The album Lindsey Buckingham said was “verging on a comedy”
Being in a band of the stature of Fleetwood Mac comes with the immense pressure of appeasing millions, and artistically, it can be limiting. Additionally, former guitarist Lindsey Buckingham needed to share songwriting duties with his bandmates and couldn’t flex the full spectrum of his ideas.
Therefore, following Tusk, an album that saw him take the lead from a creative perspective, something was lit inside Buckingham, who had a separate musical personality that he needed to let loose. His ambition with his solo career was never to become a star in his own right but to liberate a different side to himself that would allow him to return to Fleetwood Mac stronger.
Although Tusk is now viewed as a masterpiece, that wasn’t always the case, and Buckingham accepted the band would be moving forward differently. For that reason, the notion of a solo career appealed to the musician as it would give him complete creative control and the license to do whatever he pleased.
His first solo album, Law and Order, arrived in 1981. Buckingham deliberately took himself less seriously than on Fleetwood Mac releases. However, with the benefit of hindsight, the guitarist admitted that he perhaps took things too far and the record lacked sincerity.
While speaking to Stereogum in 2018, Buckingham admitted: “In a moment when I realised the only way I was going to explore the left side of my palate was to do solo work, Law And Order was a bit, shall we say, sarcastic as a body of work, a bit camp, maybe a bit too camp, almost verging on a comedy album in some ways in terms of the irony that was there and the sensibility.”
At the time of his comments, Buckingham was gearing up to release the compilation album Solo Anthology: The Best of Lindsey Buckingham. Notably, the record only contained one track from Law and Order, a move that speaks volumes about his feelings towards the LP.
Buckingham elaborated: “Perhaps maybe I have a bad attitude about that album. I mean, I wanted the anthology to have a certain elevated tone that had a level of sincerity to it. I think much of Law And Order doesn’t speak in a sincere way. It speaks more in an ironic way, a tongue-in-cheek way.”
As a body of work, Law and Order sits as an anomaly in Buckingham’s dense back catalogue with and without Fleetwood Mac. Upon release, it failed to cause a significant impact and charted lowly despite the success of the lead single ‘Trouble’.
Although he’d regularly return to doing solo work while still an active member of Fleetwood Mac, the band was his priority, and the records released under his name were merely a side endeavour. Nevertheless, even if albums such as Law and Order didn’t set the world on fire, they energised his artistry and failed without having millions of eyes glaring at him.
