Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Tue 29 September 2026 17:30, UK
Fleetwood Mac have had many iterations, but there is only really one line-up that mainstream audiences care about, and that’s when Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Christine McVie were all making music together.
Honestly, why does anybody bother writing fictional books about the music industry when real-life stories like Fleetwood Mac exist? You really had everything: creative friction, sexual friction, the friction created as a nose slides down a coffee table, taking in copious amounts of cocaine, and all of these elements boiled over to create what was a pretty hostile work environment. Well, that and a smelting pot of inspiration.
While a lot of bands would have likely split up when faced with such strenuous amounts of inner turmoil, Fleetwood Mac allowed all of the tension surrounding the band to spill into their music. It’s what led to an album like Rumours, which people still celebrate as one of the greatest records ever put together. If you wanted to be critical of such a record, you could say that there isn’t much flow in it.
A lot of albums have songs that, while being completely independent of one another, remain connected somewhat. Rumours doesn’t possess such a quality, but that’s very much a reflection of the circumstances within which it was made. Each member of Fleetwood Mac was working on songs separately, taking their own experiences and injecting them into music. It means the songs individually are great, but they don’t necessarily flow into one another.
This seems like a pretty unnecessary criticism, and to many people who consider the Fleetwood Mac classic one of their favourite albums, they would likely dismiss it; however, if you listen to the few records that Fleetwood Mac put out after Rumours, that lack of consistency does become clear. Consider their 1987 album Tango in the Night, for instance. This is still a damn good album, and despite there being little to no unity in the band (tensions were very high at this point), there is unity within the record.
Perhaps the reason all of the songs feel so connected on this record is that it started out as a solo project for Lindsey Buckingham, and he very much had a lot of creative control over how the LP was put together. This proved to be both a good thing and a bad thing, as some of his ideas were well received by band members; meanwhile, others were dismissed as useless.
An example of the former came on the track ‘Everywhere’. This was one of the leading singles from the record and was penned by none other than Christine McVie. A woman whose arrival at good songs seemed to be as inevitable as sunsets, she outdid herself with this tune that flew to the top ten of charts in both the UK and the US, and which wound up selling 12,000,000 copies overall.
Further reading: From The Vault
McVie didn’t really have any doubt that the track was going to do well. It’s not that she simply knew that she had written a classic; rather, she was taken aback by Buckingham’s great production work on the song. She fell in love with the introduction, as a little bit of studio trickery, which involved slowing down and speeding up different guitar parts, created a unique sound that she hadn’t come across before.
“That’s a half-speed acoustic guitar and electric combined,” she said when she was discussing the track, “He [Buckingham] slowed the tape down, really slowly, and played the parts slowly, and then when it came to the right speed, it sounded bloody amazing.”
It shows that even though Fleetwood Mac were a band who came with just as much drama as they had songs, every now and then, they could work together to make something truly great.
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