Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1968

Here's the second of six albums of Fleetwood Mac performing for the BBC. If you want to know more about this series of albums in general, I suggest you read the post for the first album.

In 1968, Fleetwood Mac was all about the blues, and especially Peter Green's bluesy lead guitar work. If you like that, you'll love this. As with the last album in this series, I've included any Chicken Shack songs that they played at the BBC too, so long as they were sung by future Fleetwood Mac star Christine McVie (then still known by her maiden name Christine Perfect). For this album, there is only one such song - "Strange Things Happening." It's just as bluesy as the rest.

For the previous album in the series, most of the songs were officially released. On this one, just three out of 14 are. However, all the songs have very good sound quality, because I've been highly selective. There are a bunch of bonus tracks this time, due to performances that didn't make the grade.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I bumped "Long Grey Mare" to a bonus track because I included a different version of that song performed at the BBC on the last album in this series, and I only have one performance per song for the whole series. Luckily for me, the band almost never played the same song twice at the BBC, at least for the recordings of the sessions that have survived, so there are only a few more cases like that.

The other three bonus tracks, unfortunately, are all songs that the band never recorded in the studio, yet these bootleg versions just don't sound good enough for me to feature them as anything but bonus tracks.

That's especially a shame for "Intergalactic Magicians Walking through Pools of Velvet Darkness," an interesting original by band member Jeremy Spencer that parodies the psychedelic songs that were all the rage at the time, such as "I Am the Walrus." (It even has a specific poke at that song with one lyric.) By the way, that song has been given a variety of names on various bootlegs, but a book on Fleetwood Mac claims to know the real title, so that's the one I've used.

"Dead Shrimp Blues" is one of the album tracks because of a helper named MZ. "Dead Shrimp Blues" actually has been officially released, in 2019, on a limited release for that year's Record Store Day. But it still sounded pretty bad in spots, with bursts of loud crackling. So it didn't make the cut for me. However, MZ largely eliminated the crackling and sent the improved version to me. By eliminating the crackling, some brief sections of the song had been sonically reduced to a very quiet level. I then largely managed to repair those spots by patching in sections from other parts of the song. Furthermore, I felt the officially released version was slow and low pitched. MZ also found a bootlegged version that was about 5% faster and about half a step higher pitched. I think that's how it was originally. It certainly sounds better. So I've adjusted the version to be like that as well. The end result still has some issues, but I think it's vastly improved, mostly thanks to the work of MZ.

"Intergalactic Magicians Walking through Pools of Velvet Darkness" is a Jeremy Spencer parody of a psychedelic song, and it's one of the best parodies he ever did. All previous versions I'd heard sounded like it was recorded through a wall of mud, but you can actually hear the song on this version, so please check that one out.

01 How Blue Can You Get (Fleetwood Mac)
02 My Baby's Sweeter (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Buzz Me Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
04 I'm So Lonely and Blue (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Strange Things Happening [Love Me or Leave Me] (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
06 Mean Mistreatin' Mama (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Sheila [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)
08 I Have to Laugh (Fleetwood Mac)
09 If You Be My Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
10 You're the One (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Preachin' Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
12 I Need Your Love [That Ain't It] (Fleetwood Mac)
13 You Need Love (Fleetwood Mac)

14 Without You (Fleetwood Mac)

15 Intergalactic Magicians Walking through Pools of Velvet Darkness (Fleetwood Mac)

16 Look on Yonder Wall (Fleetwood Mac)

17 Dead Shrimp Blues [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)

Long Grey Mare (Fleetwood Mac)
Wine, Whiskey and Women (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15211738/FleetwodMc_1968e_BBSessionsVolum2_atse.zip.html

The cover art shows the band playing on some TV show in 1968, but I don't know which one.