The US-only compilation English Rose was a similar package, sharing four songs with this album, and was released earlier in 1969. The title of the album is a phrase found in an 1817 gloss (marginal note) to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In contrast to their poppy sound of the 70s, Fleetwood Mac actually started out in the sixties as a psychedelic blues band under guitarist Peter Green's lead.

The phrase refers to the albatross killed in the poem ("The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen").Some CD releases circa 1999-2005 vary contents to reflect different leftovers of a Blue Horizon reissue program.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.What the CD version I originally, unwittingly, bought had five versions of that song but it doesn’t end there, none of the versions of that song were the single version on the original album and it starts with a version with loads of studio chat on it. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.