The 1979 song Lindsey Buckingham crowned as Fleetwood Mac’s greatest
It’s been 20 years since Fleetwood Mac released their last studio album, and their mainstream appeal is yet to dwindle. If anything, their star has continued to rise.
They remain one of the most celebrated acts of their day, and songs like ‘Everywhere’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ still dominate the airwaves. Similarly, Rumours eternally lingers in the best-selling vinyl chart. But they are also a band of eras, constantly changing even during rare periods when their line-up was settled. That’s part of their appeal, too: drama.
Formed by former members of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac rose to prominence during the British blues boom of the late 1960s, releasing their debut album, Albatross, in 1968. After numerous departures and additions, Fleetwood Mac relocated to the US in 1974 following Peter Green’s exit and recruited Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
They were the perfect addition to this new chapter in the band’s career, having already developed a powerful chemistry through years of writing and performing together as a couple. They fit right in there because they also abided by that ‘D’ word: drama. Pretty much instantly, they brought that to the table both sonically and behind the scenes.
Following the success of their self-titled 1975 album, Fleetwood Mac returned to the studio to make Rumours, an album that saw its creators cannibalise their complex romantic relationships for subject matter. It worked a treat but left them exhausted and disillusioned. Looking ahead to the group’s next album, Lindsey Buckingham understood that topping Rumours in terms of pop songcraft would be impossible.
Their only option was to take a sharp turn into the leftfield. Cue Tusk, the group’s most experimental album so far. It speaks volumes that Buckingham was desperate not to play to the gallery. As he reflected, “If we had tried to make Rumours II, it would have been the beginning of what others expected us to do.”
That was far from in keeping with their legacy, and despite being a new addition, the group’s legacy was always something that Buckingham concerned himself with. So, they decided to cook up a far more experimental album. “By subverting that expectation, it allowed me to say, ‘This is what’s important to me’,” he later opined.
Buckingham was keen to move away from radio-friendly pop and incorporate the vitality of the nascent new wave movement into Fleetwood Mac’s sound. Having developed a taste for the artier side of punk through bands like Talking Heads, he set about reinventing Mac to suit the tastes of post-punk America.
Though it sold a fraction of what Rumours sold (four million upon release, compared to Rumours’ ten million by the close of the ‘70s), Tusk is widely held as one of Fleetwood Mac’s finest and most forward-thinking records. Buckingham has himself described it as his favourite Fleetwood Mac album, naming its title track as his favourite song from the band’s catalogue.
“I was very interested in confounding external expectations, not bowing to those expectations and starting to paint ourselves into a corner creatively by continuing to try to make Rumours 2 or 3,” Buckingham told Entertainment Weekly, “For that reason, not just the song ‘Tusk,’ but the album Tusk is probably my favourite album.”
Adding, “Not necessarily for the music, but for why we did it,” he asserted, “and it set me off on this alternative path that was a tightrope to walk between the big machine of Fleetwood Mac and the small machine of solo work that followed.”
In many ways, while Buckingham’s reasoning seems personal on paper, it is actually an outlook that defines what is best about the band: drama, daring, and danceable blues subverted beyond belief.
