30. Keep on Going (1973)
A fantastic curio from the Mystery to Me album. Written by Bob Welch, Keep on Going sets Christine McVie’s voice against an arrangement audibly influenced by the soul music coming out of Philadelphia International Records at the time: high-drama strings, dancefloor drums. It’s like nothing else Fleetwood Mac recorded.
29. Spare Me a Little of Your Love (1972)
If you want to trace the roots of Fleetwood Mac the multimillion-selling pop-rock phenomenon, start with the LP Bare Trees. Tellingly still in their live set long after Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined, McVie’s beautiful Spare Me a Little of Your Love has a relaxed mood at odds with that album’s rockier inclinations.
28. Sad Angel (2013)
Fleetwood Mac remain a stadium-packing live act despite lineup changes, intra-band strife and not having released a great album since 1987. But if you want evidence that the contemporary Mac aren’t a spent creative force, try Sad Angel – from 2013’s overlooked four-track Extended Play – a taut, catchy Buckingham rock song about his perennial subject: Nicks.
27. Black Magic Woman (1968)
Santana’s slinky, conga-heavy cover version is more famous, but Fleetwood Mac’s first Top 40 hit is darker, more raw and exciting. It feels live, as if someone pressed record during a rehearsal; the mood is ominous, and it’s punctuated with frequent pregnant pauses. Nevertheless, it’s commercial.
26. Only Over You (1982)
By far the least revered album of the classic Buckingham/Nicks-era Mac, Mirage has something of the holding pattern about it – Tusk’s experimentation is gone, expensive-sounding soft-rock abounds – but it contains some real hidden gems, including McVie’s luscious, lovestruck, small-hours paean to her soon-to-be-ex, soon-to-be-late fiance Dennis Wilson.
25. Man of the World (1969)
Mac’s original, increasingly troubled frontman Peter Green treats the listening public as a shoulder to cry on. Perhaps a more unsettling song in hindsight than it seemed at the time, the tune is beautiful, the arrangement almost ascetically stark and the lyrics full of dread: “I just wish I’d never been born.”
24. Future Games (1971)
Rescued from obscurity by the soundtrack of Almost Famous, the title track of 1971’s Future Games demonstrates how Welch’s arrival shook Fleetwood Mac up. Subsequently covered by MGMT, it’s a charming, sprawling, stoned summer’s afternoon of a song, thick with harmonies and lyrics of a laid-back hippy-mystic bent.
23. Come a Little Bit Closer (1974)
The standard line is that Nicks and Buckingham’s arrival transformed Fleetwood Mac, but on McVie’s majestic Come a Little Bit Closer – a hidden gem from 1974’s Heroes Are Hard to Find – the band sounded as if they were already preparing for a musical shift: it could have slotted on to Rumours with ease.
22. The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown) (1970)
Thunderous and eerie – Green sings in a chilling falsetto that he’s beset by forces “creeping around, making me do things I don’t wanna do” – The Green Manalishi is both a signpost on the route to heavy metal and, like Pink Floyd’s long-suppressed Vegetable Man, the sound of the psychological wreckage wrought by LSD washing up in rock music.
21. Little Lies (1987)
Many 70s superstars struggled in the 80s pop landscape. If Fleetwood Mac wobbled at the decade’s start, by 1987 they seemed almost as imperious as they had been circa Rumours thanks to songs such as Little Lies, co-written by McVie and her then-husband, Eddy Quintela. While the keyboardist-singer was keen to emphasise its blues roots, to everyone else it just sounded like impeccable pop music.
20. Seven Wonders (1987)
Bombed on prescription tranquillisers, Nicks was barely there during the Tango…
Read More: Fleetwood Mac’s 30 greatest songs – ranked! | Fleetwood Mac