‘Chariots of Fire’ and cocaine: the tradition that made Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ possible
It’s a miracle that Rumours ever got made. At the time, Fleetwood Mac were completely imploding. All the couples were not only splitting up but doing so in the most dramatic way possible, complete with affairs and betrayals. They were taking shots at each other in their songs, making the recording sessions an emotional minefield. But according to Mick Fleetwood, one thing got them through it: cocaine.
Obviously, later down the line, Fleetwood Mac’s cocaine habit would become a serious problem. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had torn them completely at the seams. They took time away from the band, but the members still didn’t really calm down. Stevie Nicks, especially, would only get worse and worse, with a doctor telling her that she’d burnt a hole in her nose and that any more gear would be fatal.
But in 1976, during the recording of Rumours, it seemed to be the only thing keeping them together. As much as Far Out doesn’t condone using drugs as an emotional crutch, it’s clear that getting high was the only way for the band to rise above the drama plaguing the sessions.
Christine McVie was busy singing along about her affair, making her ex-husband John McVie play on ‘You Make Loving Fun’ while he reeled from the betrayal. Lindsey Buckingham made Nicks almost storm out with the simple, insulting lyric “shacking ups all you wanna do” as their long-term relationship came to an end. In response, she wrote ‘Silver Springs’, a fan-favourite track that ended up being cut from the album, possibly because of its deeply personal content as the singer essentially hexes her ex in the lyrics.
At every turn and across nearly every song, there was some emotional disaster with their artistry pouring gasoline onto the already raging flames. So, in order to try and get through it, they fell into a series of rules and traditions. The main rule was that the men and women stayed separate except in the studio. Nicks and McVie lived in one flat, the men of the band in another, to give everyone space to decompress and process after the day.
But during the day, they leaned into the carnage of the moment and tried to make light of it with a stupid tradition connected to their cocaine usage. “In the studio, we had a ritual in which the engineers and band members all started humming a tune — it changed over the years — which would serve as a siren’s call for cocaine, specifically the cocaine that I was invariably holding,” Mick Fleetwood wrote in his memoir.
He said that for a long time, that tune they would hum was the theme tune from Chariots Of Fire, after which the musician would pretend to run in slow motion over to the band to deliver their bump of white powder. “As if in a trance, I would drop what I was doing and, in slow-motion, beckon them over,” he recalled as a silly, revealing insight into some of the lighter moments in the studio.
Cocaine was so integral to the making of Rumours that the band even considered thanking their dealer in the liner noted. But as Fleetwood wrote, “Unfortunately, he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out.”
