The Fleetwood Mac song fans didn’t understand, according to Mick Fleetwood
There was undoubtedly a large portion of Fleetwood Mac fans who lost faith with the band in 1975.
The introduction of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in the wake of Peter Green’s exit brought with it a relatively stark departure from the blues-rock foundation through which they garnered their fan base. Because during that heady 1960s blues rock scene, the original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was a mainstay.
With Green at the front and the trusty rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood closely behind, they had a truly powerful sound that rocked through the floors of whatever venue they played. But on their 1968 album English Rose, they wrote a song that would unknowingly foreshadow their dream-pop future and warm their fan base.
The instrumental classic ‘Albatross’ closed the album and shocked fans in doing so. The speed with which they rose to the top of the blues scene rather oddly served as an albatross around their neck, preventing them from even daring to diversify their sound.
The band’s leader, Mick Fleetwood, explained, “Fleetwood Mac got famous so quickly; we were still playing small clubs even as we were becoming pop stars. Our aptly named first number one hit, ‘Albatross’, wasn’t understood by our hardcore blues fans. They thought we’d sold out, judging it a little light in the loafers for their taste.”
He continued, “The song is beautiful but also carries a huge sadness on closer listening. It was Peter stretching himself beyond the blues. The burden of our success haunted him. After all, he had created this, the very thing he wanted to avoid. I know the mantle became too heavy to bear, the albatross around his neck, if you like. The responsibility of keeping that giant bird in the air would eventually be too much for Peter, a haunting story in itself.’”
Not only did it foreshadow the sonic change for the band, but also Green’s descent into torment. Just two years after ‘Albatross’, Green would leave the band after a spiral into an LSD induced madness, and the blues band fans came to so desperately love would essentially cease to exist.
While time clearly proved that sceptical Fleetwood Mac fans were misguided in their dislike of this song, The Beatles decided to enter the conversation and prove to the music world just how good a song this was.
‘Sun King’, from their 1969 record Abbey Road, was directly influenced by the Fleetwood Mac number. George Harrison confirmed it, explaining, “At the time, ‘Albatross’ (by Fleetwood Mac) was out, with all the reverb on guitar.”
He continued, “So we said, ‘Let’s be Fleetwood Mac doing ‘Albatross’, just to get going.’ It never really sounded like Fleetwood Mac… but that was the point of origin.”
The introduction was strikingly similar to Fleetwood Mac’s, with that lazy chord progression bleeding into the opening verse, before the band took it into typical Beatles territory, with vocal harmonies ready to take it into the psychedelic.
But either way, critics of ‘Albatross’ were quickly silenced, with The Beatles taking inspiration from it, and the song eventually becoming the biggest-selling rock instrumental of all time in the UK. It may not have been blues, but it was still Fleetwood Mac at their very best.
