The two punk bands who inspired Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’
There’s a well-trodden path that forks in two directions for artists who face the task of following up a widely acclaimed album like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. One option is to choose a safe destination, repackaging the formula that previously worked, while the other is the artistic unknown: sonic experimentation to keep sharp-eared fans on their toes and the lifeblood of a band running through their veins.
After their 1977 global hit Rumours, the notoriously volatile Fleetwood Mac were faced with that very dilemma: Lean further into their harmonies and whimsical melodic compositions, which foregrounded their stories of inter-band heartbreak and betrayal, or move into the unknown.
In 1979, Fleetwood Mac released Tusk, an ambitious departure from Rumours and one centred around a more sparsely arranged approach to songwriting that hinged on the band’s openness to experimentation. But the genesis of that later realised sonic composition was born from Lindsey Buckingham’s keenness to make Fleetwood Mac a relevant voice in a burgeoning genre of post-punk.
Speaking to Uncut in 2004 about the band’s adoption of that genre in their smash hit follow-up, Buckingham said: “Although punk had a fairly huge impact on me, its influence on Tusk wasn’t so much on the music but more that it gave me a little room to deprogram and reaffirm things – to retrieve my own style, which I had when I joined the band in ’74” before later confirming, “I was inspired by the honesty, integrity and sensibility of bands like The Clash and Gang Of Four”.
Given that lyrically, Rumours was one of the most unflinchingly honest records of all time, Buckingham’s pursuit of heightened levels of integrity can only be attributed to ensuring that the newfound heightened success of the band didn’t effect what was obviously an emotionally unstable environment and distract them from making music for themselves first, and the audience second.
In keeping with the band’s history, this wasn’t a unanimous choice, and despite the firm reservations to abandon the Rumours formula from the rest of the band, Buckingham took control and pushed forward with his post-punk vision.
“I wanted to work on my songs alone with a tape machine and then bring them to the group. More eclectic ideas came out as a result,” he commented. “It’s the difference between one-on-one canvas painting, where the artist takes off in a more meditative, subconscious direction, and movie-making which always carries a political aspect because a bunch of other people become involved, which I found counter-productive”.
Perhaps the individualist approach to a band-wide sonic shift is where the record eventually fell short. When a new record brings with it a new sound, the great bands find a way to make it sound completely unique but also innately themselves, affirming that as long as the alchemy of those players sharing a studio exists, the sound can go anywhere.
Think Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Radiohead shifting from The Bends to OK Computer. Perhaps the stark difference between those records and Tusk was the collective approach.
The most innovative sounding elements of the record come from the title track, which saw Fleetwood himself introduce the song’s now iconic horn section and thus making it arguably the record’s most collaborative track. The rest of the record for the most part sounded like Rumours speaking a foreign language, mirroring the fractious manner in which the record was developed.
“After that, we had a band meeting and agreed we had to return to functioning on a more realistic level. Maybe there was, to an extent, sand in my eyes insofar as getting songs done the way I wanted,” Buckingham later conceded in his 2004 Uncut interview.
While Gang of Four and The Clash captured the zeitgeist by mirroring society, revealing the warts and all realities of the human experience, Fleetwood Mac’s success took them inwards. Their Shakespearean realities made for a compelling canvas upon which their songs could be painted, allowing individual narratives to be weaved in between. Perhaps where Tusk fell short wasn’t the band’s decision to explore a new soundscape, but instead not to do it as a collective, for the toxicity that bound them together was what, unfortunately for them, made them such a compelling band.
