Back in the day, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977) was one of those albums that could be found in virtually any record collection, including the 100 that Dave took with him to his post-death exile. He also took along its predecessor, the first album recorded by what came to be considered the classic Mac line-up (unless you’re a blues purist with a hankering for the earlier Peter Green-led days). The eponymous sort-of debut album from 1975 may not have conquered the world as Rumours would go on to do, but it’s a fine piece of work with all the ingredients of the classic firmly in place. Well, almost all – the various romantic relationships within the band hadn’t yet started to fall apart.

The album starts with a song that nearly had a huge part in Dead Man Singing. In my early drafts, Monday Morning was going to feature heavily in Dave’s live set, in his heyday, in the bleak days before his ‘death’ and again once he began his new life as his own tribute act. It was a song that helped me to establish Dave’s sound in my mind, but eventually I decided that although Lindsay Buckingham’s joyous stomping mid-tempo rocker had exactly the musical tone I was looking for, the lyrics didn’t do enough to shine a light on Dave’s deeper problems, so I swapped it out for Dave Mason and Traffic’s deceptively despondent Feelin’ Alright.

One of the joys of Fleetwood Mac is the triple threat vocal line up of Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie. While I’ve always appreciated all three singers in their own right, over the years I’ve come to realise that it’s the clear, English tones of Christine McVie that I enjoy the most. Surprisingly, given the way the band came to be defined in popular imagination by the tempestuous Buckingham-Nicks relationship, McVie is the one with the most songs on this album – possibly a mark of her seniority, with the others on their first outing with the band – but it’s none the worse for that. Warm Ways and Over My Head are both gentle and sweet, while Say You Love Me and Sugar Daddy offer similarly positive messages at a faster tempo.

Not that the new kids were sitting on their hands. Nicks’ contributions include two of her classic songs, Rhiannon and Landslide, as well as Crystal, a delicate Nicks song with a Buckingham lead vocal. Buckingham himself provided the aforementioned Monday Morning, the brooding I’m So Afraid as well as taking lead vocals on a spirited rendition of Blue Letter, the only song on the album not written by the new look Mac line-up.  

I should point out at this stage that the other two members of the band were so much more than making up the numbers. Mac mainstays Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, as befits a rhythm section with more than a decade together at this point, were capable of handling anything that their songwriting bandmates could throw at them, While the other three were to take a lot of the focus in the years that followed, the longer-serving duo should never be forgotten.

Buckingham and Christine McVie share the songwriting credit and lead vocals on World Turning, a driving, pulsating high point with dynamic shifts that offer the first hint of the potential that the band would realise with The Chain at their next visit to the studios.

Fleetwood Mac are so famous that it’s hard to view any of their albums as a hidden gem, but this set of songs possibly deserves that label. Forever doomed to stand in the shadow of its successor and the relational chaos that gave rise to it, it’s an album deserving of a wider audience and offering a more positive, less jaundiced slice of Californian rock.