Manny Charlton obituary

Guitarist and arranger with the rock band Nazareth whose work was a major inspiration for Guns N’ Roses

Manny Charlton obituary

Hair of the Dog was the 1975 album that put the Scottish rock band Nazareth into the big league, and it was their first to be produced by the band’s guitarist and arranger Manny Charlton, who has died aged 80. It gave them a Top 20 hit on the US album charts and a Top 10 US single with their version of the Everly Brothers’ Love Hurts.

But Hair of the Dog also proved to be a different kind of landmark for Charlton. When, in the late 1980s, the then little-known band Guns N’ Roses were working on material for what would become their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, their vocalist, Axl Rose, instructed their record label, Geffen, to “get me the guy who produced Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog”. The title song, with its fat, swaggering beat and raucous chorus of “now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch”, was one of Axl’s all-time favourites.

At the time Charlton was working on Nazareth’s 1986 album, Cinema, but despite the poor quality of the live tapes Guns N’ Roses had sent him he agreed to fly to California to meet them. “If we liked each other, and I liked their music, it was possible that I’d produce for them,” he recalled. He did like them, and they got on well enough to make demo recordings of 25 songs, including the standout tracks Paradise City and Welcome to the Jungle. But production duties with Nazareth meant Charlton had to fly back to Europe, and Appetite for Destruction ended up being produced by Mike Clink. It has now sold more than 30m copies.

“They were just a bunch of young guys living their rock’n’roll dreams and having the time of their lives,” Charlton reflected. “I never foresaw that they would become one of the biggest bands in rock history.” He was never paid for his work on the demos, but they were included on a reissue of Appetite for Destruction in 2018, while Guns N’ Roses’s 1993 album of cover versions, The Spaghetti Incident?, included their version of Hair of the Dog.

Charlton was born in the Andalusian city of Línea de la Concepción in Spain, to where his Scottish mother and father had emigrated in the late 1930s. During the second word war, when he was two, his parents returned to their home town of Dunfermline.

As a youngster he was inspired by the sounds of early rock’n’roll, which led him to learn the guitar before busking on the Dunfermline streets and then playing with a variety of local groups. He met future Nazareth bandmates Dan McCafferty (vocals) and Pete Agnew (bass) while playing in the house band at the Kinema ballroom, and the three of them formed the Shadettes with drummer Darrell Sweet.

The classic Nazareth line-up, in 1976, from left to right: Darrell Sweet, Dan McCafferty, Manny Charlton and Pete Agnew. Photograph: Andre Csillag/Shutterstock

The Shadettes wore matching yellow suits and played cover versions of Top 30 hits, but all that changed in 1968 when they altered their name to Nazareth (inspired by The Band’s song The Weight, whose opening line is “I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin’ about half past dead”). With guidance from their manager, Bill Fehilly, a Scottish bingo-halls entrepreneur who also went on to look after the affairs of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, they moved to London in 1970 and released their debut album, Nazareth, the following year.

Neither that record, nor its follow-up, Exercises (1972), made much of an impression, but the tide began to turn with Razamanaz (1973), produced by Roger Glover of Deep Purple, with whom Nazareth had been touring. By now the hard-hitting but melodic Nazareth sound was becoming discernible, and the album reached No 11 on the UK album chart, while spinning off the Top 10 UK hit singles Broken Down Angel and Bad Bad Boy. Loud’n’Proud (1973) did one better on the UK album charts by reaching No 10, and their rocked-up version of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight was a No 11 single.

The band’s prospects looked promising, and it was with their their sixth album, Hair of the Dog, that major international stardom beckoned. It was recorded in nine days at Escape Studios, a converted oast house in Kent, and as well as the title track, featured some of the band’s most enduring songs. Imaginative cover versions were a Nazareth trademark, including Tomorrow’s 1967 psychedelic nugget My White Bicycle, a No 14 hit. There they delivered a strikingly delicate treatment of Randy Newman’s bar-room ballad Guilty while making Nils Lofgren’s Beggars Day sound apocalyptic. The US version of Hair of the Dog contained the band’s grand and dramatic version of Love Hurts, an early specimen of the “power ballad” genre arranged by Charlton and sung with heartrending intensity by McCafferty. It gave them a Top 10 hit in the US and charted around the world, helping the album to sell more than 2m copies internationally.

Nazareth peforming Hair of the Dog live in 1977.

Hair of the Dog proved to be the platform for a string of successful albums, including the US Top 30 album Close Enough for Rock’n’Roll (1976), though the magic was waning by the time they released 2XS in 1982, which was their last album to reach Billboard’s Top 200 album listings. Charlton’s last album with Nazareth was their 17th, Snakes n’Ladders (1989), after which he quit. “There were just too many personal problems in the band during that time,” he reflected. “We should never have been in the studio at that point and I’ll take my share of the blame for all the bullshit that went down.”

In 1998 he moved to Texas, where he formed the Manny Charlton Band, with whom he recorded a couple of albums. He also made a string of solo albums, from Drool in 1999 to Solo in 2016. The compilation Creme de la Creme – A Best Of was released in 2018. In 2021 he celebrated his 80th birthday by recording a new version of Nazareth’s 1976 song Telegram, a saga of the life of a touring rock musician.

He is survived by his daughter, Vicki. He was porced from his wife Isabel.