Tag Archives: Tango In The Night

Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock

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Forget Rumours: Fleetwood Mac’s craziest album was Tango In The Night

(Image credit: Barry King/Getty Images)

In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together, in public, at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously.

Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night.

Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.

“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving,” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”

It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood describes as “profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life. Continue reading Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock →

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April 1987: Fleetwood Mac’s Classic Lineup Bows Out Big with TANGO IN THE NIGHT | Rhino

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April 13, 2021
Rhino Insider

Fleetwood Mac was in pretty rough shape when the band got together to record what would become the group’s 14th studio effort, Tango in the Night. The record was originally conceived as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project; it was Mick Fleetwood who  coerced the guitarist into morphing it into a full Fleetwood Mac release.

Remastered CD

“That was in my estimation when everybody in the band was personally at their worst,” Buckingham recalled years later. “If you take the whole subculture that existed in the 1970s, and what it led to — and how it degraded — by the time we did Tango in the Night, everybody was leading their lives in a way that they would not be too proud of today. It was difficult for everybody.”

That included singer Stevie Nicks, who spent most of the laborious 18-month process making Tango in the Night out on the road promoting her third solo album, Rock a Little. Ultimately spending only two weeks at Buckingham’s home studio over the course of recording, Nicks customarily got drunk on brandy before singing her vocal takes. Most of them were left on the cutting room floor.

Once the dust settled, Fleetwood Mac released Tango in the Night on April 13, 1987. Much like Rumours, the behind-the-scenes drama was the genesis for hit records. Lead single “Big Love” cruised up the charts, peaking at #5 on the Hot 100 for the week of May 21, 1987. The song was also a hit on the dance floor, with an extended remix of the track twirling all the way to #11 on the Billboard Dance Sales chart in June 1987.

The second single from Tango in the Night was another radio winner: “Seven Wonders.” The Stevie Nicks showcase made a formidable chart run, breaking into the top 20 to peak at #19 on the Hot 100 for the week of August 15, 1987.

It was Christine McVie who shined on third Tango in the Night single, “Little Lies.” Peaking at #4 on the Hot 100 in November 1987, the song soared all the way to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart for the week of October 10, 1987.

Christine McVie again took the spotlight with the album’s fourth single, “Everywhere.” The song followed “Little Lies” up the Adult Contemporary chart, hitting #1 on January 15. 1988. Over on the Hot 100, “Everywhere” broke into the top 20 to peak at #14 in February 1988. Continue reading April 1987: Fleetwood Mac’s Classic Lineup Bows Out Big with TANGO IN THE NIGHT | Rhino →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info

Fleetwood Mac Releasing Alternate ‘Tango In The Night’ LP For ‘Record Store Day’ | 94.7 WLS

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Fleetwood Mac will release Tango In The Night – Alternate for “Record Store Day” on April 21st. The LP, which was released as part of last year’s deluxe expanded version of the 1987 album, will be limited to 4000 copies on vinyl LP. Tango In The Night – Alternate features 13 unreleased tracks, including the alternate version of “Mystified,” a demo for the album’s title song, plus the rare b-sides: “Down Endless Street” and “Ricky.” Tango In The Night, which is the band’s second biggest selling album, spawned four hit singles “Little Lies” (#4), “Big Love” (#5), “Everywhere” (#14), and “Seven Wonders” (#19).

Although Lindsey Buckingham now saves songs from his solo sessions for prospective Fleetwood Mac-related projects, he recalled that during the time of Tango In The Night, it was literally the opposite way around for him and the band: “The Tango In The Night album has tracks on it that were the beginnings of my third solo record. And I started that, and the group sort of moved in and said, ‘Hey, we gotta do this.’ So the song ‘Big Love’ switched gears and got into the group thing. There was more than one time when I was tempted to sort of go out and leave the group — but it’s like anything else; you have to check your own impulses and make sure that you’re really doing the right thing and you’re ready for it.”

See the full list of “Record Store Day” releases at RecordStoreDay.com. 

The tracklisting to Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night – Alternate is: Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Releasing Alternate ‘Tango In The Night’ LP For ‘Record Store Day’ | 94.7 WLS →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie on Their New Fleetwood Mac Spinoff | Rolling Stone

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The pair didn’t want to stop after the Mac’s last tour. So they hit the studio for the first time in decades

Back in 2014, something wonderful happened to Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. They tried writing songs together for the first time in ages – taking a tentative, low-stakes approach – and were overjoyed to discover that “within the first hour,” as Buckingham puts it, “it was like, ‘Holy shit, whatever we used to have—'” “—is still there,” says McVie, sitting a few feet away. It’s mid-May, and the Fleetwood Mac icons are on a soundstage in L.A., about to rehearse. Those new songs grew into an album, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, which will imminently give way to a new tour, so they’ve booked this space for five weeks of practice.

The pair’s success was in no way guaranteed. Sure, back in the late Seventies, while working on Rumours and Tusk, McVie wrote epochal smashes like “Don’t Stop” and “Think About Me,” which Buckingham helped shape in the studio. (He also wrote plenty of hits, like “Go Your Own Way.”) But the making of those LPs had been famously turbulent – drugs, fights, love triangles – and the ensuing years hadn’t exactly been idyllic. “The Sixties-into-the-Seventies lifestyle ramped up, and by 1987? I don’t know how we ever got Tango in the Nightdone,” says Buckingham, 67. “We saw Stevie for a couple of weeks out of an entire year. Everyone was at their worst. Hard living.”

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie on Their New Fleetwood Mac Spinoff | Rolling Stone →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Reviews, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe Edition Review | Classic Rock Magazine

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The soundtrack to the Yuppie era in all its designer-suited finery.

There’s a reason that 1980s nostalgia has never really taken hold, and that’s because the 1980s generally sucked. Sure, interesting things were happening on the fringes, but mainstream culture was taking the express elevator all the way down to Yuppie Hell. And playing through the speakers in that elevator was Tango In The Night.

With 1977’s Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had accidentally invented the 80s in all its self-absorbed cocaine glory three years early. A decade on, the pharmaceutical vitality which gave that album its spirit had given way to the hollow-souled, million-dollar chintz of Tango In The Night. That it sold by the truckload tells you all you need to know about 1987.

This 30th-anniversary ‘deluxe’ edition is the musical equivalent of digging up a Blue Peter time capsule and finding the films of Sylvester Stallone on VHS. In both cases, you can’t help thinking: “Did people really like that shit?” As with Rocky IV and Rambo, Fleetwood Mac’s 14th album has not aged well. The twinkling keyboards and electronic drums that cling to Everywhere and Little Lies like an Exxon Valdez oil slick may have been state of the art in 1987, but then so was the Sinclair C5.

But the production isn’t the biggest problem here — the songs are. Whatever magic Mac once possessed had long since been dispelled by time and internal psychodramas. Lindsey Buckingham would once have dismissed Family Man and You And I, Part II for being too trite, Christine McVie’s Mystified is barely a breath away from lift music, while Stevie Nicks’ increasingly strangulated warbling has the emotional resonance of a goat being strangled by a goose.

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe Edition Review | Classic Rock Magazine →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham

“He could be brash; he could be harsh. He was very motivated”: The real story behind Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango in the Night” | Salon

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By ANNIE ZALESKI
April 2, 2017
Salon.com

Lindsey Buckingham’s producer and engineer toiled day and night for 18 months to make the triple platinum album

On March 31, Rhino Records released a deluxe edition of Fleetwood Mac‘s “Tango in the Night.” First released in 1987, the LP embodies the era’s glossy combinations of flashy rock ‘n’ roll and airy synth-pop. Layers of gauzy harmonies envelop Christine McVie compositions “Little Lies” and “Everywhere;” glittering keyboards add melancholy to the Stevie Nicks-helmed “Seven Wonders;” and jagged, lightning-bolt guitar riffs cut through “Isn’t It Midnight” and the title track.

Despite its effortless sound, the record took 18 months to make. Nicks was absent for most of the proceedings, owing to a packed tour schedule for her 1985 solo record “Rock a Little” and then a trip to Betty Ford to get sober from cocaine (the “Tango in the Night” song “Welcome to the Room. . . Sara,” in fact, is about this rehab visit). Prior to the launch of Fleetwood Mac’s tour in support of the record, Buckingham left the band. The core group of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood wouldn’t reunite and play together until 1997.

Despite the rocky genesis, “Tango in the Night” became one of the band’s biggest-selling studio records: The record is certified triple platinum, trailing only ’70s juggernaut “Rumours” in terms of sales, and spawned multiple Top 20 Billboard singles, including the Top 5 hits “Big Love” and “Little Lies.”

For a certain segment of Fleetwood Mac fans, this album is as important as “Rumours.” In fact, the LP is a sonic touchstone for modern production, particularly in the way pop-leaning acts seamlessly combine electro and rock influences. HAIM’s soft-glow synth-rock, Best Coast’s lush production and the plush approach of countless electropop acts all nod to “Tango in the Night.” On the cover tip, synthesizer-heavy act Hot Chip has performed “Everywhere” live, while Hilary Duff did an EDM-influenced studio version of of “Little Lies.” Continue reading “He could be brash; he could be harsh. He was very motivated”: The real story behind Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango in the Night” | Salon →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: Tango in the Night review – timely reissue coasts from gloss to gloom | The Guardian

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Alexis Petridis’s album of the week
The Guardian
March 23rd, 2017

This 1987 classic is a blend of solid-gold pop and super-slick production, interwoven with the sound of a band sliding into chaos

Fleetwood Mac … ‘No gloss can hide the turmoil’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The mid-80s were not the kindest time for 60s and 70s rock legends. For every gimlet-eyed operator who successfully navigated an alien and unforgiving landscape of power ballads, crashing snare drums, Fairlight synthesisers and MTV moonmen – the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey; Tina Turner – there were scores who seemed utterly lost. It was a world in which the natural order of things had been turned on its head to such a degree that the drummer from Genesis was now one of the biggest stars on the planet. David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed … at best, they ended up making albums that diehard fans pick over for tiny morsels that suggest they’re not as bad as the reputations preceding them; at worst they made stuff they’d spend subsequent years loudly disowning, involving terrible clothes, inappropriate producers, awful cover versions and – in extreme cases – attempts to rap. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: Tango in the Night review – timely reissue coasts from gloss to gloom | The Guardian →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks: Recording ‘Tango’ in my ex-boyfriend’s bedroom was ‘extremely strange | Miami Herald

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BY HOWARD COHEN
hcohen@miamiherald.com

On Friday, March 10 (re-scheduled till March 31), Fleetwood Mac releases a 30th anniversary expanded edition of one of its most popular and influential albums, “Tango in the Night.” The lavishly packaged reissue offers a remastered version of the original album, a disc of B-sides and outtakes, plus another disc of 12-inch dance mixes of its hit singles like “Big Love” and “Little Lies” and a vinyl LP.

The 30th anniversary edition of Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album, “Tango in the Night,” hits retail on March 10. The album includes four Top 40 singles, “Big Love,” “Seven Wonders,” “Little Lies” and “Everywhere” and remains the last studio album to feature the original “Rumours” lineup. Warner Bros./Rhino

For Stevie Nicks, the group’s star attraction, recording her parts for the 1987 album proved difficult. After the completion of a ragged tour for her third solo album, 1985’s “Rock a Little,” she went into rehab at the Betty Ford Center for a cocaine addiction. After her release, she was misguidedly placed on a Klonopin regimen. Few in her inner circle thought rehab would stick unless she was dosed on anxiety medication. They were wrong.

Her first test: joining her Fleetwood Mac band mates for the 1986 tracking sessions for “Tango in the Night.” The band hadn’t recorded since the release of “Mirage” in 1982.

Nicks’ ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, the group’s guitarist, was co-producing the band’s efforts, again, but this time the tension was poisonous, even by Fleetwood Mac’s standards.

“When I started recording for ‘Tango,’ they were recording at Lindsey’s house up on Mulholland somewhere. He lived there with his girlfriend Cheri and this record was being recorded at his house and I didn’t find that to be a great situation for me. Especially coming out of rehab,” Nicks said in an interview last year. “And then I was on Klonopin and not quite understanding why I was feeling so weird and this doctor kept saying, ‘This is what you need.’ It’s the typical scenario of a groupie doctor. Discuss rock and roll with you, so in order to do that he would keep upping your dose so you’d come in once a week.”

John McVie (seated), Mick Fleetwood (standing), Christine McVie (on floor), Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (on seat) in a photo shoot from the “Tango in the Night” sessions. The original album was released in April 1987 and was a worldwide hit, especially in England where it hit No. 1. In the United States the album spent 44 weeks in the Top 40. Warners Bros./Rhino

Nicks sets the scenario: “I can remember going up there and not being happy to even be there and we were doing vocals in their master bedroom and that was extremely strange. In all fairness, it was like the only empty room and they had a beautiful master bedroom all set up like a vocal booth but I found it very uncomfortable, personally. I guess I didn’t go very often and when I did go I would get like, ‘Give me a shot of brandy and let me sing on four or five songs off the top of my head.’” Continue reading Stevie Nicks: Recording ‘Tango’ in my ex-boyfriend’s bedroom was ‘extremely strange | Miami Herald →

Fleetwood Mac, Music Video, Video Clip

Fleetwood Mac hit big with ‘Tango in the Night,’ then imploded! | Somethingelse Reviews

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APRIL 14, 2015
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Like more than one Fleetwood Mac recording subsequent to Rumours, 1987’s Tango in the Night grew out of trampled solo project by Lindsey Buckingham — and the title track bears the most striking resemblance to his quirky individual efforts. They were always welcome asides, but perhaps no where more so than this project.

Tango In The Night

The title track scuffed up a session that might have collapsed under the high-gloss pop sheen of hit tunes like Stevie Nicks’ “Seven Wonders” and Christine McVie’s “Little Lies.” Those two smash tunes (along with Lindsey Buckingham’s “Big Love” and Christine McVie’s “Everywhere”) helped make Tango in the Night the band’s second-biggest selling studio project ever — after, of course, Rumours.

Nicks’ “When I See Again,” with a smart assist from Buckingham, plumbs the dark emotions of a broken relationship once more. Tango in the Night is also notable for the tight songwriting bond between Buckingham and McVie; they co-wrote a trio of songs, including “Mystified.”

But something more ominous was already looming, both personally and professionally, for the drugged-out, worn-out Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey Buckingham, perhaps determined to actually have a solo career this time, walked out shortly before the band’s scheduled tour in support of Tango in the Night. Rick Vito and Billy Burnette were drafted to replace him for the subsequent Tango Tour through 1988. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac hit big with ‘Tango in the Night,’ then imploded! | Somethingelse Reviews →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Eye Of The Hurricane | Classic Rock Magazine, Oct 2013

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Words: Paul Elliott
Portrait: Neal Preston

Heroic drug abuse, physical violence, epic strops… Forget Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s craziest album was Tango In The Night.

Fleetwood Mac

In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together. in public, at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously. Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night. Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.

“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving, ” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.” Continue reading Eye Of The Hurricane | Classic Rock Magazine, Oct 2013 →