When I went to university, I knew '70s-era Fleetwood Mac only dimly – chiefly through The Chain, the instrumental outro to which had long been used as the theme music for BBC2’s Formula 1 Grand Prix highlights programme. In my second year, a friend gave me an unlabelled tape of British blues music from the 1960s. It turned out, of course, that it was a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation of Fleetwood Mac’s output from their first incarnation, under the leadership of the sublime guitar player Peter Green. It was surprising, confusing, bewildering to discover that this band could have produced such a very different style of music in its early days.
I was immediately smitten: I’ve always had a weakness for the blues, and Peter Green was – is – one of the greatest of all blues players. This is one of my favourite tracks, Need Your Love So Bad (written by one Mertis John Jnr and originally a big hit for Detroit R&B singer Little Willie John in the mid-50s).
[There's a rather longer version here.]
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Here's another notable performance the late Gary Moore, who produced a tribute album called Blues for Greeny in the mid-90s.
I learned from the Wikipedia article linked to in this post that Green played for a little while with The Bluesbreakers at the outset of his career, filling the spot vacated by Eric Clapton; bandleader John Mayall introduced him as "better than Clapton"!
And B.B. King apparently praised him as "having the sweetest tone I ever heard".
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