My heart beat like a hammer - my eyes plumb full of tears

Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.

25/08/68 : Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac

Oh great - having held up their subsequent album as an example of what I don't want from a blues album, I get to meet this a mere 3 days later/weeks earlier.  It is supposed to be better, so I've not completely written it off mentally but I can't say I'm exactly welcoming it with open arms.  Especially since it's really hard to track down because all the usual streaming services offer up their 1975 album which helpfully has the same name (and sounds much up my street as well) - so I had to resort to YouTube.

And yeah, it's in the same vein as Mr Wonderful but it is definitely an improvement - there's better guitar playing and singing on it and the sound quality is also a considerable step up.  It's still not my thing, but there's a lot more variety and it was much less of an endurance exercise - and I can imagine that seeing them play it live at the time would have been a blast.  There are also hints as to how they ended up at "Albatross" which really weren't visible on the follow-up.

We're all the way down at #14 this week on it's 27th week of a 37 week run (surprisingly generous of the record buying public imho) with it having peaked at #4 in its 13th and 21st weeks.  The top five this week were Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Jones, Engelbert, The Hollies and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, the highest new entry was Leonard Cohen (#39 - with the imaginatively titled Songs Of Leonard Cohen) and there are no new women involved this week.

Wikipedia tells us that Peter Green used to play with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (he replaced Eric Clapton so he can't have been too shoddy) and decided to create a new band along with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie (also from JMB and the reason for the name) and a couple of others - and this was their debut.  It's a mixture of originals and covers and it did well in the UK, selling over a million copies but for some strange reason it's never been certified gold or anything.  And it's still regarded very highly these days - "one of the highlights of the British blues bloom".

"Customers also listened to" - once again I'm unable to tell you, but I suspect some of the recent albums would be on the list.  I didn't love this but it was so much better than Mr Wonderful that it was enjoyable in that respect, if nothing else.

18/08/68 - Fine, but bafflingly successful
01/09/68 - Hard to describe!

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