The Fleetwood Mac album Mick Fleetwood called “one of my least favourite”
People often forget that there was a whole lifetime of Fleetwood Mac long before Rumours. Long before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham got involved, the band were already going and was moving through different iterations.
The only constant has been the band’s namesakes – Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. They started it in 1967 alongside Peter Green on vocals and guitar and back then, they were a blues band through and through.
If you’ve never gone back to listen to the band’s original records from their first era, do it. The 1969 live album, Shrine, showcases their power beautifully as the band’s sound was rich and luxurious with Green’s strong vocals and the instrumentals swelling around him. While people often get caught up in the Buckingham Nicks era and its drama and hits, there is greatness to be found far before they ever came into the picture, before the band moved to America.
For Fleetwood, looking back is a strange thing. Having played a role in all 18 Fleetwood Mac studio albums, there’s a lot of material to consider and especially a lot of evolution to reckon with. He could never truly compare one to the other because at several points, the group became an entirely different type of band, morphing from one thing to another.
But of that earlier era, he has his favourites, namely the 1973 record Mystery To Me as he said in hindsight, “I like Mystery To Me more now than I did when we cut it,” now able to enjoy tracks like ‘Hypnotised’ for the hits they are.
There are also low points he doesn’t care for, and never has, and now likely never will. That award goes to Penguin, another 1973 album that came just before Mystery To Me. Maybe it was a record that simply needed to be made to clear room for the good one to follow, but whatever happened, Fleetwood was simply not sold on it at all.
“I sort of think Penguin is one of our albums that doesn’t flow that well as a whole,” he said, mostly taking issue with the record’s tracklisting and its lack of consistency.
It’s easy to understand, as this was a point where the band seemed to be trying a lot of things out. Within only nine songs, they’re playing around with a lot of new ideas and sounds. On ‘Did You Ever Love Me’, there are randomly steel drums. The bongos on ‘Revelation’ see the band combining classic rock with funk elements that work together, but it’s weird. Meanwhile, on the track just before that, ‘The Derelict’ is a Bob Dylan-style country song.
There’s a lot going on, and it’s all going on at once. Testing out a bunch of new styles and attempting to merge them with their original blues sound, it becomes quite disorientating.
None of it is bad, but it doesn’t necessarily mesh together very well, and for that reason, Fleetwood doesn’t think on it too fondly, stating, “It’s one of my least favourite”.
