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<\/p>\nWords: Paul Elliott
\nPortrait: Neal Preston<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together. in public,\u00a0at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously.\u00a0Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick\u00a0Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s\u00a02013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham\u00a0quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night.\u00a0Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned\u00a0to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at\u00a0a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and\u00a0Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.<\/p>\n
“What Lindsey said in that interview was very\u00a0moving, ” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t\u00a0stand to see you doing what you were doing to\u00a0yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out\u00a0of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t\u00a0take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was\u00a0someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton\u00a0of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”<\/p>\n
It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood describes as\u00a0profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of\u00a0that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey\u00a0Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When\u00a0Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that\u00a0rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover\u00a0Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life.<\/p>\n
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“It is,” Fleetwood says, “a pretty wild story. It was a dangerous period, and\u00a0not a happy time.”<\/p>\n
And yet, for all the drama that came with it, Tango In The Night was a hugely\u00a0important album for Fleetwood Mac. It became the second biggest-selling\u00a0album of their career, after 1977’s 45-million-selling Rumours. just as Rumours\u00a0had done in the 70s, so Tango In The Night de\ufb01ned soft rock in the 80s. Perhaps\u00a0most significant of all, it marked the third coming of the Mac, following\u00a0the successes of the Peter Green-led blues rock Mac of the late 60s and the\u00a0Buckingham\/Nicks-fronted AOR Mac of the 70s. And for Mick Fleetwood,\u00a0it represented a personal triumph. While he freely admits that his own\u00a0drug-fuelled insanity was instrumental in Lindsey Buckingham’s exit, it\u00a0was Fleetwood who kept the band together once\u00a0Buckingham had gone. And this was key to the success of Tango In The Night.<\/p>\n
“My motto” Fleetwood says, “was ‘the show must go\u00a0on’. It was almost an obsessive-compulsive desire to\u00a0not give up. And it worked.”<\/p>\n
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There is an irony about Tango In The Night that it began not as a Fleetwood Mac\u00a0album but as a solo project by the man\u00a0who would leave the band once it was\u00a0completed. In 1985, Lindsey\u00a0Buckingham was writing and recording songs for what was\u00a0planned as his third solo album. Fleetwood Mac had been on\u00a0indefinite hiatus since 1982, following a world [North America]\u00a0<\/em>tour in support\u00a0of their album Mirage. In that time there had been solo\u00a0albums from the three singers: Nicks’ The Wild Heart sold a\u00a0million copies; Christine McVie’s eponymous album yielded\u00a0a US Top 10 hit with Got A Hold On Me; but, to Buckingham’s\u00a0chagrin, his album Go Insane didn’t make the Top 40.<\/p>\n There had also been problems for them over these years. Nicks had been\u00a0treated for drug addiction. More surprisingly, Mick Fleetwood had been\u00a0declared bankrupt following a string of disastrous property investments. it\u00a0was rumoured that Fleetwood Mac had split up. “at that time,” Buckingham\u00a0later admitted, “the group was a bit fragmented.”\u00a0By the end of ’85, Buckingham \u2014 working alone at his home studio in Los\u00a0Angeles had three songs finished: Big Love, Family Man and Caroline. But while\u00a0he was busy making music, Mick Fleetwood was busy making plans to get\u00a0the band back on track. The wheels had been set in motion when Christine\u00a0McVie recorded a version of the Elvis Presley hit Can’t Help Falling In Love for the\u00a0\ufb01lm A Fine Mess\u2014 backed by Mick Fleetwood and the band’s other remaining\u00a0founding member, her ex-husband John McVie. She invited Buckingham to\u00a0produce, alongside engineer Richard Dashut. “It was the \ufb01rst time for nearly\u00a0\ufb01ve years that we’d all been in a working environment together,” Christine\u00a0said. “We had such a good time in the studio and realised that we still had\u00a0something to give each other in musical terms after all.”<\/p>\n Mick Fleetwood was more forthright. “The reality,” he says, “is that\u00a0Fleetwood Mac were intending to make an album. And Lindsey was in many\u00a0ways pressured into it. ‘Hey, we’re making an album \u2014 let’s go!” Buckingham\u00a0relented, partly out of a sense of duty”! had a choice,” he said, “of either\u00a0continuing on to make the solo record, or to sort of surrender to the situation\u00a0and try and make it more of a family thing. I chose the latter.” That Fleetwood\u00a0didn’t know is that Buckingham’s agreement was conditional. “I had the idea,” Buckingham said, “that that was going to be the last work with the group.”<\/p>\n For all that, Buckingham threw himself into the album. He either\u00a0wrote or co-wrote seven of the twelve tracks on the\u00a0album. He also acted as co-producer with Richard Dashut. And it\u00a0was at his home studio that most of the recording was done.\u00a0What was unusual about the recording of Tango In The Night\u00a0was the absence of Stevie Nicks for much of the process. Nicks\u00a0contributed three songs to the album, but was in the studio for only\u00a0two to three weeks. “She was not hugely present,” Fleetwood says.\u00a0“I don’t remember why. And I don’t think we would remember \u2014\u00a0Stevie and me were nuts!”<\/p>\n Fleetwood says that he and Nicks were doing more cocaine\u00a0during the making of Tango than when they were recording Rumours\u00a0\u2014 an album on which they seriously considered thanking their drug\u00a0dealer in the credits. “Actually” he admits, “it was way worse on\u00a0Tango In The Night. For sure.”<\/p>\n “Certainly, I smoked a lot of pot. But I was never a big user of\u00a0coke,” Buckingham notes. And by the mid-80s, he’d had enough.\u00a0“The subculture was pretty much at the point of burning itself out,”\u00a0he recalled. “The ‘anything goes’ attitude that existed in the 60s had\u00a0become something entirely different. But still, everyone thought you\u00a0had to do certain things to play, and I don’t know that I ever thought\u00a0about it that way.”<\/p>\n While Tango was being recorded at his home, he found a way of\u00a0keeping the two cokeheads \u2014 plus assorted hangers-on \u2014 at a safe\u00a0distance. “Lindsey had a Winnebago put in his driveway,” Fleetwood\u00a0says. “And that’s where Stevie and I would go with our wrecking\u00a0crew. With me, the party never stopped. I was like Keith Moon. And\u00a0for Lindsey having that around his own house was\u00a0a fucking nightmare. So he gave us our own house\u00a0outside in the garden. It wasn’t until years later that\u00a0I asked him: ‘What was all that about?’ And he said\u00a0‘I couldn’t stand having you punks in the house. You’d\u00a0turn up at the studio with people that you’d met from\u00a0the night before, and you’d start gooning around. You\u00a0were too fucking crazy.’ Lindsey was never a drama\u00a0queen, enjoying the 80s drug culture like Stevie and\u00a0me. It wasn’t his scene. He wasn’t comfortable being\u00a0around that much craziness. And we were blissfully\u00a0unaware \u2014 completely oblivious to things that needed\u00a0to be addressed.”\u00a0The drug taking was only one part of the problem.\u00a0There were other things eating away at Buckingham.<\/p>\n For all the money and fame that Fleetwood Mac’s success had brought him, Buckingham felt compromised on an artistic level\u00a0\u2014 pressured by what Mick\u00a0Fleetwood calls a “this monolithic thing know as Fleetwood Mac”. There is, Fleetwood says, a “tortured side” to Lindsey Buckingham.<\/p>\n “Staying honest and staying creatively alive is very tricky in a commercial\u00a0business,” Buckingham said. “You’re trying to hold on to a certain idealism,\u00a0and not succumb to becoming a parody of oneself. Are you trying to \ufb02ex your\u00a0muscles creatively, or are you trying to sell records? In my mind it was pretty\u00a0much clear-cut. There wasn’t a lot of middle ground.”\u00a0Buckingham felt he had won this battle with Tusk. The easy option\u00a0for Fleetwood Mac would have been to make another Rumours. Instead,\u00a0Buckingham spiked the Tusk album with weird, left-\ufb01eld songs such as the new\u00a0wave influenced Not That Funny and the bizarre title track. “A precedent was\u00a0set by Tusk,” Fleetwood explains. “Lindsey could say: ‘I want to do this within\u00a0the framework of Fleetwood Mac,’ without pissing everyone off.” Buckingham loved the dichotomy in Tusk: the contrast between his songs and Stevie’s and\u00a0Christine’s . “You got that sweetness and me as the complete nutcase,” he said.\u00a0“That ‘s what makes us Fleetwood Mac.” But he felt that the band’s next album.\u00a0Mirage, was too lightweight, lacking the experimental edge of Tusk. And that\u00a0nagging feeling returned to him as Tango In The Night was being completed.<\/p>\n Buckingham had written many oldie songs for the album. In addition,\u00a0the songs he had recorded solo remained mostly untouched. “Those songs,”\u00a0Fleetwood says, “were already very sculpted. All we did was rip some drum\u00a0machines off and put drums on.”One trick of Buckingham’s, in Big Love, was especially brilliant. For the\u00a0song’s climax. he used variable speed oscillators on his voice to create the effect of a male and female in a state of sexual excitement\u00a0\u2014 the “love grunts”, as he\u00a0called them. “It was odd that so many people\u00a0wondered if it was Stevie on there with me,” he\u00a0said, a little disingenuously.<\/p>\n Although there were other great songs on\u00a0the album\u2014slick pop rock tunes in the classic\u00a0Fleetwood Mac style, such as Christine’s Little\u00a0Lies and Everywere, and Stevie’s Seven Wonders\u00a0\u2014 Fleetwood calls Tango In The Night “Lindsey’s\u00a0album”. But for Buckingham himself, there\u00a0was a sense that in the transition from solo\u00a0album to band album, something had been lost.\u00a0A perfectionist, intensely analytical, he felt that\u00a0Tango In The Night was too predictable, too safe.<\/p>\n “For political reasons, I was pretty much\u00a0treading water,” Buckingham admitted. “We sort\u00a0of lost the moment, going back to try to \ufb01nd that Rumours territory. I couldn’t\u00a0do that as a producer and as a player. I was demoralised. Maybe I wasn’t even\u00a0motivated to go back. I did the best I could.”\u00a0Fleetwood also believes that Buckingham felt undervalued in his roles of\u00a0producer and arranger of others’ songs. “He was going, ‘Shit, does anyone ever\u00a0realise what\u00a0I do?’ Insecurities, we all have them, and that was part of Lindsey’s\u00a0personality. I have insecurity even about walking on stage and thinking I can’t\u00a0play drums. I don’t blame Lindsey for thinking: ‘It would be nice if someone\u00a0thanked me for all the fucking work I’ve done!”<\/p>\n But the biggest problem for Lindsey Buckingham was, of course, Stevie\u00a0Nicks . “I’ve known Stevie since I was 16 years old,” he said. “I was completely\u00a0devastated when she took off. And yet I had to make hits for her, I had to do\u00a0a lot of things for her that I really didn’t want to do. And yet I did them. So on\u00a0one level I was a complete professional in rising above that, but there was a lot\u00a0of pent-up frustration and anger towards Stevie in me for many years.”\u00a0That frustration had \ufb01rst become evident on Rumours. Nicks wrote about\u00a0Buckingham in the song Dreams, in which she sang the line: ‘Players only love\u00a0you when they’re playing.’ Buckingham responded with Go Your Own Way, in\u00a0which he claimed uncharitably, ‘Shacking up’s all you want to do.’ And over the\u00a0years, things had only got worse.<\/p>\n “He got very angry with me,” Nicks said. “He\u00a0tossed a Les Paul across the stage at me once\u00a0and I ducked and it missed me. A lot of things\u00a0happened because he was so angry at me.”<\/p>\n During one Fleetwood Mac show,\u00a0Buckingham kicked out at Nicks. “it was just\u00a0a little something coming through the veneer,”\u00a0he said later. “There has been a lot of darkness.\u00a0There was a time when I felt completely\u00a0unappreciated by her.”\u00a0Buckingham’s frame of mind was not helped\u00a0by the not inconsiderable success that Nicks\u00a0enjoyed in her solo career. In 1981, her solo\u00a0debut, Bella Donna, went to No.1 in US. Other\u00a0hit albums and singles followed. Buckingham’s\u00a0solo records sold next to nothing. “jealousy is the wrong word,” Fleetwood\u00a0says. “But it was hard for Lindsey. The reality is, she’s Stevie Nicks! And Lindsey\u00a0I think felt left out. That was his cross to bear.”<\/p>\n Despite the hostility. Nicks tried to retain sympathy for Buckingham.\u00a0“Lindsey and I were really breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac. We’d\u00a0lived together for \ufb01ve years. It’s one thing when you break up for that person to\u00a0go their way and you to go your way, quite another to break up and have to sit\u00a0together in the breakfast room of the hotel the next morning. Not easy.”<\/p>\n But neither Nicks nor Fleetwood saw what was coming. “We just didn’t\u00a0realise quite how unhappy Lindsey was,” Fleetwood says. “He had to get out.\u00a0And of course he did.<\/p>\n Tango In The Night was released on April 13, 1987. The first single from the album, Big Love, was already a Top 10 hit on both sides of\u00a0the Atlantic, and a tour was scheduled to begin in Kansas City on\u00a0September 30. But when the band gathered at Christine McVie’s L.A\u00a0home to discuss plans for the tour, Buckingham told them he was\u00a0out. And at that moment, it turned nasty.<\/p>\n It was Nicks who landed the \ufb01rst blow. “I \ufb02ew off of the couch and across\u00a0the room to seriously attack him,” she recalled. “And I did. I’m not real \u00a0scary but I grabbed him which almost got me killed.” Nicks ran out of the\u00a0room with Buckingham in pursuit. “He ended up chasing me all the way out\u00a0of Christine’s maze-like house,” she said. ‘Then down the street and back\u00a0up the street. And then he threw me against a car and I screamed horrible\u00a0obscenities at him. I thought he was going to kill me, and I think he thought\u00a0he was probably going to kill me too. And I said: ‘If the rest of the people in\u00a0the band don’t get you, my family will – my dad and my brother will kill you.”<\/p>\n Buckingham walked away.\u00a0“We were all in shock,” Fleetwood says. “It was very upsetting for all of us,\u00a0Stevie most of all.”<\/p>\n But in this crisis, Fleetwood acted quickly. “Most people would go: ‘You’ve\u00a0just made an album and one of your lead components is not there? You’d better\u00a0retreat rapidly, lick your wounds and reassess what the hell you’re gonna do.’\u00a0Well, that was not what my mind told me to do. I went: ‘We’re not stopping.’\u00a0And literally within a week, I convinced everyone that we should not stop and\u00a0have this be a catastrophic non-event and have no promotion for the album.”\u00a0Fleetwood was able to remain calm and pragmatic because he, and also\u00a0John McVie, had been in this situation before – \ufb01rstly, and most traumatically,\u00a0when Peter Green, the original Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist, quit the band and the\u00a0music business in 1970 after one too many bad acid trips. “When we lost our\u00a0mentor, Peter Green, we felt completely adrift,” Fleetwood recalls. “We went:\u00a0‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’ Seriously, I thought we’d never get\u00a0over losing Peter. But we got through it. And then it became: there’s no such\u00a0phrase as ‘the band’s going to break up’. And that became habit-forming. So\u00a0when Lindsey left, we already had a blueprint.”<\/p>\n For the tour, Fleetwood brought in not one but two guitarists to replace\u00a0Buckingham a measure of Buckingham’s high calibre. Billy Burnette, the\u00a0son of rockabilly singer Dorsey Burnette, was a country artist of minor repute.\u00a0Rick Vito had worked with John Mayall, Jackson Browne and even David\u00a0Soul. Fleetwood knew he was taking a risk. “On paper,” he says, “it was sort of\u00a0insane. But it worked.”<\/p>\n It had to. “We still did that tour,” Nicks said, “because we we’d signed the\u00a0contracts. We couldn’t call in and say: ‘Oh, we can’t do the tour.’ We had to do\u00a0it. Or Fleetwood Mac would have been sued forever.”<\/p>\n The tour was a huge success. It wasn’t the same without Buckingham.\u00a0Fleetwood accepts that. But the numbers including eight sold-out shows at\u00a0London’s Wembley Arena – spoke for themselves. And with the new-look\u00a0Fleetwood Mac out on the road, sales of Tango In The Night went above and\u00a0beyond Fleetwood’s expectations. In the UK the album went to Number One on three\u00a0separate occasions, and three singles went Top 10: Big Love, Little Lies and\u00a0Everywhere. In the US those three tracks reached the Top 20, along with Seven\u00a0Wonders , and the album sold three million copies in a year.<\/p>\n “The album was well received,” Fleetwood says. “Somewhat sadly, the kudos\u00a0of that was never really fully attributed to Lindsey because he wasn’t present.\u00a0But on the other hand, there’s a comedic sense to it \u2014\u00a0that we were promoting\u00a0an album that was mainly his body of work. It was like Brian Wilson and the\u00a0Beach Boys: ‘I’ve made the album, but now I’m staying at home.’<\/p>\n “But also, when I look back, I see another example of how desperate Lindsey\u00a0was to be heard. Basically, he was coerced and persuaded to do that album –\u00a0mainly by me. And to his credit, he put aside everything that he’d dreamt of\u00a0doing, including making his own album, for Fleetwood Mac. But then realised\u00a0that he’d made a mistake and went: ‘Oh my God – I’ve got to get Out.’ Lindsey\u00a0was not being heard. We just didn’t get it. And really, I think that excuses him\u00a0for letting the side down.”<\/p>\n Mick Fleetwood is not sure it is simple coincidence that\u00a0Fleetwood’ s two biggest-selling albums, Rumours and Tango\u00a0In The Night, were made when the band was at its most\u00a0dysfunctional. “Also,” he says, “I’m not sure I should be so\u00a0proud of it.”<\/p>\n Equally, Fleetwood has reservations about Tango In The Night. “It’s an\u00a0interesting album,” he says. “But it’s not my favourite Fleetwood Mac album\u00a0sonically. We got a little too involved in electronic-y ways of doing things.” But\u00a0that album is undoubtedly a classic of its time. With it, Fleetwood Mac were\u00a0reinvented for a new era. One of the biggest bands of the 70s became one of\u00a0the biggest bands of the 80s. And from an album created amid chaos came\u00a0some of the best songs of the band’s entire career. Even Lindsey Buckingham\u00a0conceded this much. “On the whole, that album is lacking in direction,” he said.\u00a0“But there’s good stuff on there.”<\/p>\n In the 90s, Buckingham rejoined Fleetwood Mac, and, more importantly’,\u00a0made his peace with Stevie Nicks. They have both come a long way since\u00a0that dark day in 1987: Buckingham now married and a father of three, Nicks\u00a0happily drug-free. And every night that Buckingham and Nicks go on stage\u00a0with Fleetwood Mac, all that remains between them is what Mick Fleetwood\u00a0calls “the good stuff”.<\/p>\n “Stevie and Lindsey are not ‘in love’ but they love each other,” Fleetwood\u00a0says. “And that’s why they’ve been able to get through some awful situations.\u00a0There’s something I was asked recently: ‘What’s the most misconstrued thing\u00a0about Fleetwood Mac?’ I said ‘I don’t want to sound over-sentimental, but\u00a0I think that people don’t actually understand that we really do love each other\u00a0\u2014 a lot.’\u00a0And you know, sometimes\u00a0 that’s been lost amid all the fear and loathing.\u00a0But, to say the least, it’s been an interesting journey.<\/p>\n Words: Paul Elliott Portrait: Neal Preston Heroic drug abuse, physical violence, epic\u00a0strops… Forget Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s\u00a0craziest album was Tango In The Night. In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together. in public,\u00a0at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously.\u00a0Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick\u00a0Fleetwood were … Continue reading Eye Of The Hurricane | Classic Rock Magazine, Oct 2013<\/span> ![\"Fleetwood](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/fleetwoodmac-uk.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/Corbis-PN013351.jpg?resize=474%2C320&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n![\"Billy](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/fleetwoodmac-uk.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/Corbis-PN013370.jpg?resize=474%2C322&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n![\"fm-event-tile-perth\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/fleetwoodmac-uk.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/fm-event-tile-perth.jpg?resize=474%2C240&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\nFleetwood Mac’s UK tour begins on September 24 in London<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"