Love Leads to Madness

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a record that still feels like a late-night confession with the amp turned up. Nazareth’s “Love Leads to Madness,” the opener on the 1982 album 2XS, is spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have ever sat in a parked car arguing with somebody you cannot quite leave, you already know the plot. The chorus does not whisper. It states the case plain: our love leads to madness. Dan McCafferty delivers it in that Dunfermline rasp that could sand a table and still sound like a friend telling you the truth.

The song did not start in a boardroom. Guitarist Billy Rankin has told the story in his own writings about his years with the band. The hook line was already living in his head from a 1978 demo session in London with his earlier outfit, The Mirrors, cut at Riverside Studios. He and bassist Mike had sung “Our love leads to madness” back then, long before anyone at Nazareth had a chart in mind. When Rankin came aboard, drummer Darrell Sweet locked onto that line. The two of them shaped it into a single, and the rest of the band — McCafferty, Pete Agnew, Manny Charlton, and keyboard man John Locke — put their names on the writing credit the way Nazareth often did, as a unit. Rankin has said the new album was heading into the studio with five of his songs on the slate, and this one got singled out as the lead single. Dream On, another Rankin piece with an extra verse from Charlton, would become the European smash. Madness got the first shot.

They cut 2XS in January 1982 at AIR Studios on Montserrat, with John Punter producing and engineering. That Caribbean room had already hosted a pile of big rock records, and the band worked the track up as a tight piece of radio rock rather than a twelve-minute jam. The album landed in the early summer of 1982 on Vertigo overseas, through NEMS at home in Britain and A&M in North America. “Love Leads to Madness” followed as a UK single on August 6. It climbed to number 3 in South Africa, parked at number 19 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, and bubbled under the Hot 100 at 105. The parent album peaked at 122 on the Billboard 200 and stayed around for ten weeks, the last time Nazareth cracked that chart. Games, the second single, went nowhere much. Dream On later did the heavy lifting in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and even Poland. For American rock radio, though, Madness was the one that kept getting the request line busy.

The video is its own tall tale. Rankin has written that the shoot was squeezed in after the final gig of the tour in Pasadena, close enough to the film lots that somebody figured they could borrow a leftover set from the science-fiction picture Battle Beyond the Stars. He remembers being cast as a sort of Captain Dan, with a model named Jayne Andrew as the love interest. Andrew was then the girlfriend, and later the longtime wife, of Faces and Who drummer Kenney Jones. Rankin has also joked that the same shoot involved McCafferty clobbering him in the head with a billiard ball that was not supposed to sing. His Washburn Explorer-style guitar, the one that survived after a wild night at Cobo Hall in Detroit cost him two gold-tops to a crowd that would not let go of the neck, shows up in that clip. He has ranked the finished video among the worst ever made, and then admitted he is in a few other contenders as well. The song did not need the spaceship. The chorus did the work.

None of that happens if four working men in Dunfermline do not get stubborn in the late 1960s. Pete Agnew had already been at it since 1961 in a local semi-pro group called The Shadettes. Darrell Sweet came in around 1963, a teenager who had played in a pipe band and sometimes turned up to gigs in a kilt. Dan McCafferty joined in 1965 after another singer moved on. Manny Charlton, who had come through bands like The Red Hawks and Mark V, completed the four-piece that would matter. By the end of 1968 they were done with the old name. The Shadettes sounded light for the records they wanted to make. The story Pete and Dan have both told is that they were sitting in the bar, or the foyer, of a Dunfermline hotel — fans still point to the Belleville — when The Band’s “The Weight” came on the house system. The opening line landed: I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead. Pete said, how about Nazareth? Nobody argued. A few early letters accused them of being a religious act. They kept the name anyway.

They did not quit the day jobs on a whim. Agnew has pinned the turn to full-time on the first of July 1971, when manager Bill Fehilly, a bingo-hall man with a nose for a gamble, told them he would match the wages they were already earning if they turned professional. All four were married. The money was not glamorous, but it was enough to move south to a cramped communal flat in London and start the grind. Their first publicity photographs were taken at the Nell Gwynne, a topless bar on Wardour Street, which tells you plenty about the London they walked into. The debut album arrived in 1971. Exercises in 1972 got them noticed enough to open for Deep Purple. Roger Glover produced Razamanaz in 1973, and “Broken Down Angel” and “Bad Bad Boy” both went Top Ten at home. Loud ’n’ Proud brought a reworked Joni Mitchell song, “This Flight Tonight,” and Rampant kept the road full. Then Hair of the Dog in 1975, with McCafferty tearing into the Everly Brothers’ “Love Hurts,” turned a Scottish hard-rock band into an international name. Texas radio helped push that ballad up the American chart. By the time 2XS arrived, they had already been stars, been written off, and learned how to outlast the write-off.

McCafferty’s voice is the thread through all of it. He could croon a hurt and then sand it down in the same verse, which is why a song about love going sideways suited him. He stepped back from the road in 2013 when his health would not allow the miles, and he died in November 2022. Pete Agnew, the last of the original four still in the lineup, has kept the name on the road with newer hands, including his son Lee on the drums and Carl Sentance out front. The old records have not gone anywhere. Put “Love Leads to Madness” next to “Love Hurts” and you hear the same band telling two chapters of the same story: one about the bruise, one about the chase that causes it.

Zoo Freaks who want the long view can dig through the band’s own pages. The official site is Nazareth, the place they pointed people to when the new home page went up. The verified Facebook page lives at Nazareth on Facebook, where tour notes and old photographs still draw the faithful. Instagram is @nazarethband. The band’s X account is @NazarethBand. Between those corners and a stack of worn 2XS jackets, the song keeps doing what it did on rock radio in 1982: it makes a messy romance sound like a reason to turn the volume up. That is the kind of record the crew at THE ZOO will ride until the groove runs out.