Rare Live Black Sabbath Footage Featuring Dave Walker Finally Released Online

Long-sought video of Black Sabbath performing with their ultra-brief frontman Dave Walker in 1978 has finally emerged online, offering metal historians a rare look into one of the band’s strangest transitional periods.

Walker—known for his roles with Fleetwood Mac, Savoy Brown, and now the Dave Walker Band—joined the Birmingham metal legends in late 1977. He stepped in during a tumultuous moment, replacing Ozzy Osbourne after the singer walked away amid fraught early writing sessions for what would become Never Say Die!.

His tenure was brief. Ozzy reconsidered and returned to Black Sabbath in early 1978, effectively erasing Walker’s short-lived stint from the band’s ongoing story. For years, the only surviving evidence of Walker fronting Sabbath was audio from a UK TV appearance on Look! Hear!—passed around among collectors, fans, and YouTube channels.

The Long-Lost Clip Surfaces

That changed this month when YouTube user Brian Schaefer uploaded the first known video of the Look! Hear! performance. The grainy footage shows Sabbath delivering the intro to “War Pigs” and an early version of “Junior’s Eyes,” a track that would later appear—reworked—on Never Say Die!.

For many fans, it’s the kind of archival find that rarely materializes.

Walker’s musical journey had begun long before his brief Sabbath detour. Born in Staffordshire, he first made his name in the early ’60s with The Redcaps before joining Savoy Brown in 1971. He recorded three albums with the blues-rock outfit—Street Corner Talking, Hellbound Train, and Lion’s Share—before moving on to Fleetwood Mac in 1972, where he appeared on two songs on their 1973 record Penguin.

Sabbath members had known Walker since their earliest days in Birmingham, but his time with them proved tense. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2014, he recalled feeling uneasy almost immediately, mentioning that his wife “clashed” with drummer Bill Ward’s. His exit, he said, came suddenly.

“One day I turned up where they were rehearsing near Evesham and they were having a meeting, after which Bill told me, ‘We’re in, you’re out,’” Walker remembered. “No warning. I still don’t even know if Ozzy had agreed to come back then.”

What Came After—And What the Footage Means Now

Ozzy’s 1978 return didn’t last long either. The singer was fired in April 1979, a decision guitarist Tony Iommi described earlier this year as unavoidable.

“We didn’t have an option,” Iommi said. “The record company were saying: ‘How’s the new album coming on?’ I said: ‘Oh yeah, it’s coming on okay.’ But we hadn’t done anything. We were putting riffs down, but Ozzy just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. He wasn’t into it any more.”

Sabbath forged ahead with Ronnie James Dio, while Ozzy launched his legendary solo career with 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz. The original lineup later reunited across multiple eras—1999 to 2005, again in 2011, and for a final time in 2025. Ozzy died on July 22 after a heart attack, just 17 days after Sabbath’s farewell show, Back to the Beginning, in Birmingham.

The resurfaced Walker footage arrives at a moment when fans are reassessing the band’s history—warts, lineup changes, detours, and all. It offers a rare window into a moment when Sabbath could have taken a very different direction, however briefly.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate timeline: one where Walker stayed, the material shifted, and Never Say Die! became something entirely different. Instead, the newly surfaced clip stands as a reminder of how chaotic, fragile, and unpredictable the late ’70s were for Sabbath.

And now, decades later, it adds another piece to the puzzle—a fleeting but fascinating snapshot of a band in limbo, on the brink of both collapse and reinvention.

For longtime fans, it’s more than a curiosity. It’s a piece of history finally pulled out of the dark.