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, Oasis' Noel Gallagher, The Who's Pete Townshend, The Rolling Stones' Bill Wyman, Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood & 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 announced.
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.
