Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Orpheum / Graz / Austria
Concert date: May 4, 2010
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: €32.00
It was March 2009, and Nazareth were scheduled to play Vienna’s Szene, a fairly long haul for us. Vienna isn’t exactly the end of the world, but when Scottish hard rock legends play so often just across our northern border, even the Austrian capital can start to feel far away. Still, we weren’t about to let that stop us. One sunny Monday, a trio of eager music nuts from the foot of Triglav hit the road for Vienna, and then, what do you know, bitter disappointment was waiting for us at the club. There was a sign on the door in German that we just refused to understand! Today’s Nazareth show is cancelled! The official reason: Dan McCafferty’s voice gave out at soundcheck, and the guys had no choice but to cancel the evening’s show and a few upcoming dates until McCafferty recovered.
Because of that unfortunate episode, my personal concert curse, it would’ve been a sin to skip the Scottish classic rock standard-bearers in much closer Graz, and even better, at the Orpheum, a hall known for its excellent acoustics and generally cozy vibe. The Rockline crew rolled up at eight, after the obligatory stop at Mediamarkt, when the place was already buzzing with the growing crowd. The support band started soon after, but we had other business at the same time. Lady Luck smiled on us and, right before showtime, offered us an interview with both original members of the band, bassist Pete Agnew and vocalist Dan McCafferty. Their good spirits and relaxed attitude were a preview, practically a guarantee, of an unforgettable night, which kicked off a little before half past nine.
A few minutes after the announced start, thick smoke fills the stage, the hall goes quiet, and the sound of Scottish bagpipes creeps in from somewhere in the back, carrying the crowd off to a land of endless green hills. We’re in another world now! After the intro the pipes fade out, the fog lifts, and the Scottish four-piece march onto the stage. Let the get-together begin. We jumped straight into the seventies, as Nazareth opened with “Telegram”. Since the band today (well, for quite a while now, really) is built on just the basic instruments, guitar, bass and drums, the ears quickly miss the keyboards that are so unmistakable on that song. Playing classic rock just doesn’t bring in mountains of money anymore, and one more person in the band means, as ugly as it sounds, simply one more expense. “Turn On Your Receiver” and “Miss Misery”, from their biggest classics, the albums Loud ‘N’ Proud (1974) and Hair Of The Dog (1975), steered the show onto the familiar Nazareth tracks, so a predictable set list with no big surprises and no experimenting with lesser-known material. The fact is that the opium of the masses is simply the better-known tunes, and if they’d picked some of the less frequently played but no less quality songs, plenty of people would’ve walked out of the hall disappointed. Like it or not, names like UFO, Uriah Heep or Nazareth are forced to cling to a long-proven repertoire.
The stage is ruled by the veterans, the aforementioned vocalist Dan McCafferty and bassist Pete Agnew. Every moment of the show, the band’s two leading men make it clear with a convincing performance that miles of experience run through their veins and that nothing can knock them off course. It’s incredible how musically powerful these two still are today! Their bodies carry more than 40 years of constant touring and just as many years of alcohol, and yet the performance stays brilliant! Vocalist McCafferty in particular is in a class of his own, since time usually likes to mess with singers most of all. He’s well past sixty, yet the color and tone of his voice remain recognizably raspy and therefore youthful, and his outstanding vocal performance becomes an even bigger achievement when you realize that cognac and beer are still on his pre-show menu to this day. McCafferty was slightly under the weather, as a sharp eye could tell, because during the instrumental parts he liked to retreat into a darker part of the stage and try to cough discreetly. That happened throughout the entire night, but despite the hiccups he delivered his vocal role convincingly and confidently. “My White Bicycle” and “Hair Of The Dog” also put the father-son duo of Lee and Pete Agnew on vocal duty (Lee, on drums, is Pete’s son), and they made it look easy too. More than once their harmonies made me wonder whether they were getting some help from the mixing desk. Guitarist Jimmy Murrison has his place on stage as well. At first I thought he’d only be picking up crumbs, but over the course of the evening he shifted into a higher gear and made himself heard with plenty of solo spots, so a lot of the song intros fell to him. For a whole decade now Lee Agnew has been wielding the drumsticks in Nazareth, and he brought an interesting extra element to their sound, a double bass pedal, which sounds really cool in such an old-school band.
The hits came one after another, keeping everyone’s hands in the air at the front of the stage in a checkmate position. Tracks like “Shanghai’d in Shanghai” and “Hair Of The Dog”, with their heavy riffs, blew an extra gust of wind through the crowd and showed why Nazareth were once among the strongest hard rock acts of their generation. During the latter, a cute brunette brought McCafferty Scottish bagpipes on stage, and a short bit followed, dressed in more traditional colors, which then turned back into the familiar guitar motif for the final part of the song. The main set wrapped up after a good hour with the most recognizable and indispensable ballad, “Love Hurts”, with young and old in the hall singing along together and letting the sound from the stage wash over them. McCafferty lagged slightly behind on the vocals the whole time, barely noticeably, but even counting that flaw, his show overall was more than excellent. Hats off!
The return to the stage brought, again, some Scottish folk motifs, plus the acoustic number “See Me” from the latest studio album “The Newz” (2008), which together with “The Gathering” from the first part of the show makes up the rarer material. The night closed with the rock’n’roll madness of “Razamanaz” and another evergreen, “This Flight Tonight”. One last bow and the sturdy gents marched off.
In a solid forty-five minutes the old tomcats confidently did their thing and won. The crowd got what it wanted, a good time and plenty of dirty rock’n’roll. The stage show itself is extremely static, but with Nazareth the strengths have to be found elsewhere: in the adrenaline their songs carry secretly inside, in the switching of rhythm between hellish marches and tender ballads, and of course in the energy flowing both ways throughout the show. And when absolutely everything clicks and the musicians themselves are in great spirits, as they were this time, the feeling at the end of the night is truly priceless. This time Nazareth paid back every single kilometer we drove to Graz!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Telegram 2. Turn On Your Receiver 3. Miss Misery 4. Dream On 5. Bad Bad Boy 6. The Gathering 7. My White Bicycle 8. Hearts Grown Cold 9. Shanghai’d in Shanghai 10. Cocaine 11. Hair of Dog 12. Holiday 13. Love Hurts —encore— 14. Long Black Veil 15. See Me 16. Razamanaz 17. This Flight Tonight
Photo Gallery
