PETER GREEN'S FLEETWOOD MAC (1968)Now, I'm not much of a blues fan. I want to like it. I know it is cool to do so and it is, after all, the root of all modern rock and roll, but I do find it a bit predictable and formulaic. It's certainly easy to parody although I guess it's not so easy to play it. This is a straightforward blues album really. Lots of waking up in the morning and feeling less than great cos a woman has left. Mostly (if not all) covers I guess. Having said that, I really liked it. If their mission was to bring the blues to the mainstream white man then I could imagine this did the trick. Annoyingly Spotify has a version of the album with lots of different takes of the songs on it, with some studio chit chat at the beginning. All very interesting for the devotee I guess, but a bit tedious for the rest of us. It runs the gamut of blues cliches from the fast and furious 'Shake Your Moneymaker' to the slow and deliberate 'Looking for Someone'. There's plenty of harmonica and "Womaaaan"'s along the way. It's also sung incredibly well. I'm assuming it's Green and he sounds the ticket. The slightly echo-ey sound of the guitar on 'I Loved Another Woman' foreshadows the sound of 'Albatross'. Some of the tracks, such as 'Got To Move' fade to start, as if you are walking into the room where the band are already jamming. So this was a good start, pretty much the only blues album most people would need.
MR WONDERFUL (1968)OK. Getting bored with the blues already. Fortunately for me, Spotify is a bit, well, spotty, when it comes to Fleetwood Mac's early albums. Wikipedia lists about 9 between 1968 and 1974, but I can only find 3. The third being The Pious Bird of Good Omen, which appears to have some overlap with an American issue, English Rose. So here's what I'm going to do. I'll listen to Pious Bird, which features Albatross and then move on to Rumours, which is the next available. This is more of the same, I listened to it during my run this morning and it's not conducive to setting a good time. It's still incredibly competent and there are still plenty of alternative takes of the songs to listen to if you're that way inclined and want to hear musicians swearing at each other. The cover is alarming. Mick Fleetwood I think, sans beard and bare-chested. A bit of internet research tells me that more of the Fleetwood physique was originally available for our viewing pleasure, possibly on a gatefold sleeve.
THE PIOUS BIRD OF GOOD OMEN (1969)This is a compilation apparently. As noted previously the early albums are all over the place and there are also even more compilations than Billy Joel seems to warrant. It probably explains why it's so disjointed. Albatross is really unlike anything else they've done. You wouldn't really call it Blues. I remember exactly when I first heard the track, it was at Flax Hill Junior school, in Miss Cartwright's class, which would have made me 7 or 8 years old. She put it on the tape player and asked us to move around the room in a way suggested by the music. Now my interpretive dance skills are legend, but my take on it was that it sounded like a Western soundtrack, so I pretended to ride the range on my horse. On a related subject, the track 'Rambling Pony' has no percussion, apart from what sounds like a steady clicking coming out of the right hand speaker. Really irritating. So now I'm going to jump forward several years, a few breakdowns and multiple line-up changes to Rumours. I'm sure a full study of their evolution to their highest regarded album would have been interesting, but I'd need some kind of research grant to feel that it was worth my while.
FLEETWOOD MAC (1975)I was wrong. This is available! I probably saw it and dismissed it as a compilation. Easy mistake to make. When last we met them Fleetwood Mac were a mainly British blues band, churning out blues standards in a competent fashion. Now they are an everyman rock band, using Christine Perfect/McVie and Stevie Nicks for vocal duties as much as quavery voiced, possible megalomaniac Lindsey Buckingham. They are contrasting vocal styles too, McVie's voice is rich and melodious, Buckingham is a bit high-pitched and strained and Nicks is the familiar nasal whine. It's all fairly standard 70's MOR really, in the vein of the Eagles, but whereas I loathe the Eagles (don't ask me why, but Hotel California REALLY winds me up), FM are superbly listenable. Stand out track is 'Rhiannon'. You can't accuse Nicks of mumbling it (didn't Adrian Juste of Radio 1 many years ago take the mick out of her fairly regularly on this?), but there is something indistinct about her singing style and this typifies it.Just like Donny and Marie, the whole album is a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. 'Over My Head' sung by McVie and 'Crystal' (Buckingham) are very much the former. 'Crystal' also has a very nice little proggy keyboard outro. Other than 'Rhiannon' the best known track is probably 'Say You Love Me', sung by McVie and familiar even if you don't recognize the title. 'Landslide' is a simple acoustic guitar-accompanied ballad sung with restraint by Nicks. I'm gonna need some kind of notation to identify the singer(s) from now on, so lets go with (M-McVie, B-Buckingham and N-Nicks). World Turning (B) reminded me a bit of 'Life In Fast Lane' buy the aforementioned Eagles. The cover features Fleetwood and John McVie with the latter doing the old faux-dwarf-kneeling-on-his-shoes trick and the former sipping from a champagne flute while dressed as some kind of country fop with a long cane. Please look elsewhere on the interweb for full analysis.
RUMOURS (1977)You may very well underline the title in a red wiggly line Mr. Spellchecker, but this is spelled the English English way and rightly so. Quite surprising really considering Lindsey Buckingham's seeming dominance of the band at this time. I'll give you Pearl Harbor, it's in your country after all, but we have all these arcane rules in the language for a reason y'know (to make it difficult). Most people know most tracks off this album and it usually crops up in top 10 classic albums. The vocal duties are still shared between M, B and N, but Buckingham and Nicks are definitely in the ascendant. 'Second Hand News' gallops along nicely, with B giving so bam-ba-bam-bam vocals. Next up Nicks with 'Dreams', which was rather lazily covered by The Corrs. I've always found the lyric 'Thunder only happens when it's raining' mildly intriguing, due to the both the odd phrasing and the fact that it's patently untrue. I think 'Never Going Back Again' is my favourite on the album. I like the pizzicato guitar and Buckingham's almost half-arsed vocal performance. It's just really unusual but pleasing at the same time. 'Don't Stop' was Bill Clinton's theme for his election campaign wasn't it? A bit better than Labour's D'ream and Professor Brian Bleedin' Cox I'd say. 'Go Your Own Way' is a perfect bit of rock-pop. It was a long time before I realized that 'Songbird' wasn't an original Eva Cassidy song (probably up to the first time I listened to Rumours I guess). To me it's sung just as well by Christine McVie. Not better, different. The Chain is, of course, best known as the theme to......officially longest listener generated thematically linked sequence of musically based items on the radio (currently going strong on Radcliffe and Maconie's show on BBC 6 music), oh, and the BBC formula 1 coverage. It does fit very nicely sonically with the latter, although possibly less so now that all those motor-racing bores are unhappy with the new engine noises?!. It's a funny old song too. The famous bit always seems to jar with the rest of it. 'You Make Loving Fun' (M) has a nice soft funk/wah wah feel about it. 'I Don't Want To Know' is about as humdrum as the album gets and even then it has some good clappy bits. 'Oh Daddy' (M) probably has plenty of Freudian themes that I can't be bothered to decipher. It all finishes with 'Gold Dust Woman'. Nicks being intense. The cover echoes it's predecessor, but with Nicks doing a Cottingly Fairy while Fleetwood goes troubadour. It deserves it's reputation. Truly a classic.
TUSK (1979)It's a bit of a mixed bag isn't it? One might almost say a "pot-pourri". A double album and I would suggest that they could have trimmed it to a single without loss of quality. If they'd done that they would also have had a terrific amount of just about publishable material to fleece the fans in later years. These rock bands are just not forward-looking enough. There's a lot of fairly standard, recognizable-as-Fleetwood-Mac tracks interspersed with some ker-ay-zee stuff, mainly at the hands of Buckingham. Examples of the latter are 'What Makes You Think I'm The One' in which he goes a bit wobbly voiced and sounds a lot like one of my faves Loudon Wainwright III. However Loudon has built a career on a slightly wacky approach whereas Lindsey is trying just a smidge too hard. It's not awful, the pounding piano steals stylistically from Billy Joel, but it's definitely a bit of a departure. In a similar vein there is also 'Not That Funny'. I guess that there was some attempt to tap into the buzz around new wave artists such as Talking Heads. Lindsey definitely goes a bit David Byrne on this one. Again, not terrible just, why? 'The Ledge' and 'I Know I'm Not Wrong' both feature guitar in the style of T-Rex's 'Jeepster'. 'Sara' is a standard Nicks contribution. Is this the same Sara they later welcomed to the room on Tango In The Night? Maybe there is some overriding narrative to all their work? Anything's possible. Women walking into rooms is definitely a lyrical trope for them. Nicks mentions it in 'Sisters of the Moon'. She did a solo single called 'Rooms On Fire' too. 'That's All For Everyone' is more moderately experimental stuff from Buckingham, sort of trancey and repetitious. 'Brown Eyes' resorts to quite a lot of "sha-la-la's". That's one I'd have definitely edited out. Christine McVie is scandalously underused as a vocalist and seems a bit half-hearted on the ones she does sing, such as 'Never Make Me Cry'. I'm guessing Nicks and Bucks were at the height of their stranglehold on the band at the time. The title track is all rather primitive beats. The vocal is murmured (by Bucks, natch). The beats build and there's some tribalish sounds too before they rather waspishly demand that you "just say that you want me". They then chuck in some plucked guitar and brass as it continues to build, with the odd exclamation of "Tusk!". Animal sounds (?) come in before it fades. Needless to say its actually quite wonderful. It all ends with 'Never Forget', no not the Take That song that came later and is better. This one is, ironically, quite forgettable. To go back and quote the aforementioned Loudon Wainwright when musing on Bob Dylan's 'Self Portrait' - '"Well, it's an interesting effort"
Incidentally a Google search of "Tusk" for the cover image mainly kicked up nothing but the rather menacing-looking fellow pictured. Apparently he is Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland. The reason for his apparent popularity is in fact that my company network routinely sends us via our Gdynia office for our internet, so Google Polska is my default search engine. It took me a while to work out why this blog was so popular in Poland.
MIRAGE (1982)Tusk famously flopped. A bit unfairly in my opinion. It is too long but it still has good songs. As a result Mirage is back on the beaten track. From the start it seems more collaborative in the vocal department with a fair amount of harmonizing going on. 'Can't Go Back' has a nice plinky-plonky sound and as ever the C&W influence is prominent on the next track, 'That's Alright', helped by Nicks' southern drawl. She also does 'Gypsy' which is probably the most Nicksish Nicks track of them all. She clearly fancies herself as being a bit of a free spirit. 'It's Only Over You' is a bit bond-ish and would have made a better theme, and a good enough title to replace it's contemporary 'For Your Eyes Only'. Buckingham still has a few experimental flights and we wouldn't love him the way we do if he was any different. He gasps out the vocal for 'Empire State', but it's interesting enough for him to get away with it. There's some funny instrumentation going on at the end though. 'Oh Diane' is a creditable Buddy Holly pastiche by Buckingham. He fooled me sufficiently to check that he actually wrote it. He gets a bit strained on 'Eyes Of The World'. He doesn't really have the depth for a proper rawk voice. This isn't up there with Rumours or even Tango In the Night, but there's nothing wrong with it either. The cover - Fleetwood and the male McVie are nowhere to be seen. Only the beautiful people allowed in the early eighties. Lindsey Buckingham has obviously identified himself as one of these.
TANGO IN THE NIGHT (1987)Starts with a bang, almost literally as Buckingham and Nicks grunt and groan their way through 'Big Love'. It's a terrific song, if a little overblown in the sexual obviousness stakes. Tango In the Night is the Mac album I know best, it's musically great but often lyrically awful. 'Big Love' being a case in point. However it's absurdness is also it's greatest strength. There's nothing else to say but that the song builds to a climax. Next we have 'Seven Wonders'. Nicks wailing and singing slightly off the melody. She sort of does a French accent for the line "Certain time, certain place". The Christine-sung 'Everywhere' is next. She says something at the beginning, which now I come to think about it, I haven't a clue what it is. The backing vocal is great on this too, almost an instrument in itself and John McVie's choppy bass is superb. Now, 'Caroline'. This album was played a lot in the student house I lived in in Sunderland and this song was a source of great mirth due to the absolute banality of the lyrics. It's sung by Buckingham and here's a sample: "She's so crazy, she's so lazy, keeps on coming, keeps on running". See? Also: "Time recedes with a fatal drop, dusty fury on a mountaintop, cut the cord if you can". He also rhymes 'cagey' with 'stagey' and 'attractive' with 'reactive'. The chorus is just "Caroli-hi-hi-hi -ine". I think it might actually be true genius. Funny echoey bit at the end too. It has it all. Title track is good too. Some nice changes of pace and a real attempt to inject a tango beat into it. Why haven't they used it on Strictly? Maybe they could get Mick on the next series. It's got a bit of a false end before going into the kind of screaming guitar solo that no late era prog rock band could do without. Christine McVie slows it all down nicely with 'Mystified' and then follows up with 'Little Lies' which has a really interesting layered vocal and decent backing from the new kids. 'Family Man' is another with unchallenging lyrics. "I am what I am, a family man". Sung by Buckingham of course. "a family man" is echoed in a rather odd deep voice. He also lists out a few family positions, just so we get the point "Father, Mother, Brother, Third Cousin once removed" (I added one of those for comic effect, did you spot it?). Next is 'Welcome to the Room Sara', which I mentioned in the Tusk post. I did a bit of research after that and Ol' Reliable Wikipedia reckons that Sara was the pseudonym that Nicks used when checking into the Betty Ford clinic during the recording of this album. 'Isn't It Midnight' is a fairly straightforward rocker sung by McVie, with a slightly menacing repeat of the line "the face of a pretty girl" by Bucky. Nicks decided to sing "When I See You Again" in a 'wistful style' and it's the weakest song on the album. Not even Buckingham's vocal Midas touch can save it. It all finishes with the upbeat salsa of 'You and I, Part II'. I've moaned before about bands not following through with the promised Part II song, but this just takes the biscuit. There was no part one in the first place! (actually there was, Mr Know-It-All Wikipedia says it was the B-Side of 'Big Love'). The cover is meant to look like a Henri Rousseau painting.
BEHIND THE MASK (1990)Buckingham's gone. It begs questions about 'the point', but let's go on and see what they can achieve without his creative genius. 'Skies The Limit' does not hold much promise. Fairly bland MOR. Bucks has been replaced by Billy Burnette and Rick Vito - he's worth two of any other guitarist/singer. 'Love is Dangerous' is a bit more interesting, a sort of throaty funk number. Then we get 'In The Back Of My Mind'. 7 minutes! The first two of which is a kind of rumbling prog piece featuring deep demonic voices To be honest it doesn't really go anywhere after that. 'Do You Know' is sort of melancholy I suppose in a very anodyne way. In fact, the best way to describe it all would be Fleetwood Mac without the bite. It's recognizably them, but somehow not. So what I'm basically saying is that for all his flaws and his towering self-regard, Lindsey Buckingham might just be an extraordinary talent. There's some out and out country here, such as 'When The Sun Goes Down' but it's mainly just dull. It all finishes with Nicks wailing through 'The Second Time'. Horrible. He does come back doesn't he?
TIME (1995)Now Nicks has gone! Hang on, that might be a good thing. It's a bit better than Behind the Mask. It has more character at least, but it doesn't really sound like Fleetwood Mac at all. It's the kind of thing Lady Antebellum produce these days (I think they're OK by the way - no criticism intended). Nicks' replacement, Bekka Bramlett, is better than the original and I liked 'Winds Of Change' which she sings. 'Blow By Blow' is a straight Billy Joel rip-off, which is quite ironic since my run through of his albums revealed HE was willing to jump on whatever musical bandwagon was passing at the time. Rick Vito has also gone, replaced by Dave Mason who, Wikipedia tells me, used to be in Traffic (probably many a guitarist could claim the same). Christine McVie is on better form than the previous album too. 'I Do' is sung well and features an electric piano riff that reminded me of various BBC theme tunes of the late 70s and early 80s. 'Dreamin' The Dream' (Bramlett) is a nice country ballad. McVie's 'Sooner Or Later' has shades of Clannad's soundtrack to ITV Saturday teatime gem Robin of Sherwood (featuring Ray Winstone as a rather irascible Will Scarlett). There's some worrying tendencies to sound like dear old Elton in places. 'I Wonder Why' being an example.The penultimate track, sung by McVie is 'All Over Again' and is really rather good, in a sad reflective way. The last track is a 7 minuter - 'These Strange Times' and starts with jungle drums and features a rather pompous spoken vocal, backed by warbling by Bramlett. It's not as bad as it sounds.
SAY YOU WILL (2003)Bucks is back! (Hurrah). Nicks is back! (meh). Christine McVie is gone! (boo). Mick and John plod on. Buckingham's creative juices are in full flow too. It's not in the same league as what I now recognize as being their middle purple patch (Fleetwood Mac to Tango in the Night - yes, including Tusk) but it's head and shoulders above the last two efforts. It's a long un too, probably a double but they didn't really exist any more in 2003. Nicks has been hitting the woodbines too hard if her voice is anything to go by. The second track, cryptically called 'Murrow Turning In His Grave' descends into classic screaming guitar hero riffs. There's also a song with a girl's name as a title 'Miranda', just like the classic 'Caroline'. Buckingham employs a kind of scratchy effect on his voice, and it gallops along nicely with a bit of western style backing it up. Next he tries out some very odd guitar work on 'Red Rover'. It doesn't quite work for me, sounds like he's got a wasp stuck inside. 'Say You Will' ends in an odd fashion as Nicks' voice seems to morph into a child's. I think Buckingham does a chicken impression on 'Peacekeeper'. 'Come' is a horrible cacophony. All the Nicks tracks are pretty standard for her.'Steal Your Heart Away' could almost be by World Party, has the aura of 'Message In The Box' about it.'Bleed To Love Her' steals some South African rhythms. 'Say Goodbye' is diabolically oversung by Buckingham, but what do you expect?
So that's it. Nothing after 2003. Buckingham creatively exhausted I should imagine.
Here's the playlist
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