Then Play On is the third studio album by the British blues rock band Fleetwood Mac, released on 19 September 1969. It was the first of their original albums to feature Danny Kirwan (although two tracks recorded with him were included on the compilation album The Pious Bird of Good Omen released earlier in 1969) and the last with Peter Green. Although still an official band member at the time, Jeremy Spencer did not feature on the album apart from "a couple of piano things" (according to Mick Fleetwood in Q magazine in 1990).
The album offered a broader stylistic range than the straightforward electric blues of the group's first two albums, displaying elements of folk rock, hard rock, art rock and psychedelia. The album reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart, becoming the band's fourth Top 20 LP in a row, as well as their third album to reach the Top 10. The album's title, Then Play On, is taken from the opening line of William Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night—"If music be the food of love, play on".
Then Play On is Fleetwood Mac's first release with Reprise Records after being lured away from Blue Horizon and a one-off single with Immediate Records. The label would be the band's home until their self-titled 1975 album, after which they signed to Reprise's parent company Warner Bros. Records. The initial US release of the album omitted two tracks that were previously issued on the American compilation album English Rose, while the second US pressing further abridged the tracklist with the addition of the hit single "Oh Well". The original CD compiled all the songs from the two US LP versions, both of which omitted the English Rose tracks that are on the original UK version.
In August 2013, a remastered edition of the album was reissued on vinyl and CD. This version includes all the tracks from all previous versions of the album, with the original 1969 UK track listing as the main album and both parts of "Oh Well", as well as the 1970 non-album single "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)" and its B-side "World in Harmony", as bonus tracks.
Background
Fleetwood Mac's previous albums had been recorded live in the studio and adhered strictly to the blues formula. For the recording of Then Play On, editing and overdubbing techniques were used extensively for the first time. Fleetwood was adamant about veering away from material that was strictly blues-oriented and told Samuel Graham in a 1978 interview that "we didn't have an exact concept of what we were going to do, but we knew what we weren't going to do, and that was put out another record of Jeremy singing Elmore James. Fleetwood said that the band was "stylistically two bands in one" at the time; this was reflected in their live setlists, which consisted of conventional blues compositions and rock-and-roll covers with Spencer onstage and another portion of the show without Spencer primarily dedicated to extended jams. In a 1989 interview with Musician magazine, John McVie labeled this EP as his favorite material he ever recorded with Fleetwood Mac.