Pete Agnew of NAZARETH - Interview, Nov. 10 '08 Page 5
by Martin Popoff

How did Manny and Zal split the duties? Who is contributing what? What kind guitarists are they?

Well they got on well together. They were totally different players, totally, totally different. Manny was into the rough sound thing. He's more of a rough... he goes for the noise. He likes the noise, creating noise. Zal is an amazing technician, and a good songwriter as well - the guy is mind-blowing. He is probably... well, he's one of the best guitar players on the planet. And it was quite an honour to actually play with the guy for a couple of years.

Now he gets sole credit on Simple Solution - anything you can recall about him bringing that in?

Yeah, I remember when he came up to the farm there, we were already doing it, getting the album together, when we asked him to join the band. When he came up, he came in, and he said I've got a song here, and he played it for us, and we said yes, that's great, but it was a lot softer, than the way we did it. But he wanted it done the way we do it, if you like. So yes, within the first week, he had that one, and he contributed quite a lot, and more to the next album than that one, because were already pretty down the road with that album when he came; we just had to fit him into it.

Any recording things you remember, stories about any of these specific songs?

On that actual album? I figure you like this album.

Well, I'm going to write sort of a chapter on it.

Oh, I see.

Any stories about why you had certain lyrics on these ones?

I just think... I mean really... it's hard to remember. Some of the lyrics, a lot of things we did, we did lyrics, and everybody in the band just added a bit. Oh, that sounds good, I'll add this to it and I'll add that to it. So there was never an actual idea all the way through until it was finished. And everybody would look at each other and go, that's a song. And Claim To Fame, actually I can't even remember the lyrics, because it's so long ago. The main ones are, I remember the actual No Mean City track, and that was done with everybody. We just started playing and Dan just sung over it, and he had this idea, and obviously he had the idea, and we had no idea what he was singing, and we heard it when we did the demos and we said yes, yes, that's good. He's very good lyricist, Dan. He's always doing a lot of that stuff.

Pete Agnew of NAZARETH - Interview, Nov. 10 '08 Page 6