Fleetwood Mac Stop

By the mid-'70s, Fleetwood Mac had relocated to California, where they added the soft rock duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to their lineup. Obsessed with the meticulously arranged pop of the Beach Boys and the Beatles, Buckingham helped the band become one of the most popular groups of the late '70s. Combining soft rock with the confessional introspection of singer/songwriters, Fleetwood Mac created a slick but emotional sound that helped 1977's Rumours become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. The band retained their popularity through the early '80s, when Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie all began pursuing solo careers. The group reunited for 1987's Tango in the Night, but Buckingham left the band and Fleetwood Mac entered a period where they slowly lost their frontmen, culminating in the group officially calling it a day after Time faded upon its 1995 release.

While most bands undergo a number of changes over the course of their careers, few of them experienced more radical stylistic evolution than Fleetwood Mac. Initially conceived as a hard-edged British blues combo in the late '60s, the band gradually evolved into a polished pop/rock act over the course of a decade. Throughout all of their incarnations, the only consistent members of Fleetwood Mac were drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie – the rhythm section that provided the band with their name.

The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions 1967–1969 is a boxed set by British blues rock band Fleetwood Mac, released in 1999. It was a 6CD compilation of previously released material, plus outtakes and unreleased tracks from the band's early line-up, coming in a longbox with individually boxed CDs and a booklet of extensive notes and anecdotes, written by producer Mike Vernon. It represents the entire recorded output of Fleetwood Mac whilst they were signed to the Blue Horizon label.

Fleetwood Mac have announced an expanded reissue of their 1980 live album, Fleetwood Mac Live.

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.