The “transcendent” album Lindsey Buckingham calls The Beatles’ “high watermark”
In many ways, Lindsey Buckingham can be seen as following in Paul McCartney’s ten-year-old footsteps in the 1970s. While Buckingham navigated his teens, The Beatles took rock ‘n’ roll by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into the age of colour and pop cultural hysteria. In a post-war climate, the band paved the road for the British Invasion, establishing this small isle as a worthy opponent to US pop music.
Lindsey Buckingham cannot claim to have had such an incalculably vast impact on pop culture as McCartney, but his innovative approach to pop music ran more-or-less parallel. Where today’s innovators work themselves into niches of scant exposure, The Beatles danced gaily on the fine line between psychedelic extravagance and chart appeal.
Over time, genres have procreated innumerable subgenres, guiding tastes into ever-tighter niches, but through the 1970s, pop stars still guided listeners through unchartered territory. David Bowie is perhaps the most obvious example of such an artist, but Buckingham had a claim to stake, too.
In its infancy, Fleetwood Mac was an all-English blues rock band led by the virtuosic guitarist Peter Green. However, following his departure in 1970, the band began to evolve, striking a more pop-conscious plane in 1974 with the induction of the American power couple Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
The young couple helped bolster the band’s songwriting armoury, spreading the Fleetwood Mac banner further and wider than ever before with the elegant balladry and upbeat riffs of Rumours. The soft rock masterpiece was accessible but also compositionally progressive. While fans are divided over the 1979 follow-up, Tusk, Buckingham rolled the dice to trailblaze a nuanced sound inspired by the contemporary punk wave.
Buckingham’s intrepid curiosity was inspired in no small part by The Beatles’ example. Like many of his peers, Buckingham fell in love with the Fab Four in their besuited mop top days of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ and ‘Please Please Me’, but was taken on an inspiring journey of bizarre psychedelia and anthemic poetry.
Speaking to Stereogum in 2022, just before McCartney’s 80th birthday, Buckingham picked out ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ as a favourite from the Beatles catalogue. Continuing, the Fleetwood Mac guitarist regarded the entire Revolver album as a monumental moment in musical history that “significantly broadened the landscape of the Beatles’ music.”
Most of all, a 17-year-old Buckingham fell in love with McCartney’s ballads on the album, namely ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. “The melody and chord changes are transcendent, and the production values, while largely defined by Paul, remain rooted in the collective, evolving sensibility of the Beatles,” Buckingham explained. “Revolver was perhaps the group’s high watermark in terms of composition.”
Adding a final note of praise for his favourite Revolver track, Buckingham described ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ as “a paragon among many masterpieces.”
Indeed, Revolver set an exceedingly high bar that The Beatles and many of their contemporaries struggled to surpass. The voluptuous harmonies in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, specifically, were a response to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Whether Paul McCartney beat Brian Wilson at his own game is for you to decide.
Listen to The Beatles’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ below.
