At the beginning of 1970, Fleetwood Mac had existed for two and a half years. They were founded in London in July 1967 by guitarist Peter Green and drummer Mick Fleetwood.
Green had come to rapid prominence in the influential British blues band John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Before joining Mayall, Green had worked with Mick Fleetwood in two short-lived groups in early 1966: Peter B’s Looners and Shotgun Express. He hooked up with Mayall in July that year, aged just nineteen, replacing Eric Clapton, who had just formed Cream. Green’s playing was less aggressive than Clapton’s but otherwise equal in every respect. And at times, better.
The Bluesbreakers line-up at that time was Mayall, Green, drummer Hughie Flint, and bassist John McVie. McVie had joined Mayall, aged seventeen, in 1963. Flint was replaced by Aynsley Dunbar in September 1966 and this line-up recorded the albumA Hard Road, released in February 1967. Green’s instrumental, ‘The Supernatural’, is a charged, emotional showcase for his significant skills as a blues guitarist and a template for his subsequent work with Fleetwood Mac. Green’s tone and control on ‘Someday After A While (You’ll Be Sorry)’ is as good as anything Eric Clapton performed with Mayall or anyone else. The obscure B-side, ‘Out of Reach’, sung by Green, is better still: a magnificent, despondent blues classic with a tortured vocal and icy, reverberant guitar tone. BothA Hard Road and its predecessorBluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, achieved top ten chart placings in the UK.
Dunbar left in April 1967, and nineteen-year-old Mick Fleetwood occupied the drum stool for around six weeks in mid-April and May. A number of live recordings of Mayall’s band were made between 1 February and 5 May 1967 at Brixton’s Ram Jam, Hampstead’s Klooks Kleek and Soho’s Marquee, and some of these were released in 2016 asLive in 1967. Although exact recording dates and the extent of Fleetwood’s precise tenure with Mayall’s band cannot be determined, these might include the earliest available recordings of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie playing together.
The genesis of Fleetwood Mac can be definitively pinpointed to 19 April 1967, when Green, McVie and Fleetwood recorded two songs at the Decca Studios in West Hampstead. The session was a gift from John Mayall and followed on from the recording of a new Bluesbreakers single: ‘Double Trouble’ b/w ‘It Hurts Me Too’, released on 2 June.
‘Mayall had bought Greenie a few hours of studio time as a birthday gift so that he could record some songs he had written’, Mick Fleetwood says, although Green had celebrated his twentieth birthday the previous October. ‘We were recorded by Gus Dudgeon, the Decca house engineer who went on to become extremely famous for hi
