When Fleetwood Mac invented Disco

Transition era Fleetwood Mac (Getty)

There's a lot in the news about Fleetwood Mac at the moment as they announce their first tour to include Christine McVie in the lineup for twenty years.  I saw them last year without her and thought they were amazing, so the prospect of seeing the band with her back in the fold is very exciting.

However, this post isn't about that Fleetwood Mac.  

Neither is it about the 1960s blues-driven Fleetwood Mac.  This post is about the transitional-period of Fleetwood Mac that feature Bobs Weston and Welch.

This is a Mac era that I have rarely explored.  I'm very familiar with their activities following the arrival of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, as I am of their earliest blues-roots when fronted by Peter Green, but the interim period between 1970 and 1974 has always remained a mystery to me.

Speaking of which, their 1973 album taken from this period, Mystery To Me, features a track called Keep On Going which, until the other day I had never heard.

I discovered it via a Deep Disco playlist on the amazing 22tracks service out of Amsterdam.

Yes, you heard right.  Fleetwood Mac,  Disco.  1973.

It's nothing less than a revelation.  It's proper, looping, strings-driven disco with Christine McVie as Diva-in-Chief.  Yes, yes, I keep being lectured by Daft Punk about Mr Moroder.  Yes, yes, Nile Rodgers I know what you did... but this is Fleetwood Mac defining disco back in 1973!! Not Northern Soul. Not R&B. Disco!

The rest of the album, it turns out captures a band in turmoil (as ever) reaching back quite capably, on several tracks, into their blues heritage and, quite remarkably, sending out flashes of the melody and lyricism which would define their classic era from 1975 and beyond.

It's an album I'd never heard before and one which I couldn't find to stream on Spotify, so tracked down a CD copy and it's opened up an entire era of the Mac to me which I can't wait to explore further.

Possible Book Club Books

Here's a list of books I've read this year any of which I'd be happy to discuss at the #la1bc Twitter book club:

• Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth
• Wool Trilogy - Hugh Howey
• The Crimson Petal and The White - Michael Faber
• Rivers of London - Ben Aaronivitch
• The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson
• The String Diaries - Stephen Lloyd Jones
• The Book Thief - Markus Zusack
• Labyrinth - Kate Moss
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
• Inferno - Dan Brown
• Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
• Fatherland - Robert Harris
• The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas
• The :Lifeboat - Charlotte Rogan
• Bedit Disco Queen - Tracey Thorn
• Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookshop
• Great North Road - Peter Hamilton
• Going to See In A Sieve - Danny Baker
• Peaches for Monsieur le Cure - Joanne Harris
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce

And here's the list of those I've got ready to start which I'd also be happy discussing (as it will help me choose what to read next):

• Black Chalk - Christopher J Yates
• Proxima - Stephen Baxter
• A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness
• The Never List - Koethi Zan
• Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
• The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
• MaddAddam - Margaret Atwwod
• Terms of Enlistment - Marko Kloos
• Wolfhound Century - Peter Higgins
• You - Austin Grossman
• Robocaplypse - Daniel H Wilson

Social Innovation: Rugby League Refs take to Twitter

Most of you won't follow Rugby League.  If you follow a team sport it is more likely to be football or cricket and, if it is rugby, it is more likely to be Rugby Union.

That's ok.  Whilst Rugby League is huge in Australia, the fascination with it in the UK tends to cluster along the M62 corridor between Widnes and Hull where most of the top-flight Superleague sides ply their trade, accompanied by a single team from London and, even more obscurely, for those who don’t know the game's history, a team based in Perpignan in the south of France.

You might imagine, therefore, that the support for a game played across only a relatively specific geography might be somewhat lacklustre.  Although, you might not be surprised to find that the fans are vocal, active and come together to form a family which unites fans of the sport from all clubs in a way which is scarcely replicated in other sporting arenas.  Tickets for the sport's flagship events, the Challenge Cup Final at Wembley and the Grand Final at Old Trafford are snapped up by fans months in advance and well ahead of any certainty as to which teams might actually be competing.   Rugby League fans simply love watching Rugby League and yes, they're happiest watching their own team, especially watching their own team win, but they are also passionate about the sport as a whole, often going to watch their own side play and then supplementing this by watching as many other games as are televised each weekend from February to October.

Another unique aspect to the game is that of the role played by the referees and other match officials.  Drawn from a relatively small pool, Superleague referees are all known by name to the fans and attract their own "support" and criticism based on their reputation, or where they reside (particularly where it is uncomfortably close to the opposing team!).  In football (the association variety), only a few high profile referees tend to be known by name to fans. 

Innovations in the Rugby League have seen the use of two referees per game (at least in its televised form in the UK - in Australia, they even have two refs on the pitch!).  Recent Challenge Cup coverage on the BBC (as opposed to Sky which picks up all Superleague broadcasting) even allowed viewers not only to see what the video ref was scrutinising as he mulled over his decisions, but they could even hear his comments as he went through the thought-process leading up to his decision.

However, one of the newest and most significant of the recent innovations implemented by the Rugby Football League is Ask The Ref.

The officials have recently banded together under a single Twitter name:  @RFLReferees and announced to fans that any (polite) questions sent their way via Twitter... in fact any tweets containing the hashtag #asktheref... will be reviewed by them as a group and several of them selected and retweeted from the @RFLReferees account with an accompanying answer and the initials of the referee who's written the response.

After the weekend's games, the referees (amongst many other things) review these tweets and the responses are shared on Twitter on a Tuesday afternoon.  For Superleague afficionados, they make fascinating reading.  For the onlooker, perhaps not so much.  But I'd urge those with an interest in social media to take a look, if only to consider the implications of this innovation, admire the spirit of the RFL in implementing this approach and imagine what the impact would be on other sports if direct contact with match officials was enabled in a similar way.

Take a look.

I bought what?

I love my Kindle and find that I read many more books now than I used to do in dead-tree days.  

I also find that I buy more books.  I do tend to get around to reading them, but I am definitely more impulsive than previously.  Some of this is to with the occasional promotional offers and price reductions.  Some of this is also to do with the ease of purchasing books via the Kindle store. I can over hear a conversation about a book and quickly Google the title; I can click on the link in an article or review or, as I did this morning, I can cast my eye across the train carriage and nosily wonder about the book being read by a fellow traveller and more-or-less immediately start reading it myself.  Of course, and somewhat ironically given the social components now built into the Kindle-reading experience, the passenger across from me needs to be reading a physical book if I'm to have any clue about what he or she is reading at all!  (I'm sure some kind of smart-cover technology will fix this soon enough, although who'll then joyfully admit to enjoying 50 Shades of Beige whilst on public transport?)

Anyway, that's not the point I'm making here.  Well, obviously it is, but only as an aside, if you will.  No, the point I'm making is that I accrue as-yet-unread books in my Kindle library at a rate of knots, sometimes so enthusiastically that I forget I've made the purchase.  So, after finishing a book, when I consult the library on my Kindle I'm often pleasantly surprised to find things in my possession but just as often perplexed when I can't remember what a particular book is about or what prompted me to buy it in the first place.  

Now this is where things are a bit broken.

What I'd like to do very quickly, on my device and within my Kindle library-listing itself, is click through to the book description also used in the main Amazon bookstore, and possibly the reviews.  You know, just to remind me why I was stimulated to make the purchase in the first place.  But of course I can't.  On a traditional Kindle device, all I get is the title and author.  At least on a Kindle Fire, or by using a Kindle app on an iOS or Android device I get to see the cover, which may go some way to jogging my memory, but it's not as good as having quick access to a review, for which I need to fire up a browser and trek across (first-world-problem alert) to the Amazon Kindle store, search for the book, find the description and reignite my memory, before closing the browser and reopening the Kindle or Kindle app and starting to read.

I fairness to Amazon, this did used to be a little easier on iOS devices when access to the store was available from within the app and before Apple implemented one of their famously counter-intuitive waves of control-freakery and banned this little boon to customer experience, but even then the descriptions didn't really accompany the title in the library listing.

Anyway, there we have it... 

In summary:  Can we have a precis of a book's description accompanying it in individual Kindle libraries across apps and devices please?  Thanks.

Try to listen to this end to end