Watch the 1969 Fleetwood Mac performance that impressed John Lennon
Last year, fans of The Beatles – so practically everyone – were treated with a fly-on-the-wall glimpse inside the creative process of the Fab Four. Peter Jackson’s intensely revealing 2021 documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, collated previously unseen enhanced colour footage of the band working in the studio, first in Twickenham and later in Apple Corps, to complete the sessions for their final album, Let It Be.
As the group shared ideas and invariably lost their temper with each other, we heard a few big namechecks of contemporary acts they had been admiring at the time. One of which was Fleetwood Mac, who, at the time, were a heavy blues band guided by the extraordinary guitar stylings of Peter Green.
In 1969, some six years before the recruitment of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac found themselves at the peak of their early incarnation. The band was formed by Green, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and guitarist Danny Kirwan after the dissolution of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
During Part 2 of Jackson’s documentary, Lennon asks his bandmates if they had seen Fleetwood Mac on Late Night Live the night before. “They’re so sweet, man,” he said. “And their lead singer’s [Peter Green] great. You know, looks great, and he sort of sings quiet as well. He’s not a shouter.” Paul McCartney agreed, saying they sounded like Canned Heat. “Yeah, but better than Canned Heat,” Lennon asserted.
It seems Lennon was quite the early Fleetwood Mac fan. After hearing Peter Green’s tranquil blues arrangement in ‘Albatross’, he decided to use a similar arrangement to write ‘Sun King’, which appeared on side two of Abbey Road in 1969.
‘Sun King’ was later dismissed by Lennon as “a piece of garbage I had around,” but at the time, it was spawned from Lennon’s infatuation with Green. The song was initially titled ‘Here Comes the Sun King’, but Lennon changed it to avoid any confusion with George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes the Sun’, which appears a couple of tracks earlier on Abbey Road.
“We just started joking, you know, singing ‘Quando para mucho,’” John said in 1969, discussing the bilingual lyrics. “So we just made up… Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, you know. So we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something,” Lennon said in a 1969 radio interview. “We did the introduction, we call it the ‘Sun riff,’ the little instrumental bit that’s like Fleetwood Mac before we start singing, and we did it again at the end, so we are able to sing it to make them different, you know, so it wasn’t just the same riff.”
Watch Fleetwood Mac’s performance of ‘Oh Well’ at the BBC in 1969 below.
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