“God knows all our lives are unimaginable without each
other,” mutters Mick Fleetwood, glancing speculatively
from one old friend to another. It’s a line you might
expect to crop up in Friends or Cold Feet, but it’s
quite a thing to say at Madison Square Garden in front
of 20,000 people when you’re really just introducing the
band.
This is Fleetwood Mac, though, the longest-running soap
opera in rock’n’roll, so portentous lines never go
amiss.
The underlying plot motif of recent months has been yet
another comeback successfully accomplished. The new
studio album, Say You Will, has sold a million in the US
while the tour, begun last May, has grown and grown, now
extending to Europe and seven November shows in the UK.
And the revivified band, minus Christine McVie,
“retired” pro tem, demonstrates nightly that this is no
nostalgia trip, it’s Fleetwood Mac full on. Trim Lindsey
Buckingham, 55, sings like a deranged Roy Orbison,
dazzle-fingers the guitar strings, then stumbles away
thumping his heart as if each solo might be his last.
Stevie Nicks, 55 too, aflutter with black lace, so
forgets her trademark wafty witchy ways that she punches
the air like a Premiership goalscorer and defies the
logic of middle-age, gravity and her stilettos to kick
up her skirts and execute a dizzying Dervish twirl.
But that’s not all. Because here’s the news. Four songs
in, Buckingham and Nicks, the romantic leads who broke
up amid Rumours 27 years ago, are gazing into each
others’ eyes across the stage as they sing a harmony. A
little later, she hip-wiggles up to him and her fingers
dance air guitar right next to his. In Landslide, as he
reaches - let’s face it - a climax, she slips behind
him, a hand on his arm and he turns and kisses her
forehead. Then, at the end of Tusk, they fall into a
full embrace. Buckingham breaks from the clinch and,
bent like Quasimodo, makes for a microphone. He tilts
his head back and roars. “Rrrrrraaaaarrrr!”
The following afternoon in a wood-panelled suite at the
Waldorf Astoria, Stevie Nicks, as on-stage a living
susurrus in diaphanous black, is chuckling about
Buckingham’s silly walk and animal noises. Nothing to do
with Victor Hugo, she says: “It’s Tusk the elephant.
That whole African-drum, tusk-in-the-air, happy,
religious, ritualistic thing, with Mick as the African
chief. Making that record, we became like a tribe. In
the studio we had two ivory tusks as tall as Mick on
either side of the console. The board became ‘Tusk’. If
something went wrong it was, ‘Tusk is down’. Those 13
months working in that room were our journey up the
sacred mountain to the sacred African percussion, uh,
place, where all the gods of music lived.”
Frankly, sacred mountains and gods of music were just
the ticket to start MOJO's retrospective on the
notorious vinyl double that was 1979’s Tusk. Back then,
record moguls dubbed it “Lindsey’s folly”. Yet, of late,
MOJO has encountered diverse young bands - The Strokes,
Air, The Webb Brothers, -- unexpectedly quoting Tusk as
influential. It was recently designated “a landmark of
radical MOR” by The Guardian. How prescient American
critical doyen Greil Marcus looks now, having written in
his October 1979 Tusk review that “Fleetwood Mac is
subverting the music from the inside out, very much like
one of John LeCarre’s moles - who, planted in the heart
of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign
of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used
to him, and takes him for granted.”
Tusk erupted out of the lives in tornado turmoil. Three
years before Tusk, with Buckingham-Nicks a promising duo
and utterly broke, as an improbably Los Angeleno Mrs.
Mop Nicks had set aside her chiffon in favour of “Ajax
and a toilet brush”. Then Mick Fleetwood called and
everything went wild. Joining Fleetwood (drums/band
manager) and the McVies, John (bass) and Christine
(keyboards/vocals), they made a US Top 10 album,
Fleetwood Mac, which successfully shifted the band’s
reputation from the Brit R&B of Peter Green days to
Californian soft rock. Then came the global monster,
eventual 30-million-selling Rumours. In the course of
his vertical take-off, malign scriptwriters took over
their lives.
Christine McVie walked out on her marriage to John,
largely because of his boozing. Soon she was living with
band lighting engineer Curry Grant, and, in the early
days of Tusk, John married his secretary, Julie Rubens
(one relationship that has endured). Nicks broke up with
Buckingham after five fraught years. She took up with
The Eagles’ Don Henley and others, while he played the
field before going steady with a woman called Carol
Harris. Fleetwood and his wife Jenny (Pattie
Boyd-Harrison/Clapton’s sister) divorced and remarried.
Then, unbeknownst to the band, he began an affair with
Nicks.
And everyone drank, smoked and snorted loads.
Unsurprisingly, when Buckingham called at Fleetwood’s
Bel Air home early in 1978 to discuss strategy - “What
the **** were we going to do now?” as the drummer puts
it - it took three days.
Still sporting an enormous Afro yet captivated by new
wave, Buckingham insisted that he couldn’t stand any
laurel-flaunting ’Rumours II’ operation. Sitting in an
airily sumptuous apartment at the Ritz-Carlton, he tells
MOJO how he tried to convey that, in adapting to the
band, “I was losing a great deal of myself” - to both
their music and high-on-the-hog lifestyle. He wanted to
record his songs at home, then bring them to the band.
Fleetwood, now 56, is ensconced 100 yards along the
block in the rather more antique Plaza (different hotels
because they all have their New York favourites;
otherwise they’d all stay together, honest). His
ultimate reaction to the “new boy” was that “what he
suggested was quite possible and, I thought, a survival
plan for the band - although I know I understood it more
readily than John and Christine did.”
“Begrudging agreement” was all Buckingham needed. That
May, he went home and got stuck in.
A daytime person and fervent admirer of the discipline
his Olympic silver-medalist older brother Greg brought
to swimming, he discovered “an extreme focus which was
in many ways to the detriment of other parts of my life,
I know. My thought was, let’s subvert the norm. Let’s
slow the tape machine down, or speed it up, or put the
mike on the bathroom floor and sing and beat on, uh,
kleenex box! My mind was racing. I love it.”
Bearing home tapes of squally, manic pieces like The
Ledge and Not That Funny, Buckingham would join the band
at Village Recorders where the owners had re-equipped
Studio D for around $1.4 million. The band were supposed
to buy it, but when that fell through they ended up
paying much the same in rent - not to mention nightly
lobster and champagne takeaways.
The shiny new-machine look didn’t last. Tickled by the
tusks, Nicks hung drapes above the desk, stuck paintings
and Polaroids on the walls and plugged rainbow lights in
everywhere. “It became very vibey, mystical, incensy and
perfumed,” she purrs. But Buckingham was not for
soothing. Engineer Ken Caillat, a Tusk co-producer and
the boffin behind the DVD version due out early next
year, still frowns on the guitarist’s contrariness: “He
was a maniac. The first day, I set the studio up as
usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from
where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape
microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of
push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d
freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with
nail scissors. He was stressed. And into sound
destruction.”
Given the band’s emotional history, calming influences
hardly abounded. John McVie - 58 this month and not
doing interviews - found himself regularly advising the
whippersnapper Buckingham to get his hands off the bass
parts, one reason for the bassist’s early departure from
the studio to his ocean-going yacht and consequent
substitution by a cardboard cut-out in the Tusk video.
While Caillat recollects “some kind moments” between
Nicks and Buckingham, the guitarist/producer sees the
peaceful passages as “exercises in denial”. Tellingly,
he has recalled Nicks “coming in once a week to do her
song and that would be it”, while her perception was
that “I was in the studio every day for 13 months.”
Feeling insecure within the band, she bonded more than
ever with Christine and engaged The Eagles’ manager
Irving Azoff, with whom she secretly set up a new label,
Modern, to launch a solo career.
She didn’t inform Fleetwood of this intention until
January, 1980. Their own veiled affair, meanwhile
continued beyond the collapse of Fleetwood’s remarriage
to Jenny in 1978, only to end suddenly that October when
he fell for Sara Recor, Nicks’s best friend and titular
inspiration for the song, written a few months earlier,
that became Tusk’s most enduring hit.
For months after that, says Nicks, “We weren’t talking
to each other very much. We were there, but looking past
each other. Everybody was nervous: ‘Is she going to
burst into tears and leave?’” Nicks believes the rest of
the band realised what was going on, but Buckingham, his
attention and perceptions fiercely “compartmentalised”,
has said he knew nothing until a couple of years after
the event when Fleetwood, in English gentlemanly
fashion, gave him a ‘There’s something you ought to
know’ speech.
Nor was that the last of the complications. Nicks had a
liason with Caillat’s assistant engineer, Hernan Rojas.
Christine McVie met Beach Boy Dennis Wilson one night at
Village Recorders and within days he had moved into her
mansion, haunting the Tusk sessions thereafter - Caillat
describes him “coming in hammered, stinking of alcohol,
walking around with a jug of vodka and orange juice in
his hand”.
The uproar wasn’t all about love, though. Tusk’s leading
actors, Buckingham and Fleetwood absorbed onslaughts
that had nothing to do with the vagaries of eccentric
ego and erratic passion. In July, 1978, during a touring
time-out from recording, Buckingham collapsed in a
Philadelphia hotel suite with a seizure, soon diagnosed
as epilepsy. Intimations of mortality? “Not really;
More, What the hell was that? You’re on the bathroom
floor, your girlfriend’s crying and you’re, Huh? What?
It does take a horrible toll on your body. You go into
this complete coiled-spring thing. But once I was
prescribed Dilantin I had no more problems.”
Then, within a few months, his father died, aged 56,
after years of heart problems probably caused by the
strain of running the family’s troubled coffee business.
Morris Buckingham, who always encouraged Lindsey’s
rock’n’rolling when a career in law or architecture
would have better suited his social standing, is one of
Tusk’s co-dedicatees. The other is Wing Commander Mike
Fleetwood, Mick’s father, who died of cancer in summer,
1978. When Fleetwood learned that his father was fading
he flew home. He was able to say a proper farewell and
his father’s spirit stayed with him, tangibly, while the
Tusk maelstrom raged to a conclusion.
“My father and mother used to come on tours for weeks on
end,” says Fleetwood. “They were like parents to
everyone on the road. I’d been hopeless at school and
when I was 15 my father backed me in leaving to go to
London and play drums. So it was gratifying to know he’d
seen my pipedream come true. But after he died what I
always had with me was the tapes he’d made of his own
poems and other writings. Fantastic pieces. Whenever I’d
get drunk we’d all sit around listening to my dad! Well,
in truth, it was probably a bit strange to some people”
‘Oh, there goes Mick again, playing his dad’s tapes,
sitting there on the floor with tears pouring down his
cheeks.’ But that’s how much that all meant to me.”
In June, 1979, Tusk was done. Fleetwood Mac had a high
old time recording the title track brass section and
video at Dodger Stadium with the 100-string University
of Southern California Trojan Marching Band. Nicks led
the baton-twirlers, as she did in high school; Fleetwood
banged the big bass drum. He updated Warner boss Mo
Ostin on what they’d been up to - the 2- tracks, the
million dollars - and recalls a response along the
lines, “You’re insane doing a double album at this time.
The business is fucked, we’re dying the death, we can’t
sell records, and this will have to retail at twice the
normal price. It’s suicide. You’ve got to stop ‘em!” So
they went ahead. They had the power.
On October 10, out came 20 tracks and 72 minutes of
strange, tripolar sounds; Buckingham barking and
hollering into the back of beyond, Nicks murmuring
mysticism, and McVie cooing and coaxing with the cool
elegance of classic pop.
The opening two tracks set the tone. McVie’s Over And
Over floats on a gentle stream of dappled piano and
slide guitar, lovely, simple but neither daft nor
innocent as it frets, albeit languidly, “Don’t turn me
away/And don’t let me down.” Next up, it’s Buckingham’s
The Ledge, and suddenly you’re at some deranged circus,
drums stomping like a seaboot dance - Fleetwood’s
blissfully minimalist sophistication on Over And Over is
the perfect antithesis - the guitar off-key, and
ungainly as a very fat man sprinting, the voice
gloating, nagging, slurry and barely comprehensible.
Nicks makes her entry with track five, Sara, laid-back
cruise-rock and full-on sex, “Drowning in the sea of
love/Where everyone would love to drown”. And so it
rolls. The oddball and the familiar. The rowdy and the
slick. Arguably, it’s even the man versus the women, as
nine Buckingham tracks oppose (complement?) six from
McVie and five from Nicks. Even so, while these extremes
can hardly be overstated, Buckingham’s recollection is
that the band did play on all but one of his songs -
Save Me A Place - and his guitar, production and harmony
vocal contributions to the McVie and Nicks compositions
are clearly as diligent and sensitive as they were on
the previous two albums. Ultimately, none of them could
resist doing their best for the music, regardless of
personal conflicts.
Ken Caillat, irked for the duration because he believed
the band should “do something like Rumours, the public
want that”, fought his corner when he took the lead on
sequencing and largely ensured that “those more
disturbing songs were spaced out between Christine’s and
Stevie’s”. No wonder Buckingham long ago reconciled
himself to the view that the Tusk effect is much like a
wacky solo album constantly bobbing up and down
demanding attention throughout somebody else’s record.
But, disjointed and dislocated as it is, there’s not a
dull track on it. It’s beautiful and nuts and not at all
what’s supposed to happen in the music industry even
now, and that’s why fans and bands are still coming to
it fresh. Retrospecting in 1995, a latecomer to the
album’s motley throng of disciples, Simon Reynolds wrote
that, “Tusk ranks as one of the great career sabotage
LPs in pop history alongside The Clash’s Sandinista!,
ABC’s Beauty Stab and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique”. He
further compared it to Sly And The Family Stone’s
There’s A Riot Goin’ On ”as anti-populist refusal of the
soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled
exercise in superstar experimentalism” and, giving
Buckingham a thrill no doubt, to PiL’s Metal Box: “Both
were long-awaited double albums released late in 1979,
with bizarre packaging; both were essays in anti-rockism,
both were attempts to sidestep an audience’s
expectations.”
Yet, cruelly, Ostin’s hard-headed assessment of the
times and the economy proved accurate. And the
promotional strategists certainly didn’t help matters
with a couple of desperate misfires. The utterly
eccentric Tusk was the first single released - like some
bizarre health warning to Rumours purchasers - after
which, with great fanfare, the whole album was broadcast
on Westwood One radio to the accompaniment, as Fleetwood
later lamented, of a nation’s cassette recorders hissing
away. It soon became evident that sales would total less
than a quarter of its predecessor’s phenomenal figures.
However, before recriminations began, the mayor of Los
Angeles declared the release date ‘Fleetwood Mac Day’.
At the launch party, Nicks took the mike to thank
revellers at Frederick’s of Hollywood’s saucy lingerie
emporium for “believing in the crystal vision”.
The Tusk tour proved more blur than crystal vision. “It
almost killed the band”, wrote Fleetwood in his
autobiography. He meant both financially and, at times,
physically as the frazzled fivesome decided that the
only way to keep the show on the road from Pocatello,
Idaho on October 26, 1979, to Los Angeles on September
1, 1980, was to indulge themselves. In America, they
chartered their own planes, latterly the Caesar’s Palace
casino’s private Boeing 707. In Europe, wary of airport
customs’ drug-seeking diligence, they hired their own
luxurious train.
Hoteliers must have cringed to hear of their coming.
Nicks’s rooms had to be repainted pink, so a white piano
was required. And Caillat recalls at one European
stopover a window frame was removed and a crane deployed
to get a baby grand into Christine’s suite. As for the
men, they enjoyed a practical joke. A favourite was the
celebration of tour manager John Courage’s birthday by
filling his room with 50 chickens accompanied, for
farmyard verisimilitude, by bales of straw. Inevitably,
a further “king’s ransom” was spent on keeping the party
supplied with cocaine and alcohol. They even argued
extravagantly: Fleetwood has recalled spending $2,000 on
an all-night shouting match with Sara on the phone from
Japan to California.
Under all this self-inflicted pressure, Fleetwood’s
robust constitution began to crack up, conspicuously so
before Christmas, 1979 at the San Francisco press
conference. His whole body went into spasm, though he
stayed at his post, trying to answer questions while
Christine massaged his shoulders. “It was
hypoglycaemia,” says Fleetwood. “I was manic depressive,
I’d hyperventilate. Eat a bowl of ice cream and I was
all right for 20 minutes, then down again. It was 18
months of hell. I thought I was going crazy. I had these
weird psychedelic, coma-like visions and quite a few of
them turned out to be true. Once, I saw [co-producer]
Richard Dashut in the control booth smoking a joint and
a policeman walked in behind him. I rang him and he said
a policeman friend of his had come by the studio that
night. Gospel truth!”
Eventually, the condition was diagnosed and a diet
suggested which, he discovered via rigorous testing,
kept the hallucinations at bay while enabling him to
“keep on rocking like a madman”.
Buckingham too started to come unscrewed, overwhelmed by
frustrations about his relationship with Nicks, the way
it ended, her position as crowd favourite at concerts.
In March 1980, playing to 60,000 in Auckland, New
Zealand while loaded with whisky (according to
Fleetwood), he pulled his jacket over his head in
grotesque imitation of Nicks’s drapes and started to ape
her twirling moves. Then he ran across the stage and
kicked her. Nicks carried on like a trouper.
In the dressing-room, head hung in shame, he was
confronted by Christine McVie who slapped him and threw
a glass of wine over him: “Don’t you ever do that to
this band again! Ever! Is that clear?”
Buckingham can’t remember the events, but says, with
bemusement: “Oh, I wouldn’t doubt that I mimicked Stevie
on-stage. And kicked her? That could have happened too.”
The end of the Tusk tour was a relief to all. But within
weeks the band members’ accountants, particularly
Nicks’s man Irving Azoff, had all come to a conclusion
about the tour: it played to enormous sell-out crowds
and made no money. In two meetings that September, the
second at Fleetwood’s house in Bel Air, the
player-manager found himself encircled by inquisitorial
suits and silent bandmates.
“It was a terrible occasion,” sighs Fleetwood. “My only
defence was, Well, you try and stop them spending! Me
and John Courage had tried early in the tour. We booked
cheaper hotels. but we had so many complaints from the
band. We were all basically insane! Instead of five
limos we would have 14 because we loved everyone we were
travelling with so the lighting guy and so on had cars
too.” (Shrewd McVie eventually decided to take his
“limo” in cash and travel on the crew bus.)
The band assured Fleetwood they trusted him, they knew
he didn’t have his hand in the till. It was just that,
as Buckingham puts it, “Mick isn’t a budget kind of
guy.” And that meant, after six years as manager, he had
to go - to be replace by the “committee” of individual
representatives who, Fleetwood feels, have complicated
band life ever since.
“It was pretty...ugly,” he says. “But I took it like a
man. I remember halfway through the meeting I went up to
my bedroom for a brandy and I said to Sara I was
actually sort of relieved. It was all too much. It hurt.
But I understood. And I was sound enough, yet again, to
say ‘I can eat crow and move on’.” At different points,
Fleetwood has called the Tusk story “the end of an era”
and “the reason why this band still exists”. Nowadays,
he tends to think both of these seeming contradictions
are true.
Twenty-three years on, in Madison Square Garden, at the
end of Don’t Stop, Buckingham and Nicks strike a
startling tableau centre-stage. In profile, she stands
with her back to him gazing upwards, he bends low over
his guitar, his face buried in her ash-blonde hair. The
crowd sighs. And steams. The hands of lovers young and
old entwine. But it probably wouldn’t work if it wasn’t
based on a true story.
At the Ritz-Carlton earlier that day, Buckingham mused,
in his California way: “Stevie and I could never quite
find each other after Tusk. You have to understand that
this is someone I met when I was 16 [they duetted
California Dreaming at a high school party before they
were introduced]. I was completely devastated when she
took off. And yet, trying to rise above that
professionally, I produced hits for her, I had to do a
lot of things for her that I really didn’t want to do.
If I kicked her on-stage, that was....something coming
through the veneer. There has been a lot of darkness.”
After Tusk, despite being blamed for its “failure”,
Buckingham made two more albums with Fleetwood Mac,
quitting in 1988 before the Tango In The Night tour. He
released three intense, uncommercial solos, had one
rejected by Warners, and drifted back into the Mac ambit
via 1997’s MTV Unplugged and The Dance reunion live
album. In the late ‘90s, he married and had two
children, Will and Lee.
Nicks started her solo side-venture with the smash Bella
Donna in 1981 and followed it with six others. With her
off-stage life dominated by medical problems, she left
the band after 1990’s undistinguished Behind The Mask.
For eight years she was hooked on Klonopin, a
tranquilliser prescribed by her doctor, but since 1994
she has beaten all her addictions, even the 60-a-day
Kools.
Reconciliation came - slowly - out of the band reunions
and, probably, a mellowing in Buckingham. Ken Caillat
quotes a recent conversation: “He said, ’I’m a selfish
guy.’ Which is true, he’s all about me, me, me. He
admitted he had even been angry about having a child to
start with. Then one day the kid grabbed his little
finger and he just got it. He understood there was
another world out there.”
And when Nicks rejoined Fleetwood Mac for the
intriguingly Tusk-like Say You Will - he found her ready
to forgive - and not forget, but laugh about “the time
you threw that Les Paul at me” and such..
“Now, on the road, we’ve had many really good talks,” he
says. “We’ve known each other most of our lives and yet
we’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.
Obviously, a lot of love as a subtext. But where is that
love? How do we get in touch with any of that? For all
of us, the decisions we make now are going to determine
how we are as people until we die. Stevie and I are
trying to look at it...with care.”
He grunts a laugh. “It’s significant that someone can
end up, you know.... not having killed you!”
“Now I just adore him,” says Nicks, with ravishing
candour. “He is my love. My first love and my love for
all time. But we can’t ever be together. He has a lovely
wife, Kristen, who I really like, and they are expecting
their third child. The way he is with his children just
knocks me out. I look at him now and just go, Oh,
Stevie, you made a mistake!”
She leans forward. “But when we go on-stage together we
are able to experience our love affair again - and again
and again! For two and a half hours, four times a
week...There isn’t really anybody in my life - it
wouldn’t be good for me now anyway, I’m always away. But
when hard times come over the next 20 or 30 years, when
people we love die, he’ll be the first person I’ll call.
Knowing that now, I think he has been able to let go of
all the nasty things that happened and realise that,
like I said to him, Lindsey, you’ll always have me. I’m
always a phone call away. So you get it all.”
“It’s a forever story with those two,” grins Fleetwood.
“As it is with all of us.” He likes forever stories.
It’s his “obsession” that’s kept the band going since
Peter Green’s departure in 1970. Even when Christine
McVie quit after recording the rather sorry Time in
1995, the brand name duo continued as ever, ace rhythm
section in search of a band. Fleetwood, long divorced
from Sara, is now married again, to Lynn, with
18-month-old daughters. John McVie and Julie have a
14-year-old daughter, Molly. McVie has been a teetotal
for years while, after eight years’ abstinence,
Fleetwood feels confident his “occasional glass of wine”
won’t set him off again.
The gabby one and the quiet one remain the bedrock of
one another’s lives, Fleetwood reckons. “John is truly
my best friend,” he says. “I adore him. It’s mutual.
We’ve been through so much. He is the most truthful
person I know. We share a sense of humour. Loyalty;
Musically, we’ve done it for so long together
that...anything else is shallow compared to John. Long
ago, playing the blues, we learnt that a rhythm section
needs to be gracious: you’re creating a platform for
others. We don’t have musical egos at all.
“I have a home on Maui in Hawaii. Now John’s thinking,
‘Where do I go when I retire?’ And about three weeks ago
on the plan he told me, ‘I’m pretty dam sure I’m going
to build a house on Oahu’ [a neighbouring island]. Well,
you’ve got to give yourself a few days off before you
start pushing up daisies and to know that, in our latter
years, he’s going to be just over the road...that makes
me feel good.”
   
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Inset #1:
Undercover Punk
Phil Sutcliffe reveals the love of new wave that shaped
Lindsey Buckingham’s startling contributions to Tusk.
“I never much wanted to be in this band in the first
place,” muses Lindsey Buckingham, just 28 years too
late, a few hours before he goes on-stage with Fleetwood
Mac at Madison Square Garden. “I would much rather have
been in a band like The Clash from the beginning. Ha!”
There again, The Clash didn’t get together until 18
months after Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac,
and anyway they were in Shepherd’s Bush, not Los
Angeles, where the vibes were rather different.
That wrong-place-wrong-time sensation nagged at the
guitarist as, throughout his career, he wrestled with a
band member’s need to “play team ball” and his own
creative instinct to write and sing whatever the wished
- and his internal strife came to a head with Tusk.
He would interrogate British journalists visiting the
Fleetwood Mac camp about the latest news on The Clash,
the Sex Pistols, The Pretenders, Gang Of four and moan
about the rest of the band’s conservatism; Fleetwood and
McVie had no interest in new wave, Nicks only listened
to Derek And The Dominos and Steve Miller in her
dressing-room.
But he did credit those British punks for “deprogramming
me” and “giving me the courage” to take a stand and
insist he be given his head on Tusk so that, he hoped,
the band that soothed the world with Rumours could maybe
“shake people up and make them think.” Close to 25 years
on, it’s fair to say he succeeded.
   
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Inset #2:
Fleetwood’s Finest
The best of the Mac by Sylvie Simmons and Phil
Sutcliffe.
Greatest Hits
Columbia, November 1971
Twelve fine cuts from ‘68-’71 find a band going through
big changes. All three troubled singer-guitarist-writers
are here - Jeremy Spencer’s tough US blues, Danny
Kirwan’s lean Anglo pastoral, and Peter Green’s
impressive, diverse originals: wistful Albatross,
Latin-noir Black Magic Woman, introspective Man Of the
World and Green Manalishi door-matting his descent into
nightmare. (SS)
Fleetwood Mac
Warner Bros., July 1975
Eleventh album, first with Buckingham/Nicks; a new life
begins. Christine McVie’s lovely-groove seductions
shaded by Nicks’ dying-fall romances (Rhiannon,
Landslide). There’s a musical dimension to intra-band
drama as John McVie’s masterful, undeniably busy bass
shoulders young Buckingham aside. His creative ego
fumed. (PS)
Rumours
Warner Bros., February 1977
The great paradox. Individual relationships fall apart
and the band becomes the perfect team, their USP
male/female combo working a treat as the grief beds
down. Nearly every song says goodbye, but generously - a
kind, yet essential honest account of what they’d been
through. Eternal mass empathy ensues. (PS).
Tango In The Night
Warner Bros., April 1987
Buckingham resentfully drops a solo album to produce,
then leaves pre-tour. Nicks is semi-detached by Klonopin.
Routinely inebriated Anglos soldier on. Result:
surprising retrieval of mid-’70s enchantment through
Everywhere’s charm (C. McVie), Big Love’s lusty longing
(Buckingham), and When I See You Again’s ache of loss
(Nicks). (PS)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional information: Fleetwood by Mick Fleetwood
and Stephen Davis (Sidgwick & Jackson); Rumours Exposed:
The Unauthorized Biography Of Fleetwood Mac by Leah
Furman (Citadel). The band tours the UK for the first
time in 15 years from November 22 (Newcastle) until
December 19 (Earls Court, London). A single,
Peacekeeper, is out on November 24. |
