1969 Fleetwood Mac: Albatross

As befits their revolving door of personnel changes, there can be few bands with as schizophrenic an output as Fleetwood Mac. Sure, line-up changes in bands are nothing new - people come and people go but in generally there remains a constant thread in the music that's synonymous with the name of the on the tin. Broadly speaking, the 'major periods' of Fleetwood Mac can be split into the late sixties blues based band that Peter Green fronted and the mid seventies AOR monster led by Lindsay Buckingham. And yet perversely, their sole number one belongs to neither phase; yes, this is very much Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, but the trademark sting of his R&B guitar licks are sidelined in favour of a languid wash of an instrumental that tips its hat to that curious phenomenon of exotica. Or, more accurately, ambience perhaps - I can hear echoes of the bass and timpani pulse beat of 'Albatross' and Green's subtle tremolo lead in Brian Eno's ' Deep Blue Day', and The KLF too would use the main call and response guitar motif as a recurring theme throughout their 1990 'Chill Out' album. Like the best ambient recording, the minimalism of 'Albatross' is striking - it's the notes that Green doesn't play and the two chord structure of the entire tune that he doesn't play them on that evoke the vastness of ocean and the wingspan of the bid crossing it as surely as 'Telstar' evoked images of a satellite beaming images from space; a cinematic vision that doesn't require an accompanying film to confirm what the mind is 'seeing'. Which is all you can ask from an instrumental. A gorgeous tune.