Hear Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour & Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green team up on song from new music/book project

As mentioned last year, there are two tribute albums/projects on the way for the late Fleetwood Mac co-founder Peter Green. The Mick Fleetwood And Friends Celebrate The Music Of Peter Green And The Early Years Of Fleetwood Mac live album/film (of the February 2020 all-star tribute concert to Peter) comes out this Friday (4/30) and features Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Kirk Hammett Mick Fleetwoor, The Who’s Pete Townshend, The Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman, Fleetwood Mac’sd & Christine McVie, and more; and there has also been talk of an album/book project that both Kirk Hammett and David Gilmour were involved with. That’s now been officially announce

The book is called The Albatross Man, and it’s an illustrated visual book of Peter Green’s life and career, that Peter himself worked on directly with Rufus Publications. The synopsis reads:

For the past 4 years, Peter worked directly with Rufus Publications to produce a huge, illustrated visual book of his life and career. Mark Smith at Rufus has been travelling down to Canvey Island on a regular basis to talk to Peter about his life, look through his personal archive and discuss his love for fishing, drawing and listening to a wide range of music on a daily basis. During this time a book of rare images, memorabilia, lyrics and notes from his time in Fleetwood Mac has been assembled with Peter having full control over the book’s direction and details. Peter also played the guitar for Mark on occasion, delicately going back through a lifetime of influential music. The resulting book, “The Albatross Man” by Peter Green, will be shipping in October 2021 on what would be his 75th birthday.

During the evolution of the book, it was decided to include some unique music as part of the project. A newly discovered vocal take by Peter, recorded in the mid-sixties in his mother’s attic on a tape recorder, of “Need Your Love So Bad” formed the basis of the first song with guitars provided by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, a huge fan of Peter’s work. The track was produced by Laurie Latham. Peter heard and approved mixes of the track and the short promotional video created for “Need Your Love So Bad”. The second track chosen was “Man of the World” and Kirk Hammett of Metallica, another huge Peter Green fan and current owner of the legendary Greeny guitar, was approached and quickly joined the project. He flew into London and on January 6th 2020 he went into London’s Abbey Road with producer Rob Cass to record the guitar parts for his revised vision of the song, all using Greeny. The following day Kirk went down to Canvey Island to meet with Peter and hand him Greeny once more, but also to play him the guitar parts to “Man of the World”. Again Peter approved the music and approach. The track has now been mixed and finished in LA and also features Mick Fleetwood on drums. The bass and production were handled by legendary producer Bob Rock. Both tracks have been recorded for the book project and offer widely different interpretations of Peter’s work.

At over 450 pages the large, coffee table book, “The Albatross Man” is a perfect celebration of one of the UK’s leading guitarists, songwriters and performers. Not only does it feature Peter’s personal pictures, Fleetwood Mac notes and essays and a stunning array of photography (many previously unpublished) it also includes written contributions from Mike and Richard Vernon, Neil Slaven, Dinky Dawson, Kirk Hammett, Bernie Marsden and many others.

The book begins shipping in October. Pre–orders are up now.

Along with the announcement comes the stream of David Gilmour’s contribution, a new version of Fleetwood Mac’s cover of Little Willie John’s 1955 blues song “Need Your Love So Bad.” This version of the song uses Peter’s home-recorded vocals from 1968, and David Gilmour reworked it and added new arrangements ercently. It puts a fresh spin on the Fleetwood Mac version that came out in 1968. Hear it for yourself below.

Kirk Hammett spoke about his cover of “Man of the World” last year, saying, “I am singing on it; it’s an easy song to sing, it’s got that talk-singing kind of thing, I can handle that. That’s about the length of my singing abilities, but I’m into it. I’m so into it, I’m into all aspects of it, it’s just one of those things, it just kind of unfolded like this. It gets a little uppity in the end, and what I did was I just modernized the whole song, modernized it with modern tones, kind of like a more modern arrangement; I’ve made the uppity part heavy and dynamic.” Stay tuned for that.The roots of this Peter Green-penned song date back to Green’s “I Loved Another Woman” from the band’s 1968 self-titled album, which has a similar song structure and melody, but a few months later Green fleshed it out, added in a hint of psychedelia and a slight Latin twist, and turned it from a traditional blues vamp into a timeless classic. It was released as a single and appeared on some comps the next year, but a lot of people first heard this song when Latin psychedelic rockers Santana turned it into a hit with their 1970 cover, which Peter green approved of, as evidenced when he performed the song with Santana at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Santana breathes new life into the song, but the original still stands tall. It proved how quickly Green was progressing as a songwriter from the traditional blues he had been writing just months earlier, and it remains a gem of the original psychedelic rock era

Fleetwood Mac’s first chart-topping hit was, surprisingly, an instrumental. Peter Green didn’t want Fleetwood Mac to be pigeonholed as a blues band, and only months after “Black Magic Woman,” Green took their sound in a drastically more exploratory direction on this psychedelic, meditative single. It was the band’s first recording with new guitarist Danny Kirwan, whose vibrato-ing style provided a nice complement to Green’s fiery playing, and their guitars intertwine beautifully on this song. It is said to have directly inspired The Beatles’ “Sun King” from Abbey Road and to have greatly inspired David Gilmour’s guitar playing in Pink Floyd, and the influence didn’t stop there. Comparatively modern guitar heroes Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr) covered it together for the 2012 tribute album Just Tell Me That You Want Me, and it’s not hard to see why those two musicians would pick this one.

As Peter Green continued to push past the barriers of blues rock (and continued to take more LSD), he began developing a knack for melancholic, psychedelic folk that he first perfected on the 1969 single “Man of the World.” It’s hard not to draw parallels between Peter Green and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett (another reclusive psychedelic mastermind behind a late ’60s UK rock band that got much more famous in the ’70s without him), and those parallels are even more obvious on introspective songs like “Man of the World.” Peter sings somberly about loneliness and depression and the instrumental backdrop is about as hushed and bare-bones as Fleetwood Mac got at that point. It’s a heartbreaking masterpiece.

Peter Green’s growing interest in psychedelia and folk music and the increased singing and songwriting input from Danny Kirwan — whose contributions were praised and encouraged by Peter — led to Fleetwood Mac’s third full-length and first timeless album, Then Play On. It’s a masterpiece that blends blues, rock, psychedelia, folk, flamenco, classical, and more (and has stunning artwork), and it’s as essential as anything Fleetwood Mac released in the Buckingham/Nicks era but for entirely different reasons. “Coming Your Way,” the Kirwan composition that opens the album, sets the tone for it perfectly. The song uses blues rock as a starting point, but it goes in all kinds of other directions from there. Kirwan and Green’s guitars are in constant conversation with each other, Mick Fleetwood’s polyrhythmic percussion livens things up and never relies on a traditional blues beat, and the song eventually evolves into a doomy coda that qualifies as proto-metal. It’s a leap from anything Fleetwood Mac had released before it, and once hard rock and progressive rock became popular in the 1970s, this song would prove to be ahead of its time.

Going further in the direction of “Man of the World,” Peter Green contributed this lonely, sorrowful, psychedelic folk song to Then Play On. He’s frequently celebrated as a guitarist, but it’s songs like this that really show how innovative of a songwriter he was, and how much untapped potential he had in this realm. His debut solo album, 1970’s The End of the Game, is a jammy, psychedelic, instrumental album, but had he instead chosen to release a singer/songwriter album, we’d be talking about Peter Green the way we talk about Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan. This song proves it.

Peter Green wasn’t the only Fleetwood Mac member developing an ahead-of-his-time psychedelic folk songwriting style on Then Play On. Danny Kirwan was emerging as a crucial contributor in that same department, as evidenced by such songs as “Although the Sun Is Shining” and “When You Say.” The latter is a hauntingly beautiful song that helped introduce vocal harmonies to Fleetwood Mac, and which gained the approval of Christine Perfect — later known as Christine McVie — who was a Fleetwood Mac contributor at the time, soon to be an official member, and who did her own great version of this song on her debut 1970 solo album.

There are a lot of great songs on Then Play On, but its crowning achievement was a song that was initially left off the album but then added to revised versions after becoming a successful non-album single, “Oh Well.” It’s an eight-minute song made up of two parts, and it’s Peter Green’s masterpiece. Almost every side of his songwriting was represented on this song and then some: fiery blues riffs backed by Mick Fleetwwood’s increasingly atypical drumming, somber folky passages, baroque pop instrumentation, flamenco-inspired guitar, and more, and it was all tied together by some of Green’s most commanding singing and songwriting. It’s clearly a huge inspiration on progressive rock, and it’s as successfully ambitious as other 1969 triumphs like Abbey Road, Tommy, and In the Court of the Crimson King. The song unfortunately tends to overshadow much of Peter Green’s other fantastic material, but that’s bound to happen when a song is this close to perfect.

Fleetwood Mac hinted at a doomy direction towards the end of Then Play On opener “Coming Your Way,” but they went full proto-metal on the last song Peter Green contributed to Fleetwood Mac before his departure, 1970’s “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown).” It became a popular song for Judas Priest years later and there are also well-known covers of it by Melvins and Corrosion of Conformity, and it’s not hard to see why metal bands took to this one. It’s as crucial to the development of heavy metal as anything Black Sabbath released that same year. It’s as psychedelic and ahead-of-its-time as any of Green’s best songs, but darker and heavier than all of them. Neither he nor Fleetwood Mac ever released anything quite like it ever again.

As we all know, Fleetwood Mac eventually recovered from Peter Green’s departure, but it didn’t happen quickly or immediately. Their first album without him, 1970’s Kiln House, saw the return of early guitarist/vocalist/pianist Jeremy Spencer (who was on Fleetwood Mac’s first two albums but sat out of much of Then Play On and other singles from the era), and Spencer’s Kiln House contributions were often 1950s parodies that sounded regressive compared to the forward-thinking Then Play On. Danny Kirwan’s contributions underwhelmed compared to the music he had written for Then Play On, but he would get his groove back on the 1971 single “Dragonfly,” which sounded like the true successor to his Then Play On contributions and which Peter Green is said to have called “the best thing [Kirwan] ever wrote.” It’s right up there with “When You Say” and “Although the Sun Is Shining” as a hazy, hypnotic, psychedelic folk song and it’s a shame that it became such an obscurity. (It’s currently not on streaming services, but the upcoming Fleetwood Mac: 1969 – 1974 will finally change that.) Kirwan, perhaps the most underrated member in Fleetwood Mac history, would prove to be the bridge between the Peter Green era and the poppier ’70s era, though he’d part ways with the band before their massive breakthrough (and then led a good but often-ignored solo career). Many of the best early ’70s Mac compositions were his.