By Greg Kot
Sat 27 Jun 1992
The Canberra Times
Lindsey Buckingham, late of Fleetwood Mac, is back on top, as Greg Kot reports.
IN 1987, when the musical world last heard from Lindsey Buckingham, he was telling Fleetwood Mac he wanted out — and his bandmates were not taking the news well.
The break-up, on the eve of a world tour, was recounted in bloody detail by Mick Fleetwood in a recent autobiography, but the drummer says that, in retrospect, everyone saw it coming.
Buckingham had been the creative hub of the band for 12 years, as songwriter, singer, guitarist, producer and arranger, the “boy wonder” — as Fleetwood described him — who could take one of Stevie Nicks’s raw, rambling stories and sculpt it into a pop song such as Sara or Gypsy.
But he found himself no longer being challenged. “I had not been very happy in that situation for a while,” Buckingham says. His first new music in five years, Out of the Cradle (Warner Bros), is a fresh start for the 42-year-old singer.
“I feel better than I’ve felt in 10 years, and it’s the idea of taking responsibility and having account ability for yourself,” he says.
Leaving.the band “was a survival move I had to make”. The beginning of the end was the 1979 Tusk album, which included some of his most experimental music, sold several million copies but was considered a commercial failure after the 20-million-selling Rumours.
” After Rumours, the soap opera, the phenomenon of the sales, the sensationalistic aspects of the inter relationships in the group were the things people were focusing on and not the music,” he says. “When the machinery is stoked up that much, there are forces in and outside of the group that will want you to run it into the ground.
“Quite often I felt I was an outsider watching this happen…. Plus you had a lot of [punk and new-wave] music coming in from England and other places right before Tusk that was a kick in the butt.
“My reaction was to say to Mick, ‘I’d like to go into my house and just fool around with songs on my own.’ So I’d sit in my bathroom and hit boxes and do whatever worked on a really primitive level, and I’d also come into the studio and work on everybody else’s stuff.
Tusk was the result…. When the album didn’t sell as well as Rumours, there was a bit of, ‘Gee, Lindsey, I guess you shouldn’t have done that.’ There was no way I could fight that within the group.”
It was six months after he quit Fleetwood Mac before Buckingham could even think about making music again. Then he began paying daily visits to his home studio in the Los Angeles hills, where he tinkered for 10 or 11 hours each day.
“When you worked with a band, or at least that band, it was more like moviemaking, because you may start off with the same intent, but you’ve got to verbalise step by step to get from point A to point B,” Buckingham says. “It’s more of a conscious, political kind of thing at times.
“Working alone, you start off with a blank canvas and an intent, but as you put strokes on the canvas, the work leads you off in different directions. It’s intuitive and lends itself to discovery a lot more.”
While Buckingham was making those discoveries and the years rolled by, Warner Brothers executives began getting anxious.
“They gave up [pressuring me] after a while,” Buckingham says with a chuckle, and “went from trying to expedite the process to actually getting drawn into what was going on more and more” as they heard one good song after an other.
The wait was worth it. Out of the Cradle is a dazzling sonic feast, showing Buckingham’s range as a balladeer, rocker and Tin Pan Alley-style craftsman.
“I find that so-called Tin Pan Alley sound very fresh right now for someone who’s entering a new phase of a career and wants to embrace a sense of maturity and is not interested in trying to appear 20 years old,” he says
Yet the album does not lack rock ‘n’ roll spark. It’s far more diverse than his two earlier solo albums, and more quirkily intriguing than his generally streamlined work with the post-Tusk Fleetwood Mac.
“With Stevie [Nicks] and Christine [McVie] writing with a slightly softer sound, I was often called up on to come up with the edgy stuff in the band,” he says. “And so you were looking at only a slice of me.
And with the solo records, I was concentrating on the esoteric as a way of keeping myself honest, so those weren’t a complete picture either. This is the first time I’ve been able to … approach a work the way I’ve wanted to “
One of the album’s features is Buckingham’s distinctive guitar playing, which bridges the gap between classical and country finger-picking and adds a rocker’s gusto.
— Knight-Ridder Newspapers