Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 175

Record label: Reprise

Produced: Fleetwood Mac

Recorded: London; April 1969

Released: September 9, 1969

Chart peaks: 6 (UK) 109 (US)

Personnel: Peter Green (g, v, hm); Jeremy Spencer (p); Danny Kirwan (g, v); John McVie (b); Mick Fleetwood (d); Martin Birch (e)

Track listing: Coming Your Way; Closing My Eyes; Fighting For Madge; When You Say; Show-Biz Blues; Underway: One Sunny Day; Although The Sun Is Shining; Rattlesnake Shake (S/US); Without You; Searching For Madge; Like Crying; My Dream; Before The Beginning

Running time: 53.39

Current CD: Reprise 759927448-2 has a revised track listing: Coming Your Way; Closing My Eyes; Show-Biz Blues; My Dream; Underway: Oh Well (S); Although The Sun Is Shining; Rattlesnake Shake (S/US); Searching For Madge; Fighting For Madge; When You Say; Like Crying; Before The Beginning

Further listening: The Vaudeville Years Of Fleetwood Mac 1968–1970 (1998), a spiffing 2-CD set which contains unreleased and extended versions of tracks on Then Play On plus unissued versions of Man of the World and Green Manalishi

Further reading: Peter Green: The Founder Of Fleetwood Mac (Martin Clemens, 1998); My 25 Years In Fleetwood Mac (Mick Fleetwood, 1992); www.fleetwoodmac.net/penguin

Download: Not currently legally available

By the time Fleetwood Mac came to record Then Play On, they’d scored hit singles with the languid Albatross and the heartbreakingly beautiful Man Of The World, giving notice that their blue horizons were ever broadening. Danny Kirwan was now on board: his songwriting skills and his folk leanings edged an increasingly detached Jeremy Spencer further to the margins and emphasised the new directions the band were taking.

Sessions began in April 1969 with two Kirwan songs, Coming Your Way and Although The Sun Is Shining. Engineer Martin Birch recalled how he would work individually with Green and Kirwan; ‘Peter would come in and show me the feel and structure, lay down the basic track and when we were happy with the drums, the bass and two guitars, the others would disappear and I would work on his song until it was completely recorded … Then I would do the same with one of Danny’s songs and it would alternate like that until the album was done.’

While great music emerged, this way of working was indicative that the band was in the early throes of fragmenting. There were disputes over Oh Well, with Fleetwood and McVie almost convincing Peter not to release this magnificent work as a single. (the song wasn’t on the original UK version of the album).

Producing the album themselves was a mistake, according to Green. ‘We should have had a producer, then it might have sold better … we weren’t completely aware of what the producer’s job was.’

In hindsight, you can also hear it in the songs. Green has often noted that Show-Biz Blues ‘says it all about why I left Fleetwood Mac’. Musically, it was a homage to Bukka White’s percussive slide guitar, but ‘Now tell me anybody, do you really give a damn for me’ is the cry of a band leader in the spotlight and under pressure. Even now, 30 years after the event, Peter Green complains, ‘They could have helped me more, but they just stayed in the background.’

Then Play On delivered symphonic, elegiac rock, so far removed from the rough-hewn white-blooze of only 18 months previous. Green was rightly proud of the album upon completion and remains so. ‘I love it, every minute of it. There is nothing I feel I could have done better.’

A Californian aesthetic was already looming – the wave-washed beaches and rolling highways suggested by Danny and Peter’s wistful guitar sounds and Mick Fleetwood’s tyres-on-the-road thump. Americans loved it. One can only wonder what Fleetwood Mac might have achieved had Peter stayed and created a fourth album. Oh well …