Get the latest gossip
Hard rock, ambient weirdness and UFOs: exploring the greatness of early 70s Fleetwood Mac
As a new best-of collates the era between Peter Green and Buckingham-Nicks, we pick out the gems from this diverse and unfairly ignored period
Green-era Fleetwood Mac released the almost unbearably sad 1969 single Man of the World backed with a rock’n’roll pastiche called Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight; what is 1979’s Tusk if not a miscellany of contrasting ideas? Few albums illustrate the chaos and confusion of early 70s Fleetwood Mac quite like Penguin, which throws every idea imaginable at the wall in the hope that one will stick: R&B covers, steel drums, astringent Neil-Young-ish country-rock, the brief return of Green on Night Watch. Photograph: Barrie Wentzell Welch quit after Heroes Are Hard to Find, dispirited by the band’s lack of commercial progress, but his parting shot included Coming Home, a final blast of echoing, drugged-out weirdness that sounds appealingly like Los Angeles soft rock viewed through a psychedelic prism.
Or read this on The Guardian
