(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Sun 25 January 2026 12:00, UK
Hedonism only gets you so far in the world of rock and roll; you can’t spend your entire life consuming all manner of drink and drugs and still expect to be on top of your game. This was a fact that Ozzy Osbourne was forced to come to terms with in 1979, when he was unceremoniously booted from Black Sabbath.
That original line-up of Black Sabbath remains one of the all-time greats of rock and roll, almost single-handedly introducing the world to hard rock and metal rebellion, and inspiring a countless array of future artists spanning the spectrum from punk rock to death metal. Ultimately, though, that wild ride to the peak of Britain’s rock realm was not without its troubles, and Osbourne’s dismissal back in 1979 hardly came as a surprise. After all, he had already quit once before.
Being in a band of Sabbath’s stature isn’t always an easy ride. With the endless onslaught of sleep deprivation, mounting commercial pressures, and the fact that the band members were routinely consuming enough drugs to knock out a herd of elephants, something was bound to fall apart eventually.
Those first few albums remain undeniable masterpieces, but with that mounting pressure, internal struggles, and worsening dependencies on illicit substances, the band’s material soon dropped in quality, and by the time that Technical Ecstasy emerged in 1976, the breaking point was certainly on the horizon.
“I’d had enough,” Osbourne later shared in his 2009 memoir, I Am Ozzy. “There didn’t seem to be any point any more. None of us was getting on. We were spending more time in meetings with lawyers than we were writing songs; we were all exhausted from touring the world pretty much non-stop for six years; and we were out of our minds on booze and drugs.”
In short, then, something had to give way eventually. Then, during one fateful and presumably argumentative rehearsal in 1977, Osbourne walked out on the band, apparently quitting for good. It was down to the remainder of the group to decide whether to throw in the towel, too, or carry on with a new vocalist, and they ended up choosing the latter option.
Ultimately, Tony Iommi tapped up former Idle Race vocalist and fleeting Fleetwood Mac member Dave Walker, who promptly caught a flight from California to Birmingham to heed the call of the hard rock heroes. For at least a little while, it seemed as if Walker was a permanent replacement for Osbourne, even if he didn’t pack quite the same punch as the band’s original vocalist.
With Walker, the band even made a television appearance on the Midlands programme Look! Hear! in early 1978. In the end, though, that brief appearance on local TV ended up being one of Walker’s only notable moments with the band. During his time in Birmingham, the vocalist bumped into a dejected Osbourne, and shortly thereafter, Ozzy asked to rejoin the band, mere days before he was meant to go into the studio to record his first solo project.
Inevitably, Sabbath took back their original singer, and Walker was unfortunately canned. What’s more, the reams of lyrics that Walker had written during his brief time with the band had to be abandoned, as they were created for a completely different vocal style than Osbourne’s. Thus, the entirety of Walker’s time with the band was captured on that one TV appearance.
In the end, Osbourne lasted just one more year with Black Sabbath before being fired by his bandmates, to be replaced by Ronnie James Dio, who established an entirely new era for the group. As a result, it is easy to forget the fact that, if only for a month or two, Dave Walker was the frontman of the greatest hard rock outfit of all time.
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