The one Fleetwood Mac album nobody needed to hear
The story of Fleetwood Mac is essentially a soap opera. Drugs, fights, romance, drugs, money, drugs and some of the best pop music ever made. Also drugs. Something that flies somewhat under the radar in comparison to all the salacious details is the fact that they’re also the best and biggest counterargument to the theory that great bands are one, defined set of people that should never ever change.
After all, Fleetwood Mac are a brilliant rock band who have, in their time, been about three brilliant rock bands. There’s the Peter Green Fleetwood Mac era, where John McVie and Mick Fleetwood were the rhythm section for Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green’s duelling guitar work. Then there’s the Penguin era after Christine McVie joined the band and shared lead vocal duties with Bob Welch and Dave Walker. After that, two California singer-songwriters joined the band, and the rest is tabloid and music history.
All this to say that the one thing that Fleetwood Mac could do is evolve. They were always able to create great music no matter who was in the studio, who was shagging who or who was getting cocaine blown into their unmentionables. This is shown by their track record, too. Not everything they did is Rumours-level godlike, but that’s an insane level of quality by which to judge a whole band’s output. More or less everything they did is worth a listen and has a few good songs on it, until you get to the 1990s.
Strangely enough, the 1990s was otherwise kind of a banner year for the Mac. While their 1980s work has been reassessed since, at the time, they were regarded as little more than a boomer nostalgia act. A very, very successful one, but not relevant anymore. It turned out that, like with so many other bands, all the people needed was the opportunity to miss them a little. Once the band’s classic lineup reunited for a few shows in the mid-’90s, the band hadn’t been so exciting in years. However, they just couldn’t get that lineup in the studio.
Why couldn’t Fleetwood Mac capitalise on their popularity?
It’s a tale as old as time and a song as old as, well, ‘Dreams’ probably? Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks still couldn’t stand the sight of each other. While they could just about handle a concert or two, getting them back in a high-pressure environment like the recording studio was absolutely out of the question. Instead, the McVies and Fleetwood tapped up Traffic guitarist Dave Mason and country singer Bekka Bramlett to fill the void.
Turns out that Mason and Bramlett, with the best will in the world, couldn’t replicate the songwriting magic of two of the best songwriters in rock history. The album that followed, 1995’s Time, is pretty much the only outright bad Fleetwood Mac album. However, levelling the album’s issues solely on the new arrivals would be deeply unfair. They’re trying their damndest, which is more than can be said for Fleetwood and the McVies.
The best this record gets is the McVie-led ‘I Do’. A pleasant enough Mac-by-numbers jam that also has a cute penguin and their chick on the single cover; I’m not made of stone. Otherwise, it’s full of lifeless, confused dreck, which, when it can be bothered to be creative, slides straight into self-indulgent cringe. Anyone up for the album’s closer, ‘These Strange Times’? It’s a seven-minute, new age, drone track with Mick Fleetwood ranting about God! Anyone? Anyone?!
Tellingly, the next album the band released was The Dance, one of the most celebrated live albums of the 1990s, and the record that actually capitalised on the hype surrounding the classic Mac line-up getting back together. The band swiftly moved on from this disaster and returned to the lucrative, celebrated business of being Fleetwood Mac. Time, nothing more than a footnote in their long history, one, thankfully, covered up by mountains of cocaine.
