Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Embrace it all, every crackle, pop, and effect, behold the fierce nature of the live recording when it hasn’t been polished to a studio standard, for being able to hear something from a period before your time is a gift of opportunity that requires acceptance, investigation, enjoyment.

To have been present in time when Fleetwood Mac went stratospheric thanks to the drafting of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in to the once classic Blues driven band is one of the true highlights of many a music lover’s life over the last 50 years, though so few recognise the pair as the duo they once were, that the heartbeat of what became the phenomenon once was a sparkle that produced a single album in 1973. They were so highly thought of and admired that it wasn’t just fate that pushed them into Mick Fleetwood’s orbit, it was kismet, a certainty of consequence that around the time of the eponymously titled new album being imagined, so the pair were grafting with passion at the Morgan Auditorium in Tuscaloosa in Alabama.

That live FM broadcast in January 1975 may sound rough and ready when you compare it to the live recordings that audiences are used to in today’s digitally prepared and clinical world, but it is history in the making; not least for the future of British/American music as the pair cemented themselves in the hearts of the public, but the fact that they brought several songs to the table ready formed and which are given an almost headline and welcome banner as part of the experience for those fortunate to be in the crowd that day, and those in the ether to come.

Alabama 1975 is rough, but it glows with a flame so bright that it sets the past in motion, the edginess, the sense of restlessness and creative agitation in amongst the inspired love and pride of their vision, it is all there across the four sides, one of which is taken from a performance the previous year, and despite the nature and inevitability of the recording, it fills the heart with a enormous sense of pleasure to hear the duo in the days before they enthused Fleetwood Mac with that one missing ingredient that would make them superstars.

Across tracks such as Lola (My Love), Races Are Run, Long Distance Winner, You Won’t Forget Me, the pulsating I Don’t Want To Know, Never Going Back Again, and Rhiannon, the double album offers a seismic opportunity to relish that which came before but influenced absolutely the very future they were obviously destined to unveil.

Rough, ready, outlandishly cool, and filled with promise; Alabama 1975 is a captured moment in time which bristles with anticipation and release in equal measure.

Ian D. Hall