Uncut recounted the tale of Fleetwood Mac’s improbable reunion at length in May last year (Take 72). Now come two DVD releases commemorating the resumption of rock’n’roll’s longest-running soap opera. Live In Boston is a straightforward concert film shot in September 2003 on their first tour in five years. The band clearly miss Christine McVie, the only member of the classic mid-’70s line-up not to participate, and on one level, they offer up stadium rock of the blandest kind. Yet the residue of their own infamous internal psychodrama remains intense, and there’s an undeniable chemistry to these two-dozen performances, spread across two discs. “Rhiannon” proves that even in her fifties, Stevie Nicks can still beguile in her trademark black lace and chiffon. But it’s the way she and former lover Lindsey Buckingham interact during the songs they wrote for each other?”Landslide”, “Second Hand News”, “Dreams”, “Never Going Back Again”, “Go Your Own Way”?that creates a compelling emotional melodrama that reaches its height on “Silver Springs”, as Nicks chants: “Time casts a spell on you, but you won’t forget me”.

Documentary Destiny Rules ostensibly tells the story of the recording of the band’s 18-track reunion album, Say You Will, and rehearsals for the tour over a prolonged 18-month period in 2002-3. One says ‘ostensibly’, for everything Fleetwood Mac do remains haunted by the ghosts of their ’70s past, so the fascination of seeing them back together lies almost totally in the fact that, although time may have healed old wounds, visible and livid scars remain. They’re liable to reopen at any minute, too, for even while rehearsing and recording new songs, the band seem unable to help raking over the past. “It’s pretty amazing that all this time later those subjects are still being dealt with in a really deep manner,” Buckingham says with incredulity. Shortly after, there’s a huge fight between him and Nicks involving contracts and lawyers and accusations of duplicity. It’s all a bit like rubber-necking a motorway car crash. You ought to be repelled, but you can’t help being drawn to the grisly spectacle.

For those who survived the grinding tedium of last year’s live Greendale gigs, Young’s accompanying film at least attempts to contextualise his three-generational “musical novel” centred around the titular farming community in northern California.

Written and directed by long-time alias Bernard Shakey, it charts the human fallout of one “split-second tragic blunder” on the old coast highway, when Jed Green (played by tour manager Eric Johnson) shoots dead a cop during a routine search of his coke-laden car. With Jed awaiting trial, the Devil?also Johnson, in flash-red shoes and jacket?takes residence in the town. The effect on Grandpa (pedal-steel legend Ben Keith) is catastrophic. Stunned by Jed’s deed and with TV crews camped on the lawn and news ‘copters whirring overhead, he flips, firing a shotgun into the air before fatally collapsing on the porch. Galvanised by the horror, 18-year-old grand-daughter Sun Green (Sarah White)?scion of struggling painter Earl (James Mazzeo) and Edith (Young’s wife Pegi)?sets off into the world as a socio-political activist. Armed with megaphone and daubed in war paint, she first chains herself to the 16ft lobby statue of uber-industrialists Powerco, before emerging as an eco-warrior in the Alaskan wilds.

Shot on Young’s favoured underwater Super 8mm camera, it’s a humanist endeavour that ultimately falls short, less for its narrative trick (no dialogue, just actors lip-synching the lyrics of Greendale throughout) than for the plodding mid-tempo monotony of the songs themselves. Had he delivered an inspired suite of material, this could have been something. A pity, since many of the larger themes (media invasion of privacy, global planet rape, political power-broking, social revolution) are more strident echoes of Young’s early film work?Journey Through The Past (’73) and Human Highway (’82). The moment when slowly-mouthing Grandpa lies dying on the porch is more telling than Young perhaps envisioned in his deadpan lyric: “This guy who just keeps singin’/Can’t somebody shut him up?”

The late Tom Dowd’s influence on music is legendary. As an engineer, he invented the eight-track recorder. As Atlantic Records’ in-house producer, he worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman before helping Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, The Allman Brothers and Ray Charles. His life is traced here through interviews with Dowd himself, Charles, Franklin, Ahmet Ertegun and Eric Clapton, and through fine archive footage and recordings, Inspiring.

Stats show that Middle America’s “mass moral outrage” at Janet’s Superbowl boob-bearing came from a noisy couple of hundred. Her career may survive, then, though no thanks to this year’s scrappy LP Damita Jo. This gathers all the videos from the last four, the best of which is “That’s The Way Love Goes”, where she maximises her feline moves, timid voice, and gorgeous loping grooves. But she’s definitely in decline.

Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984’s Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm. Oasis are no longer trailblazers; some might say, unkindly, that they are simply trailing.

It was very different 10 years ago. Back then, they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, storming over the horizon with the urgent and irresistible mission statement of “Rock’n’Roll Star”, the curtain-raiser to an album that boils with ambition and bare-faced cheek.

Crucially, it represented the dawn of a new era. Grunge was reeling from the suicide of Kurt Cobain only a few months earlier, and the restless, swaggering lads from Burnage, Manchester were snapping hard at the heels of the UK’s baggy gurus, from whose circles they had arisen, with a louder, angrier and yet more beautiful take on music. Britpop had arrived, and although it may have gone on to mean different things to different people, Oasis would be the godheads, the people’s champions, their mix of aggression, melody and populist lyricism trampling any and all of the opposition.

Now, Definitely Maybe is comprehensively assessed, explained, explored and celebrated in a package that takes full advantage of the DVD format, revealing more about the album over several hours than anyone would even think to ask, There are options for listening to the songs straight through with an accompanying pictorial collage, and for seeing them all performed live in various venues. The five promo videos are also included. But it’s the documentary, bustling with newly recorded interviews with the original band members and many of the key characters around them at the time, which really gets the blood rushing.

Here are all the anecdotes, the gossip, the trivia and the stories behind the songs, the sessions and the sleeve. Here too is a laying-bare of the long labour pains that attended such a seemingly spontaneous musical outburst, an insight into the political preoccupations and personal clashes within Oasis even then as they strove to recreate the raw power and passion of their demos.

Eventually, they managed it. Stealing shamelessly from everybody from T. Rex (“Cigarettes And Alcohol”) to The New Seekers (“Shakermaker”), they were na