NAZARETH
" FANCY GIVING IT ANOTHER TWELVE MONTHS ?"
It’s the question Nazareth’s Pete Agnew and Dan McCafferty asked each other every July 1 since 1972. Now, with McCafferty gone, the band’s glory days behind them and Agnew the last surviving original member, he’s happy to still be giving it another 12.
In late June last year, Louder, Classic Rock magazine’s website, re-posted an epic interview with Nazareth’s Pete Agnew and Dan McCafferty. First published way back in 2004, and conducted over an Olympic-level drinking session in the bar of the Pitfirrane Hotel in Fife, it’s a rock’n’roll yarn that has everything, starting with Agnew and McCafferty, aged five, requesting to share a double desk on their first day at St Margaret’s Primary School in Dunfermline, to them becoming best friends, and the gradual elevation of Nazareth, the band they co-founded in 1968, from wedding group into one of the most underrated and stubbornly persistent hard rock bands that these isles ever produced.
With a grin, McCafferty had revealed how each year on July 1, the anniversary of the band first giving up their day jobs to turn pro back in 1971, either he or Agnew would phone the other to enquire: “D’ya fancy giving it another twelve months?”
With a mix of good-natured humour and genuine astonishment that these things happened at all, the pair dug into a treasure chest of war stories that included being taken under the wing of early producer Roger Glover from Deep Purple, reluctantly teetering on stack heels and dressing up “like bloody Christmas trees” on Top Of The Pops during the era of 70s glam, and the eventual patronage of Guns N’ Roses, whose singer Axl Rose fan-worshipped McCafferty, whose powerful gravelly voice could strip paint from walls.
When Nazareth and Lynyrd Skynyrd toured the United States together, in October 1977 they declined an invitation to travel with Skynyrd on the flight from Greenville, South Carolina to their next show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The plane crashed, killing Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, road manager Dean Kilpatrick and both pilots.
“We’d seen their plane, which looked like Gaffa Tape Airlines,” said Agnew. McCafferty claimed that one of the pilots had attended the barbeque at the house of drummer Artimus Pyle before the classic line-up of Skynyrd boarded the aircraft. However, radio reports had claimed that Nazareth did board the flight, so when McCafferty telephoned home his wife Maryann wept tears of relief.
