Amazon.co.uk Review
The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac? Frankly, it depends where you live, in a sort of "I say tom-ar-toe, you say toe-may-doe" kind of way. Broadly speaking, the most notably interesting (and commercially successful) periods of Fleetwood Mac's episodic history remain the grubby blues of the original Peter Green-led incarnation of the late 1960s (big in Britain but a non-entity in America) and the refined, mid-1970s divorce-dissecting AOR of the Buckingham / Nicks
Rumours era (big everywhere). It is fairly safe to assume that neither British nor American passport-holders are particularly interested in what happened in between. So then, the UK retail version of
The Very Best of rightly condescends to throw in such Peter Green classics as the instrumental "Albatross" (a Number One single) and "Black Magic Woman" but--and here's the gripe--omits both "On Well" and "Green Manalishi" in favour of such peripherals as the less-than-spectacular 1988 Number 54 hit "Family Man".
It could be worse. The American Very Best of (unlike its British counterpart, a two-CD set available on import) incredulously neglects to include anything from the Peter Green line-up at all, not even the sulky brooding of the sensuous "Man of the World" (possibly the finest song ever written), a little matter that American audiences ought to find time to raise with the United Nations. Still, there can be no quarrel with most of what is on here, after all, there's a sizeable chunk from the Lazarus-style comeback of Tango in the Night and the multi-platinum Rumours(the gossamer-like timelessness of "Dreams" even managing to withstand a recent faux-folky mauling from the Corrs) it's just that there isn't enough of it. Can someone please hurry up and make CDs that play for two hours? --Kevin Maidment
Description
This single-disc 21-track Fleetwood Mac collection spans three decades of material and reflects their many personnel changes. From their late 1960's blues-rock, to their late 1980's radio friendly pop, to 1997's 'The Dance' project - all eras of the band's history are covered. Twelve top 40 hits are featured, including their 1968 no.1 single 'Albatross'.
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