‘Then Play On’: the turning point album that kept Fleetwood Mac alive
“Fleetwood Mac is like one big story with a lot of different chapters,” Mick Fleetwood said in a 2020 interview. As the one person who has been at the helm of the band for its entire tumultuous tenure, you really can’t argue with him.
People often, wrongly but understandably, focus on the drama epicentre that is Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in this regard, but only starting the historical re-enactment of the band from the moment they joined in 1975 would be like beginning the story from chapter three, to use Fleetwood’s own analogy. Although the late additions of Buckingham and Nicks were ultimately what propelled them forward, the core foundations of Fleetwood Mac were laid long before they were ever on the scene.
All of this is to say that Fleetwood has the utmost authority when it comes to telling us what the real lay of the land is with the band, simply because he’s the only one to have encompassed all its many whims and eras. In this sense, as much as he is bound to consider their later proclivity for pop as pivotal, his heart really lies in their original mainstay of the blues.
To this end, the true moment of redirection did not come with Fleetwood Mac in 1975 or Rumours in 1977, but at a far earlier point when, most notably, original founder Peter Green was still on the scene. For Fleetwood, “Then Play On was the turning point,” he said, in symbolising the notion of them being freed from the strictest shackles of blues and being allowed to run wild down whatever musical pathway they wanted.
“It was Peter feeling confident enough to express himself. He wasn’t just playing his heroes anymore. He was becoming one,” the drummer added, still evidently looking up to his sonic compatriot with a certain untouchable level of ethereal spirit. Yet it is also oddly fitting that Fleetwood recognises Then Play On as Green being at his most free and almost whimsical in his approach, because it would ultimately prove to be the parting gift he would leave the band.
There’s a certain poeticism in the fact that the album would be the last contribution Green would make to Fleetwood Mac, not lost in the cover artwork itself, where a horse gallops onwards but its rider looks back over his shoulder. It was representative of letting go of the reins – both literally and metaphorically – with the approval of the original founder to his drummer to take the band into the next orbit. Of course, at that point, no one could know exactly how far that would go.
With the album title having been inspired by the William Shakespeare line: “If music be the food of love, play on” from Twelfth Night, it was a fitting foreshadowing of everything that Fleetwood Mac would transpire to become in its later years. Fleetwood was right to class Then Play On as the turning point, because without the sense of emancipation it brought about, the band would have never grown to its full rock and roll force.
