Peter Green

2008 four CD set from the British popsters fronted by Peter Noone. Into Something Good covers all the UK and American hits, all the album and E.P. tracks, the film soundtracks, the B-sides, and 10 previously unreleased performances. That's 121 tracks and over five hours of music! Also included are ten Peter Noone solo tracks including 'Oh You Pretty Things' featuring David Bowie and two previously unreleased Noone tracks. The release will be accompanied with sleeve notes written by Spencer Leigh and featuring an interview with Peter Noone himself. EMI 2008.

The Blues has always been popular in England. Performers like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf and even Freddie King and Bo Diddley were stars in England before making it big in their own country. When John Mayall formed the Bluesbreakers it was out of respect and admiration to those performers; and he's stayed with the blues, cultivating a number of fine young blues musicians including guitarists Eric Clapton and Peter Green. After Clapton left Mayall, moving on to form Cream, Peter Green replaced him. Now Green has formed his own group, Fleetwood Mac (along with another former Bluesbreaker, bassist John McVie).
Whereas Clapton expanded onto new horizons with Cream, Green has chosen to remain dedicated to the blues, and on this, their first recorded effort, Fleetwood Mac have established themselves as another tight English blues band—joining Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Ten Years After and Savoy Brown as chief practitioners of blues in England.
Green, like Mayall, has studied the records and performances of Howlin' Wolf, Memphis Slim, Junior Wells and Elmore James carefully. The piano riffs on "Hellbound on My Trail" are lifted directly from Slim's classic "If You See Kay," but it's done well, if perhaps a little too self-consciously. Fleetwood Mac (the name is a combination of the names of members of the group), know what they're doing, they dig the music they're playing and that's great—but the drawback here is that they don't put enough of themselves into it instead of what they've heard from the original artists.
Green is a more than competent guitar player, and the Mac's treatment of "Shake Your Moneymaker" is just as powerful as the first Butterfield version (on the Paul Butterfield Blues Band album). The harp work is proficient in most places but rather weak on "Got to Move," the old Sonny Boy Williamson song. Green's composition "Long Grey Mare" is one of the best cuts on the album, anchored by McVie's strong bass line. The record has a strange, prematurely vintage (if there can be such a thing) sound to it, like an old classic recording made in the late Forties or early Fifties.
Like most modern white bluesmen, Fleetwood Mac try very hard to live the kind of music they play—not picking cotton in the Delta, but maintaining the hard-life blues tradition, gigging at small clubs in Northern England and in scruffy halls in the East End. Their music retains an unaffected rough quality. They play well, and if it sounds a little scratchy at times it's because that's the way they happen to feel at that particular moment. The licks they've copied from other performers are natural enough—it's more of a tribute than an imitation.
The English continue to prove how well into the blues they really are, and know how to lay it down and shove it back across the Atlantic. Fleetwood Mac are representative of how far the blues has penetrated—far enough for a group of London East-Enders to have cut a record potent enough to make the South Side of Chicago take notice.

The late 1960s/1970 Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac is deservedly legendary and the era that began in 1975, with the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, is by far the most commercially successful era, but the time period between the two is often neglected in terms of recognition. Admittedly, this era was full of personnel changes and certainly a transitional time in the long history of the band, but they were still creating new, fresh and vibrant music. This December 1974 Record Plant recording, the band's second appearance that year, captures the lineup fronted by Bob Welch and Christine McVie, performing some of their finest material of that era, along with several tributes to the departed original leader of the band, Peter Green.

Maybe I'm Still Just Peter is the 2019 album by Olympia, Washington artist Maggie Teachout. This comes courtesy of Green Monkey.