in a Led Zeppelin arrangement. The clincher comes with a nine-minute version of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’.

An overlong drone of a song to begin with, it’s stretched to the limits with every repetitious device known to modern rock, and drowned in a haze of feedback fuzz. Strangely enough, it works and that leads me to the conclusion that Nazareth, in bridging the gap between folk and heavy metal, could easily become the Turtles of the Seventies. They are a group worth watching”.

Roger Glover produced the follow-up album, Rampant (1974) before Manny Charlton took over the controls for Hair of the Dog (1975), which put Nazareth into the big league. The US version included the Boudleaux Bryant-penned ballad, Love Hurts, which had previously been recorded by The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons. Nazareth's cover of it soared into the US Top 10, was a hit around the world, and spent 55 weeks on the Norwegian charts alone. The album's title track, meanwhile, would later be covered by Guns’n’Roses. The album sold two million copies worldwide and cemented Nazareth’s popularity in the States.

Further albums quickly followed: Close Enough for Rock’n’Roll, Play’N’ the Game, Expect No Mercy. By 1977 the band had completed no fewer than seven tours of the States. A 13-date tour of Canada saw them play to 100,000 fans. In Edmonton, they were presented with 45 gold and platinum records.

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Obituary: Dan McCafferty, singer with Scottish rock group, Nazareth

Nazareth had a narrow escape in October 1977, however. After they had played a gig in Greenville, South Carolina, with the hugely popular US rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Skynyrd’s drummer Artimus Pyle invited them to a barbecue the following day. The plan was that Skynyrd would then board a flight to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for their next concert. Pyle suggested that Nazareth could join them on the flight before making their own way to New Orleans, where they were due to play with Ted Nugent. But Nazareth declined, saying they had interviews and other duties to do. They didn’t particularly like private planes either, as Pete Agnew acknowledged a few years ago.

Skynyrd boarded the Convair CV-240 plane in Greenville but it ran out of fuel near the end of the flight and crashed in a wooded area in Mississippi. Six people died, including Skynyrd’s singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and Gaines’s sister Cassie, a backing vocalist. Nazareth were formidably popular at their peak, and have some 23 million album sales to their name. Like many long-established acts, they have seen more than a few line-up changes.

Sadly, Darrell Sweet died, aged 51, in 1999, to be replaced by Lee Agnew, Pete's son; Manny Charlton died, aged 80, in July 2022, and Dan McCafferty died that December, aged 76. He had, with regret, left the band in 2013, his ability to perform onstage having been badly affected by a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Dan was replaced by Carl Sentance.

You just cannot keep a good band down. Nazareth are still drawing in the crowds; their recent itinerary has taken in Canada, Germany, Sweden and Austria. And Nazareth’s 25th studio album, Surviving the Law, came out in 2022: Sentance, Agnew, Lee Agnew, and guitarist Jimmy Murrison. “Surviving The Law", said an enthusiastic review in Louder Sound, "is resolutely loud ’n’ proud in true Nazareth tradition".

* Next week: AWB, by the Average White Band