JANUARY 9, 2017
by: David Honigmann
FT.com

The hit was born of a romantic geometry complex enough to baffle the Bloomsbury Group

In early 1975, two Americans, Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks, had just joined a once-famous British blues band now down on its uppers. Buckingham, a perfectionist, buzzed around showing the other members how to play their parts on the songs he was bringing to the project. The bassist was unimpressed.

“The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac,” John McVie told him. “I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.” And that — as Mick Fleetwood, who was the Fleetwood, records in his autobiography — was that.

A couple of years later Buckingham and Nicks had been integrated into the band, and the new line-up had a successful album under their belt. It was now Fleetwood and McVie together who laid down the signature bass-and-drums riff that would define what was (with all due deference to former members Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch) the high water mark of Fleetwood Mac: “The Chain”, from their globe-conquering album Rumours. Continue reading The Life of a Song: Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ | FT.com →

• Channel 4 set to keep Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ as intro music on their Formula One coverage starting this season
• The BBC had used the track as its Formula One title music since 1978
• Fleetwood Mac recorded the song for their Rumours album in 1976
• Channel 4 will screen 10 live races and show highlights of the other 11

By Philip Duncan, Daily Mail
12 February 2016

Channel 4, the new terrestrial home of Formula One, will use Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain as its title music.

The song has become synonymous with the sport on the BBC since it was first adopted by the corporation in 1978.

Channel 4 tweeted on Friday: ‘F1 has a new home but some things just have to remain: we’re chuffed to announce that The Chain by Fleetwood Mac will be our title music.’

Former McLaren driver David Coulthard has already made the switch from the BBC to Channel 4, but Suzi Perry, the presenter of the BBC’s F1 coverage following the departure of Jake Humphrey to BT Sport in 2013, last week ruled out joining him.

Channel 4 will show 10 races live – without commercial breaks – and screen extensive highlights of the remaining 11 races scheduled for the upcoming season which gets under way in Melbourne on March 20.

THE CHAIN

‘The Chain’ was the seventh track on Fleetwood Mac’s February 1977 album ‘Rumours’ having been created the previous year.

It was created by combining segments from previously rejected songs and therefore is the only song on the album to be credited to all five band members of the time – Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie and Stevie Nicks.
The bass section at the end of ‘The Chain’ was created by Fleetwood and John McVie, then combined with lyrics written separately by Nicks. She and Christine McVie then reworked the first part of the song.

To complete the song, Buckingham recycled the intro from an earlier duet with Nicks called ‘Lola (My Love)’ from their self-titled 1973 album.

The song became highly recognisable in the United Kingdom when the BBC adopted it for their Formula One coverage in 1978 until 1997. It returned when the BBC regained the broadcast rights in 2011.

At that time, as a result of a campaign to get ‘The Chain’ to No 1 in the UK chart, it peaked at No 81.

A 1997 re-release of the track on a live album ‘The Dance’ topped at No 30 in the American charts.