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November 10th, 2026 · 5:00pm GMT
When you look back at the influences of different musicians, most of them will make reference, at some point, to The Beatles.
You’ll often find that many musicians will cite the Fabs as being game changers, and that’s because they were. It wasn’t just their music that people connected with (obviously, that was a huge part of it), but there was a lot more to it. They were the first British band to make it in America, and they essentially laid out a new blueprint that people could follow if they wanted to do the same thing.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche,” said the manager of The Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. “It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
Of course, just because The Beatles influenced so many people didn’t mean that they weren’t also influenced by others. There were plenty of artists who they thought were worth listening to and who they wound up being inspired by, one of whom was the early iteration of Fleetwood Mac. Sure, the band in 1969 weren’t a great reflection of the version of themselves that would eventually reach massive heights, but they were still making great music nonetheless.
One of those songs that the early iteration of the band released was ‘Albatross’. It used a lot of reverb on the instrumentation, but in turn helped to create a blues-infused instrumental number. It holds the record of the greatest-selling instrumental track of all time, and acts as a great reflection of how good different pieces of music can sound, so long as they are made with a touch of romanticism.
George Harrison felt particularly drawn to the track, as he loved how well the guitar came across. He is often overlooked as a guitarist merely because of the fact that he was in The Beatles, but he had a way of playing that helped bring so many of the classics the band were responsible for to life. With such an affinity for the six-string, it’s no surprise that he loved what Fleetwood Mac were doing so much, and he wanted to replicate it.
He did so when it came to putting together The Beatles song ‘The Sun King’. This wasn’t a song that John Lennon looked back on too kindly, as he described it as “a piece of garbage I had around”. However, when you ask fans, the song has become somewhat of a cult classic among Beatles lovers, and it’s that Fleetwood Mac-inspired guitar style which helps get it over the line.
Further reading: From The Vault
Harrison admitted that the song was massively influenced by Fleetwood Mac and their reverb-heavy style of guitar playing, saying, “At the time, ‘Albatross’ (by Fleetwood Mac) was out, with all the reverb on guitar”.
Despite the band taking from the classic, there’s no denying that the songs are incredibly different versions of one another. The Beatles started out by merely playing ‘Albatross’, but the song eventually evolved into something totally different. “So we said, ‘Let’s be Fleetwood Mac doing ‘Albatross’, just to get going’,” said Harrison, concluding, “It never really sounded like Fleetwood Mac… but that was the point of origin”.
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