Hard to tell what might have come next, since shortly after this album’s release, Spencer suddenly quit the band mid-tour, running off with a notorious cult known as the Children of God. With Green’s sudden departure, his fellow singing guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan pick up the slack, but Spencer’s unabashed love of ’50s R&B and rockabilly and Kirwan’s taste for Nick Drake-like folk-rock melancholy mesh somewhat awkwardly. Quite likely the most underrated album in the Fleetwood Mac canon, 1970’s Kiln House intriguingly catches the group in a period of transition. The set also includes all of the Green-era band’s other classic singles, the achingly beautiful instrumental “Albatross,” the nine-minute epic “Oh Well (Parts 1 and 2)” and “Black Magic Woman.” Yes, Santana had the hit, but it was originally a Fleetwood Mac song. This 20-track CD supplants the 1969 singles compilation The Pious Bird of Good Omen by adding two hard-to-find but essential singles recorded in 1970 just as Fleetwood Mac’s blues-rock-oriented first lineup was crumbling, “Man of the World” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Prong Crown).” The latter was original frontman Peter Green’s musical farewell note, a nightmarish drug-induced vision written and recorded shortly before he left the band to join a religious cult and largely give up music.
The Best of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac (Blue Horizon Records 2002) Let’s rectify that with a countdown of the essential pre-Buckingham Nicks Fleetwood Mac albums. But it seems like only the Mac’s 1975-’87 period, when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were fronting the band and they were scoring massive hits, has penetrated the consciousness of today’s bearded youth, with their earlier incarnations largely unknown. It led the group to make its thoroughly crazy yet quite beautiful follow-up, Tusk in 1979, bereft of the editing and economy that makes Rumours so very special.For the last couple of years, Fleetwood Mac have been the latest vintage soft rock band to become fashionable among the sort of college students who still frequent used record shops. It became one of biggest records of all time, providing an antidote to the era while remaining entirely in step with its times. If the age was about redundant excess, you are hard pushed to hear any of it on tunes like "Don't Stop" or especially "Dreams", which both benefit from incredibly sparing instrumentation – there is so much left out, it makes the tunes somehow seem busier by memory. Sonically, it's near perfect – there is little fuss, no mess and hardly any waste. But it is far from a one-man show – Nicks' "Dreams" is a beautifully insistent, sweetly nagging understated plea to lost love, while Christine McVie's "Don't Stop", "Songbird" and "You Make Loving Fun" typify proper, grown-up music. With every member of the band touched by some degree of relationship hell, they made a trouble-filled, cocaine-fuelled album … that sounded like a thousand angels kissing you sweetly on the forehead.īuckingham emerges as top dog here his swooping, ramshackle "Second Hand News" (with its euphoric chorus finally arriving two minutes into the song), "Never Going Back Again" and "Go Your Own Way" dominate the album. And then, after tasting triumph, it all fell apart, amidst affairs and acrimony. After being left rudderless in the wake of founder Peter Green's departure, the core of drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and his keyboard-playing wife, Christine had finally found some form of stability and commercial success by adding the young singer-songwriting team of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. It had been a tumultuous 1970s for Fleetwood Mac when they came to record this album on America's West Coast. It is as much a part of that year's landscape as Never Mind The Bollocks, "I Feel Love" or Saturday Night Fever and arguably the one least tainted by the passage of time. Selling over 30 million copies world-wide, it has assiduously worked its way into so many households since its release in February 1977, that it's become part of the sonic furniture. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac has taken on a life of its own.
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