The most “tragic” hit of Glenn Hughes’ career: “A difficult moment”
A relative unknown joining the ranks of one of the most important, beloved hard rock outfits of all time is the kind of fantasy that most rock vocalists can only dream of, but that is more or less what happened to Glenn Hughes back in the mid-1980s, when he was plucked from relative obscurity to replace Jeff Fenholt – who was himself in a long-line of replacements for Ozzy Osbourne – to front Black Sabbath.
From the moment that Ozzy first walked out on Black Sabbath back in 1977, Hughes was the seventh in a run of different vocalists meant to replace the inherently irreplaceable output of the group’s original singer. In fairness to Hughes, though, he came into the band with an already impressive CV, centred around his time with funk rockers Trapeze, and a brief stint on bass guitar for Deep Purple. Nevertheless, his time with Sabbath didn’t exactly go to plan.
What the rest of the band failed to consider, not just in Hughes’ recruitment but also in the recruitment of his several predecessors and handful of successors, is that nobody can truly sing like Ozzy Osbourne, whose voice was essential to the fabric of the band. Yet, the reason for the eventual dismissal of Hughes, as well as people like Jeff Fenholt or Dave Walker, was that they couldn’t sing Black Sabbath like Ozzy could.
On top of that impossible problem, Black Sabbath’s output back in 1985 wasn’t the most inspiring. Originally, Hughes was brought on board for the often forgotten record Seventh Star, which, as well as having one of the worst Black Sabbath album covers, was first intended to be a Tony Iommi solo album. To put it lightly, it didn’t exactly rival the groundbreaking quality of Paranoid or Master of Reality.
Even Hughes himself was never overly convinced by the record, telling MusicRadar in 2025, “Honestly, I haven’t heard the album in decades, but people talk about it. Some of the riffs are quite heavy, but lyrically and melodically, I’m not a metal singer.”
Concluding, “It really wasn’t my cup of tea, as they say.”
To make matters worse, the tour that was meant to support the album wasn’t received much better. Just prior to the start of the band’s planned US tour, Hughes came to blows with the tour’s production manager. “He hit me right in the face, and broke a bone in my nose, and consequently I had dried blood caked around my vocal cords,” he recalled. “So I couldn’t sing after three shows. It was impossible.”
“Regardless of if he hit me, or who said this, or who did what, it was a difficult moment for anybody to be hit in the face and then asked to sing a song,” he continued. “So, it was a very tragic moment for me and Tony. But I can’t change the way things were.”
With his blood-caked vocal cords, the vocalist only made it through a handful of performances before being replaced by the New Jersey vocalist Ray Gillen – yet another in the long line of hastily recruited Sabbath singers.
Perhaps if Hughes hadn’t had his nose broken on the eve of the band’s US tour, his time with Black Sabbath would have been a little more substantial – ultimately, we will never know. That fateful hit certainly altered the course of the band’s timeline, though, and it would take a fair few more years before Osbourne finally returned to his rightful position.
