Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: 1969-1970

The first thing I have to say is that I originally posted this in February 2020, but on July 30, 2020, I radically changed it. That's because I found a bunch of BBC (and other radio) performances that I'd previously missed. There were so many from around this time that I split the album in two. This had been called "Volume 4" of the series. But now this is "Volume 5," and the remainder from this time period is on a "new" "Volume 4." Furthermore, what had been Volumes 5 and 6 have been renamed Volumes 6 and 7, respectively.

Sorry about the confusion. The bottom line is that you should just redownload the entire BBC series to make sure you have everything. I've also made changes to Volumes 1, 2, and 3, mostly due to finding better sounding versions of some songs.

Anyway... back to my regular comments... Here's another album of Fleetwood Mac performing for the BBC. 1969 and 1970 are two of my favorite years of the band's music, because they still were heavily into the blues, but they also showed more variety with rock and pop.

This time around, nine of the 12 songs are officially unreleased. The sound quality is consistently high for both the officially released and unreleased tracks. Everything here is from the BBC except for "I'm Worried," which comes from a Norwegian TV show, and "Shake Your Moneymaker," which comes from a Finnish radio show.

Guitarist Peter Green left the band in May 1970. All but the last four songs are from April 1970 or earlier, so they still feature him. The remaining Fleetwood Mac songs are from a brief time when the band was mainly led by Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer, before Christine McVie joined.

The ninth song, "Nights Is When It Matters," is from an official album called "On Air," which is a collection of BBC performances by the blues band Chicken Shack. As with a couple of the previous volumes in this series, I've included Chicken Shack songs only when the feature Christine McVie on lead vocals. However, there's a problem. She left Chicken Shack in mid-1969 to pursue a solo career, and then joined Fleetwood Mac in late 1970. So I'm pretty sure this is from her time as a solo artist, and I've labelled it as such. Either that, or the date I have is wrong and it's from 1969, or she still played occasionally with Chicken Shack. If anyone knows, please let me know.

The "On Air" album seems to have just been a legal bootleg. They put some musically dubious things on there without any attempt to fix them. "No Road Is the Right Road" is one example. The song was clearly incomplete, fading out after about a minute and a half, right in the middle of the second chorus. To give it a better finish, I completed the second chorus by patching in the missing part from the first chorus. So at least the song comes to a good conclusion now, even though it's still short and incomplete. By the way, no studio version of the song ever appears to have been released, either by Chicken Shack, Christine McVie solo, or Fleetwood Mac.

On a different note, many of the BBC performances have also appeared on my various stray tracks albums for the band. I hope you don't mind the duplication, but I figure it makes sense to have all the BBC performances together, as well as separately highlighting the songs that were ONLY performed (or at least properly recorded) at the BBC on the stray tracks albums.

 

01 I'd Rather Go Blind (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
02 Hey Baby (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
03 Get like You Used to Be [Edit] (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
04 Shake Your Moneymaker (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Although the Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
07 No Road Is the Right Road [Edit] (Christine McVie)
08 I'm Worried (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Tell Me You Need Me (Christine McVie)
10 Sandy Mary (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Only You (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)
13 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115966/FleetwodMc_1969g-1970_BBSessionsVolume5_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is of the band playing on the set of some TV show. But I don't know the show or the date. But the fact that Peter Green was dressed in a white robe like a prophet is a sign it was probably near the end of his time in the band.