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Originally Posted by Mr Scarrott
A temporary line-up still counts, in my opinion, for what it's worth, and they were billed as Fleetwood Mac for that time. It's all subject to nuance, I guess. I suppose the only official acknowledgement of the number of line-ups came in the liner notes of the Greatest Hits album, written by Stephen Davis which refers to the Vito/Burnette band as "Mark XI" so we may have to defer reluctantly to that. Having said that, Davis might simply have got the number from Pete Frame! I can remember an interview with Mick in 1990 in which Mick guessed that there had been ten incarnations so he obviously had given up counting by that point.
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The Pete Frame thing was out years before it was in that book.
I disagree that temporary line-ups count as official line-ups. Those exist only to help the band meet obligations. For example, from 1991-1993, the entity of Fleetwood Mac really only existed because they owed Warner Bros. a box set. Ironically, Clinton used "Don't Stop," and suddenly there was interest in the band again. The band was not really a working entity at that point. The "Rumours" band and the "Mask" band (minus Stevie) did televised shows because the incoming president asked them to and as a way to capitalize on the renewed interest in the band as a way to try and salvage the lagging sales of the boxed set. Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Rick Vito, and (as we would learn) Billy Burnette had no intentions of continuing with the band. Their returns were one-offs.
Now, there is one area where it gets a little murky. The 1993-1994 band (Mick, John, Christine, Bekka, and Dave Mason) released "Blow By Blow" for "Soccer Rocks The Globe" and then Billy asked to come back. Now, from an interview I read with Dave Mason, it didn't sound like Billy was completely rejoining at that point. It mentioned Billy in the same breath as Steve Thoma. I guess one could list that as an official line-up, but I think that's really minutiae.
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There's also a version of the band that I think of as Fleetwood Mac#-1. That's when Green, Fleetwood & McVie were given studio time as a present by John Mayall and recorded the instrumental Fleetwood Mac and a couple of others that were released later on under the band's name. Clearly at that time, they weren't recording as Fleetwood Mac or as the Bluesbreakers but in some other informal capacity. They were a name before they were a band, I think I read somewhere.
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There wasn't an entity called Fleetwood Mac at that point. They were in fact recording as the Bluesbreakers, just minus John Mayall. Some of those songs appeared on Mayall albums. To put it another way, is "Ramblin' On My Mind" on the Beano album an Eric Clapton song just because John Mayall, John McVie, and Hughie Flint don't appear on it? No, just like "Never Going Back Again" isn't a Lindsey Buckingham solo song.