The “darkest period” of Fleetwood Mac in one album
The history of Fleetwood Mac has always been rife with feuds, fallouts and in-fights. The band barely survived in moments as members walked out and quit left, right and centre. But never was it harder than in their mid-1980s period.
Many might think that the peak of the band’s drama came during the Rumours era. During the 1976 sessions, the band’s couples all split. Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham wrote increasingly cruel songs about each other, forcing the other to play them. Christine McVie even wrote a song about her affair, making her husband, John McVie, play on the track, ‘You Make Loving Fun’. It seems impossible that it could get any worse than that.
But Buckingham claims a different era was even tougher for the band. Ten years after Rumours, the rifts from those splits and the band’s worsening drug dependency made the 1987 album Tango In The Night their hardest project.
It had been bubbling for a while. In 1982, after their Mirage tour, the band went on hiatus as the tensions hit a new high. And while they eventually reunited in 1987, the band were very different people in very different places.
“I think of it as our darkest period,” Buckingham said of the sessions. Despite the group coming back together, the atmosphere in the studio shifted from one of lovers quarrels into a genuine sense of doom and worry as drug addiction took hold of the band.
During their hiatus, Stevie Nicks’ cocaine addiction worsened to a terrifying degree. While the band had all been into drugs, using them both recreationally and to try and handle the pressure of a hectic touring schedule like many musicians did then, Nicks’ use slipped into a real dependency.
By 1986, Nicks’ usage while away from the band was clearly fatal as doctors told her she had burnt a hole in her nose from excessive usage. After an intervention from her bandmates, who wanted to reunite for a new album, she went to rehab for the first time.
But as the Tango In The Night sessions got underway, her treatment clearly hadn’t taken. “Stevie was the worst she’s ever been. I didn’t recognise her,” Buckingham said, adding sadly, “She wasn’t the person I had once known.”
The blame for the band’s toughest days doesn’t fall solely on Nicks’ shoulders though. Buckingham admits, “Everyone was at their worst, including myself. We’d made the progression from what could be seen as an acceptable or excusable amount of drug use to a situation where we had all hit the wall.”
It was conducive to the times, but in no way conducive to a productive work environment. “The way people were conducting their lives made it difficult to get serious work done. Mick was pretty nuts then. We all were. In terms of substance abuse, that was the worst it got.”
But Nicks was undeniably the worst of them. While the others remained somewhat focused, the singer would totally disappear from sessions. “We spent a year on the record, but we only saw Stevie for a few weeks. I had to pull performances out of words and lines and make parts that sounded like her that weren’t her,” Buckingham said.
Mick Fleetwood was a letdown, too, as the guitarist added, “Half the time, Mick was falling asleep.” All in all, Buckingham concluded, “We had to rise to the occasion. It was a very difficult record to make.”
With the band gripped by drug addiction and simply trying to keep it together enough to finish the record, the Tango In The Night sessions mark the “worst” of the band’s history, according to Buckingham. It was an atmosphere so bad that the guitarist walked out at the end of it, signalling the end of Fleetwood Mac’s most successful and well-known lineup.
But was it a good album?
Tango in the Night is, perhaps in spite of itself, an amazing album. It’s a streamlined, gut-punchingly emotional record with no fat and a whole host of fantastically written songs, even more so than their 1975 self-titled record. Buckingham’s ‘Big Love’ and ‘Family Man’ are all-time greats, and even Nicks’ reduced presence can’t take away from the mighty power of ‘Seven Wonders’ and ‘Welcome to the Room… Sara’. But it’s McVie who hits it out of the park time and again, from ‘Everywhere’ to ‘Mystified’ through ‘Isn’t It Midnight’ and especially ‘Little Lies’.
The twinkling keyboards and soft textures transcend their dated technological interfaces and create a backdrop for some of the most twisted, impassioned, and wonderful recordings that the band ever made. This is the end of classic-era Fleetwood Mac, but what a high note to go out on.
