Eleven months after his official announcement as Dan McCafferty‘s replacement, Linton Osborne‘s quit NAZARETH claiming that “it didn’t work out” and thanking the band and the fans. The group haven’t issued a statement yet, but their guitarist Jimmy Murrison thanked the singer in return and wrote – stressing it was his personal, not collective, point – that “this whole thing has been handled pretty badly” and that the decision whether to continue rests with the ensemble’s leader Pete Agnew.
The situation is strange, because NAZ put a lot of effort into breaking Osborne through. Linton, judging by initial live videos, didn’t do justice to the band’s classics – and had to deal with the fact that the album, which was released after he’d joined, featured McCafferty – but, as witnessed by this scribe’s close friend, was great recently. The quartet even recorded a concert DVD with Linton in London’s Metropolis Studio last November, and it hardly makes sense to put the video out now. It would be a pity if they call it a day, although to lost their identity would be much worse than that.
