Nazareth Reborn

It’s never too late, is it?

Nazareth, the Scottish rock band that made rock ballads a thing, has come home. As other bands have gradually fallen by the wayside hobbled by age and time, Nazareth has been rocking for 58 years, since the birth of rock.

And now the band is back. The foursome sound like Nazareth again. They all have glints in their eyes, purpose in their hearts. Even the road crew has a skip in their step. They are reborn.

This has to do with their new lead singer, Gianni Pontillo, a tall, 48-year-old Swiss-born Italian minstrel with a big voice that shakes them back to their roots.

Nobody can ever replace their original lead singer Dan McCafferty, with his indefinable full-bodied, razor-rasp voice and that scream! Eyes as blue as could be, long, slim fingers around the mike, a mop of curly hair, a wide mouth, his familiar stomp, a presence. Unforgettable. Essential.

So when McCafferty had to reluctantly step away from the band after he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in 2013 – that really hurt him inside, he told me –  the band forged on. It has always been a working band. So they had to work.

McCafferty died on Nov. 8, 2022 at age 76. Agnew wrote his eulogy, thinking someone else would have to deliver it because the band had commitments in Europe. But when replacement lead singer, Carl Sentence had to take a five-day break to rest his voice, just at the time of McCafferty’s celebration of life, it was as if the skies had opened, just for this moment. Agnew lost no time in boarding a plane, and delivered the eulogy himself. That mattered. They had been friends since they were school kids in Dunfermline.

Band founder and leader Pete Agnew did not believe they could ever replace McCafferty, nor did he want a band that was a cheap imitation. So why try? He strove for something a bit different. And that was Carl Sentence, who was with the band for 11 years, up until late last year. Sentence had rocket-powered energy as he fronted the band. His voice put the band in a new, different place.  They made an album together. Last fall, Agnew said Sentence had become part of them.

Then Agnew discovered Pontillo. Since 2019, he had been the frontman of German heavy metal band Victory.

Pontillo was “a gift from the gods,” Agnew told rock podcaster Chris Akin.  He had fallen into their lap. He had an amazing voice that has “really filled the slot of Dan [McCafferty] well.

Pontillo’s  favourite period of rock was Nazareth’s period of rock. He just came along at the right time. Pontillo has always loved Guns N’ Roses whose lead singer Axl Rose idolized McCafferty. Pontillo composes music, too, on the piano.

Agnew told the podcaster that he hadn’t known Pontillo until about 1 ½ years ago. Someone had pointed him out to him. “I was absolutely blown away when I heard him singing,” he said on the podcast.

Pontillo’s presence has lifted the spirit of the band. “It feels as if we just had some really nice medicine,” Agnew said.

It’s not that they had been playing badly without him. Perhaps they had been going through the motions, thumbing the notes, outputting the lyrics, touching the strings, measuring it all with the drums. But Pontillo has raised their mood on stage. (And probably off-stage, too.)

“The guys are really enjoying playing these songs again,” Agnew said.

“It’s like a totally different band now,” he said.

Nazareth finished their Bending the Rules tour last December, and Sentence made a quick exit, eventually saying that “if you can’t do the job, you shouldn’t be there,” and left, leaving Nazareth with his blessing. “It’s time to move on,” he said.

Nazareth said only that there had been a “parting of the ways.”

And then Pontillo came on board. He did a tour with Nazareth in Europe and now they are in the midst of a tour across the United States. Nazareth was to do a tour across the United States two years ago, but Agnew’s illness caused a tour cancellation. Agnew thinks they owe the U.S. fans a tour. Next they will do eight stops in Brazil, another Nazareth hotspot, and perhaps head to Santiago, Chile.

Nazareth has begun to play some of their tunes again that have fallen by the wayside over the past few years.  How often have you heard “Telegram” and “Whiskey Drinkin’ Woman” recently? Pointillo does those.

Nazareth is back to its rock bluses sound.

And it feels new to them again. As if they had just done a new album with all of those old songs on it.

Of course, they play different songs in Europe, than in North America or Brazil, depending on what songs resonate most with those crowds.

For example, “Animals” was a song they did to great acclaim during tours across Russia, but heard seldom elsewhere. “Dream On” was a big hit in Europe. “Where Are You Now” was a favourite in Asia.

“Love Hurts” seems to be a favourite everywhere.

“You should hear [Pontillo] sing ‘Love Hurts,’ Agnew said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67QxZmz9DyE

“Love Hurts’ was a ballad that changed the lives of Nazareth. While McCafferty and Agnew had been away at a wedding, drummer Daryl Sweet and lead guitar Manny Charlton began picking away at the song to become a “B” side. It wasn’t even intended to be on any album.

There had been many versions of “Love Hurts’ but Nazareth’s favourite was the soulful one by Emmy Lou Harris and Gram Parsons.

When McCafferty and Agnew returned the next day, Sweet and Charlton had recorded it in exactly the same key as Harris and Parsons. But it was in a very low octave, far too low for McCafferty.

So McCafferty had to sing it an octave higher than that. It made the song very difficult to sing for McCafferty, but the effect of it was an anguished, heartfelt sound that illustrated the song. A hit it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsnEhf-ONME&list=RDfsnEhf-ONME&start_radio=1

(Had McCafferty and Agnew been in the studio, it would not have been done in that key. And it wouldn’t have become as big a hit, Agnew said.

Pontillo has chosen to sing it in that original key. It’s explosive and heart-rending. And he does it with his own rasp.

Pontillo debuted with Nazareth on Feb. 26 this year on the band’s European tour.

They have not scheduled a tour across Canada this year, so Canadians, hot fans of the band, will have to wait. But then, Nazareth played in Canada in back to back years, although they usually do every other year. Last season was billed as their Farewell Tour in Canada, but Agnew says they will be back and are not actually saying goodbye to Canada or to anybody.

“I’m 80 on my next birthday,” Agnew said last fall at the Canadian stop at Casino Rama. “So every gig is a potential farewell.

“A lot of people guy tickets to say; ‘I was there! I was there when it happened!”

“They are waiting for me to keel over on the stage,” he joked.

But Agnew emphasized that it wasn’t so much a farewell tour as a farewell to TOURS like they had done in the past in Canada. “We are not packing up,” he said. “We have no intention of  not coming back. [in 2026], Its going to be one of our busiest years, as it happens.”

But no longer will the band be doing tours that last four to five weeks across Canada. They will come over for gigs, but not touring. “I’m not really too keen on touring,” Agnew said. “So we’re trying to cut touring everywhere. We’re fulfilling all the touring contracts [last year in Canada] but I don’t think I’m NOT going to see Canada again. We won’t be doing Farewell tour No. 6. We’re not doing that.”

Agnew finds himself laughing at Uriah Heep, who announced a farewell tour in 2024 with Mick Box, an original band member. They called it “The Magicians Farewell.” They are booked to the end of this season, still saying Farewell, to the places they rocked 20 years ago. Agnew says Nazareth has no plans for that sort of thing.

Agnew has demanded that on the U.S. tour that they have a tour bus because “I’m not flying around.”

The problem with touring in both Canada and the United States is the size of the countries, which demand flying by plane – if you do an extensive tour. Taking a tour bus is heaven. “As soon as the tour bus goes away, this is when it’s disastrous,” Agnew said.  “You don’t want to be flying. It’s a nightmare thing. And Pearson airport (Toronto) has got to be one of the worst in the world, on the planet. It doesn’t work.

“There are two trains and three elevators. And the elevator can take one suitcase. We’ve got 14 trolleys. It’s horrible.”

Their tour across Canada in 2024 was the stuff of legends, if you want to talk about slogging through airports. It was craziness,” Agnew said.

They were to head for a gig in Halifax, and fortunately one of the crew had a phone app to trace his luggage.  They were to fly out of Toronto on a day that the skies opened and the Queen’s Plate at nearby Woodbine was postponed. Everything flooded. They were delayed for a night in Toronto, Flights were  cancelled.

When they are able to get out and land in Halifax, Pearson had lost their equipment. In Halifax, Nazareth played with equipment they had never seen before in Halifax.

“Don’t send that equipment to Halifax, because we are coming back to Toronto,” Agnew told the airport. But that didn’t happen. A crew member watched the equipment flying away from them on his app. “Every time we went someplace, it was going the other way,” Agnew said.

They had another gig in Waterloo, and then at Casino Rama. The equipment did catch up to them eventually, after a round trip.

This all happened, after they stepped out of their tour bus.

Their last stop on the Canadian tour was in Thunder Bay. They had to catch an early flight. There was only one flight from Toronto to Thunder Bay a day and it left early.

“We were flying about 2 ½ hours in one of these little planes. Us and our gear,” Agnew said.

But when they7 approached Thunder Bay, Agnew found out why they called it Thunder Bay.

“Sorry, we can’t land here,” they were told. Weather too bad. Winds too high. So the plane had to go elsewhere.

They ended up in Sioux Lookout, a town of 5,836 people about 350 kilometres from Thunder Bay. It was October, long past the blueberry festival and its mascot BlueBerry Bert, and the average temperature in October was 8.1 degrees Celsius. Nazareth made their unscheduled stop there late at night.

“It was a wee post.” Agnew said. “And it was a four-hour drive to Thunder Bay, so we couldn’t go. There was no way we could have caught a flight. So we had to stay up there that night, what was left of it. “

(There is a new Day’s Inn there, built from recycled cargo bins, with no restaurant,  across  the road from a pub. The shuttle driver from the airport was also chef and hotel manager.r. There was a woodlot view, and a great chorus of frogs at night.

They got rooms at 4 a.m.

This delay  meant they had to rebook all their transatlantic flights to Scotland. “It was a nightmare,” Agnew said.

“The last week of last year’s tour was a nightmare,” Agnew said., “The rest of the tour was fine. As soon as you get rid of the tour bus, and planes and airports are involved, that’s the kiss of death.”

Back at Pearson, their flights were delayed by at least 11 hours. “I’m losing the will to live,” lead guitarist Jimmy Murrison tweeted.

Pearson airport, is “ enough for anybody to want to shoot themselves” Agnew said. “ But to start the tour in that bloody place, it was absolutely awful.”

The tour bus is much better. It’s much more relaxing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to a place in time You are already kind of in your hotel, so you don’t have to worry too much.

Tour buses became a thing during the energy crisis In 1979 when flights were being cancelled frequently. Country singers began to use tour buses. In late 1978, Nazareth took a tour bus for the first time.

“We got this tour bus and we couldn’t believe it,” Agnew said. “You get up in the morning, in your hotel, you eat breakfast, go back to the bus and go to bed. Who wants to go to an airport when you can do this.”

Now and again, however, taking a flight becomes necessary. During a gig, they have to leave their tour bus. And Canada is so big. “You’ve got to leave it now and again, but you’re hot doing it every day.” Agnew said.

Russia – another of Nazareth’s hotspots, is another case altogether. They take a rail train across the country. “ No way we would fly in Russia,” Agnew said. “Their airlines were a joke. You had to fasten your seatbelts, if you got one. There’s no smoking unless you bright your own ash tray. You might get a cupcake or something. The seats were falling to bits. You’re not getting on these things. These things are just dropping out of the sky.”

So train it was. Nazareth had its own carriage on the Siberian Railway. They did all of their tours in Russia by rail. “And it was brilliant,” Agnew said. “We did all the tours in the 1990s up through the northeast. The distances are off the wall.

While in Canada, you can fly from one end to the other in five or six hours, in Russia, it is 9 or 10, Agnew said. “And you are still in the country.”

Agnew cannot see that the band will return to Russia, although they still get requests from Russian promoters. Agnew told them: ”Listen, I know I can come up there. It wouldn’t matter to you guys, but it would not do much for my social life in the rest of the world. I tell you, we cannot do that. We just cannot do it.”

So the Nazareth sound still reverberates in many spots around the world, even more so now with Pontillo on the mike. Agnew is the only original band member left, although drummer Lee Agnew and lead guitar Jimmy Murrison have been with the band longer than original band members Darrell Sweet and Manny Charlton. It’s the band that people know now.

“The original was like a lifetime ago to me,” Agnew said. “I can barely remember. I can remember obviously, but I play with Jimmy and Lee at home. The three of us have played longer than any of the Nazareth lines. You get to kind of know each other. You know everybody’s feel. You know.”

And to the fans watching now, the most recent lineup is Nazareth, as far as they are concerned. It’s the only thing people have seen in the past 10 years. Youngsters who come to the concerts know no other Nazareth. They do not know the Nazareth of long ago.

Pontillo is giving them a hint, though, of the grand days of old.

“You always get the people who say, oh it’s not Nazareth [especially without Dan McCafferty]. It’s not the real band.

“Well, I’ve got a list of 35 bands, like Deep Purple and AC/DC It’s a cover and it can go on forever. Everybody knows it’s a cover band, because there is only one [original] guy in it. It’s rubbish.

“It’s like the Blue Jays. They don’t have the same lineup they had 30 years ago.”

And by the way, although people give Nazareth commemorative jerseys for Blue Jays and Maple Leafs, they don’t have the foggiest idea what the teams are about.

At any rate, this new lineup with Pontillo takes Nazareth full circle, to a place they have been before, even if it is not exactly the same or ever will be. But it feels like it. It tastes like it. Their enthusiasm is undeniable. Shows in the United States are being sold out. They are being asked for encores.

It is their busiest year in a long time. People are getting a treat. New and old together. All Nazareth.