Fleetwood Mac? Well, suffice it to say that everything after the last of the original lead players departed is the musical equivalent of an extended soap opera and leave it at that.
All of those statements are, of course, my own highly biased and slightly exaggerated personal opinions.
So I’m not going to suggest that music I wasn’t inclined to explore very far doesn’t have a place in the history of rock’n’roll, or in the wider field of popular music, whatever that strange beast is.
The four bands I mentioned were tremendously significant to a huge number of people, but I never bothered to listen too much and don’t have anything to say about them. That might seem like writing the history of the twentieth century without referring to either of the World Wars, the Holocaust or the Great Depression, but I’m not writing the history of anything beyond what Hughesy listened to between about 1966 and the present day, so if I didn’t listen to it it’s more or less irrelevant.
Even if it is, effectively, the elephant in the room of popular music.
So what am I interested in? The Beatles, based on the article in Rants?
These days, despite the arrival of the long-awaited remasters of their entire oeuvre, not very.
Don’t get me wrong. I doubt that there has ever been a single musical act that has been as pervasive as the Beatles were from the time I first noticed them around the start of 1964 and the effective end of the Beatle era in the early 1970s. The Beatles provided a major part of the soundtrack to those years, played on the radio, on record players, in garages where bands were rehearsing and in the dances where those bands took their first steps on the path to musical stardom (or not, as the case may be).
Within a decade that era was gone, except for the memories of those who lived through it.