Pete Agnew of NAZARETH - Interview, Nov. 10 '08 Page 2
by Martin Popoff

A Roger Glover-related question, remember when you guys did This Flight Tonight... was there ever any talk about how that came about from Hard Lovin' Man?

Oh, I don't know. No, we never referred to anything else at the time. What we were doing that album, like way back, way, way back (laughs), and no, that was a thing that we had always been messing around with, that song. We always played it like that. Kind of a Ghost Riders In The Sky, kind of thing. And no, I never really tied in with anything. Well, maybe he did. I think for him, it sounded pretty fresh and pretty new at the time. He was really excited about it when we did it, I seem to remember. And we never really listened to Deep Purple for our influences. Of course, he was in Deep Purple, so there must have been influences because he was producing the album.

What are Roger's strengths as a producer?

He was really good at... he could bring everything together, he was a good arranger. And he was very, he was a disciplinarian. He liked to... every day we did a track, we would do a track one day, and we would do one track every day, and at the end of the day, when everybody was pretty much tired, he would say, 'OK, we're going to routine the track for tomorrow.' So we would just start messing around with the track, and we would play for about two hours every night and work out what we were going to do the next day. We wouldn't record it that night, because we were too tired to record it. But he used to go around with his drumstick, you know, like a conductor (laughs), and one of the things that he really loved, when we did the album, he loved the vocals. Because we have a lot of harmony, and he never had that in Deep Purple. Ian was always just singing. Deep Purple wasn't a harmony band. So he had a great time sating, 'Can you do this; can you do that?' And of course we could. He really enjoyed that. But his experience, the good thing about it, he had more experience in the studio than we had at that time. He had made quite a few albums. He'd already produced an album with a band called Elf, which is Ronnie Dio, they were younger guys at the time. He just did an album for them. I think he produced a couple albums by that time. The main thing with Roger, when we were going to do that album, Razamanaz, we were looking at different producers. We were looking at Jimmy Page, and Pete Townshend, but the thing is, Roger really, really wanted to do it. He actually said to us, 'I really, really want to do it.' And that makes a difference, rather than we were just hiring someone to do it. He really wanted to do it, and I think you can see that the few albums he did with us, he was a great producer for us. Hats off to the guy. He definitely helped to make those albums, and those were the albums that got us into the big time.

Pete Agnew of NAZARETH - Interview, Nov. 10 '08 Page 3