Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 6: In Concert, Paris Theatre, London, Britain, 4-9-1970

Note that this previously was called "Volume 5: of Fleetwood Mac's BBC Sessions. I have since found enough music to split what had been Volume 4 into two, so this is now "Volume 6." Apologies for the confusion.

This contains all of a single show the band did for the BBC in April 1970. But there's a complication. It turns out that this full show actually has been officially released, as part of the archival double album "Show-Biz Blues." It makes up all of the second disc of that album, except for the first two songs from it. I didn't realize this at first because that album is so poorly annotated. It merely stated that the songs on the second disc were from a "London Concert, 1970." And while the official version included all the songs from it, in the correct order, they left out all the talking between songs. Instead, they added fake audience noise to cover for the lack of talking. They have the cheering continue onto the start of each subsequent song to make it seem as if the band kept playing with barely a pause between songs, when the bootleg version makes clear that isn't what happened at all.

I'm not sure, but I suspect the vagueness in the "Show-Biz Blues" liner notes is deliberate. It turns out there are a bunch of BBC performances on the first disc of that album as well, and they're all mislabeled as studio versions. For some reason, whoever put that together didn't want it known that many songs from it were from BBC sources. Maybe they didn't want to pay the BBC a share of the album profits? Had they kept the talking between songs, it would have been obvious that they were BBC tracks, since most of the talking was done by a BBC DJ.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it turns out the bootleg version sounds great, almost as good as the "Show-Biz Blues" version. Plus, it's more complete with the talking, and doesn't have the fake audience noise at the start of each song. So I've used the bootleg version as my source here. But the "Show-Biz Blues" version was properly mixed and the bootleg version was raw. So I asked a friend named MZ, who has better sound editing skills than I do, to edit the files and improve the mix. He did, and his version is a definite improvement. That's what I'm posting here.

This concert was part of a weekly hour-long series hosted by BBC DJ John Peel called "In Concert." In ran every week in 1970 and 1971, and then less often for a few years after that. I've already posted a bunch of other concerts from that series, for instance concerts by Traffic, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, and so on. For this particular week, Peel was absent and was replaced by another BBC DJ, David Symonds. As I mentioned above, he did nearly all the talking between songs, acting like an MC and announcing nearly every song.

Unfortunately, this is the last album in the Fleetwood Mac BBC series to feature guitarist Peter Green. Personally, I think his era of the band was most interesting towards the end, when they widened their repertoire beyond the blues. Luckily, this concert was recorded only about a month before he left the band. Some say he started to mentally deteriorate starting in early 1970 after taking too much LSD. Whether that's true or not, his lead guitar playing was still very sharp for this concert, and his singing was perfectly fine as well.

01 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Underway [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
06 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
07 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
08 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)
10 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
11 The Green Manalishi [With the Two Prong Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
12 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Coming Your Way (Fleetwood Mac)
14 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Great Balls of Fire (Fleetwood Mac)
16 Twist and Shout (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115973/FleetwodMc_1970d_BBSessionsVolume6InConcrtParisTheatre__4-9-1970_atse.zip.html

I have no idea when or where the cover art photo is from. I believe I took it from the liner notes to the "Live at the BBC" album. But it does seem to show the band's early 1970 line-up, including Peter Green. The coloring was a bit off. I did my best to fix in in Photoshop, but it still may be slightly off.