I had gotten into this less formal approach to recording, where the idea is setting the architecture down on tape and playing it all yourself and sort of discovering it as you go along. How easy it is to forget amid the never-ending Fleetwood Mac soap opera that this is, after all, one of the most esteemed pop-rock songwriters and musicians on the planet.īuckingham gamely agreed to share his thoughts on 10 of his albums, spanning his life’s work both inside and outside one of the famous bands in rock history.īefore Stevie and I moved down to Los Angeles to get a record deal, I acquired an old Ampex AG440 4-track, which is what The Beatles used for Sgt. But when I caught up with Buckingham last week, I was more interested in discussing his distinguished catalog spanning nearly 50 years. But he also indulged an experimental, anti-commercial side on LPs like 1979’s Tusk that has proven to be surprisingly influential for several generations of indie rockers.ĭuring the recent publicity run for his latest solo record, Lindsey Buckingham, the spry 72-year-old guitarist generated headlines after making some disparaging comments about his one-time lover and eternal foil, Stevie Nicks. As the musical director of Fleetwood Mac during their most successful era in the 1970s and ’80s - which includes blockbuster albums like 1977’s Rumoursand 1987’s Tango In The Night - he had a hand in writing, arranging, and producing dozens of hit songs. It led the group to make its thoroughly crazy yet quite beautiful follow-up, Tusk in 1979, bereft of the editing and economy that makes Rumours so very special.Few people in the modern era have created music as popular as songs and albums made by Lindsey Buckingham. It became one of biggest records of all time, providing an antidote to the era while remaining entirely in step with its times. If the age was about redundant excess, you are hard pushed to hear any of it on tunes like "Don't Stop" or especially "Dreams", which both benefit from incredibly sparing instrumentation – there is so much left out, it makes the tunes somehow seem busier by memory. Sonically, it's near perfect – there is little fuss, no mess and hardly any waste.
But it is far from a one-man show – Nicks' "Dreams" is a beautifully insistent, sweetly nagging understated plea to lost love, while Christine McVie's "Don't Stop", "Songbird" and "You Make Loving Fun" typify proper, grown-up music.
With every member of the band touched by some degree of relationship hell, they made a trouble-filled, cocaine-fuelled album … that sounded like a thousand angels kissing you sweetly on the forehead.īuckingham emerges as top dog here his swooping, ramshackle "Second Hand News" (with its euphoric chorus finally arriving two minutes into the song), "Never Going Back Again" and "Go Your Own Way" dominate the album. And then, after tasting triumph, it all fell apart, amidst affairs and acrimony. After being left rudderless in the wake of founder Peter Green's departure, the core of drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and his keyboard-playing wife, Christine had finally found some form of stability and commercial success by adding the young singer-songwriting team of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. It had been a tumultuous 1970s for Fleetwood Mac when they came to record this album on America's West Coast. It is as much a part of that year's landscape as Never Mind The Bollocks, "I Feel Love" or Saturday Night Fever and arguably the one least tainted by the passage of time. Selling over 30 million copies world-wide, it has assiduously worked its way into so many households since its release in February 1977, that it's become part of the sonic furniture.
Rumours by Fleetwood Mac has taken on a life of its own.
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