This might have looked like a surfeit of string benders, but Spencer was still channeling Elmore James and hadn't contributed to Green's material. Kirwan added an extra dimension that resulted in a #1 single (the wonderful wind under the wings sighing of Albatross). Things started to get complicated on the album front as well, with the band's three singles, some other odds and ends and two tracks cut with Eddie Boyd making up their third album, The Pious Bird of Good Omen.
The transatlantic equivalent comprised half of Mr Wonderful, some other odds and ends and two tracks that ended up on Then Play On. With Mick Fleetwood in drag on the album cover, English Rose's lack of commercial success across the pond probably comes as no surprise. Released in January 1969, seven months before The Pious Bird, it peaked at #184...
In the meantime the band had been lured away from Blue Horizon, first to Andrew Loog Oldham and Tony Calder's Immediate Records, and then across to Warner Brothers/Reprise, where they've been ever since. On that basis, The Pious Bird is an understandable exercise in clearing out the vaults, and when the band toured the United States in January 1969 sessions at Chess Records in Chicago with Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and Otis Spann yielded the Mac's Fleetwood Mac's last all-blues recording, issued as Blues Jam at Chess.
Their brief stay at the troubled Immediate label resulted in another hit single Man of the World/Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite (the latter credited to Earl Vince and the Valiants, which represented Jeremy Spencer in raucous rocker mode). The Beatles apparently wanted them on Apple Records (Fleetwood and George Harrison were married to the Boyd sisters), but the band's manager Clifford Davis (soon to feature in a very bad light) decided to go transatlantic.
And it's around here, folks, when they arguably (definitely, as far as Hughesy is concerned) hit their peak. Released in September 1969, Fleetwood Mac's first album for Reprise, Then Play On, was an almost totally Spencer-free affair, although he did, apparently, contribute some piano parts. Spencer was cutting a solo album, the fifties-tinged Jeremy Spencer, with the Mac providing the backing.