There are massively successful albums, and then there’s Rumours, by Fleetwood Mac. Released on 4 February 1977, the group’s 11th album topped the US charts for 31 non-consecutive weeks that year. It not only hit No 1 in the UK but remained in the Top 100 for eight years.
It’s sold over 45 million copies to date, making it one of the highest-selling albums ever, and, what’s more, music fans continue to fall under its spell: amazingly, Rumours was the biggest selling vinyl album of the 2010s in the UK and No 7 in last year’s best-selling vinyl chart.
Aside from staggering sales figures, Rumours simply connects with people – ‘Dreams’, ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Don’t Stop’… all pangenerational anthems with universal appeal. And it remains hugely influential on music.
Plenty of today’s leading artists, from Taylor Swift to Sabrina Carpenter, Haim to Florence + The Machine, Lady Gaga to Lorde, owe a massive debt to the bittersweet pop-rock of late ’70s Fleetwood Mac. But the road to Rumours was a treacherous one for the soft rock titans.
"We took the decision to hang in there"
Just a few years before Rumours’ release, Fleetwood Mac were at their lowest ebb. In 1973, guitarist Bob Weston had an affair with drummer Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Fleetwood found out two weeks into a US tour and the aftermath led to Weston being fired and the band cancelling the remaining dates.
Their manager, Clifford Davis, tried to recoup his losses by sending out a new version of the group on the road, which led to lawsuits galore and his sacking.
Adding to the Mac’s concerns, their album sales had been steadily diminishing, with 1974’s Heroes Are Hard To Find an outright flop.
When Mick Fleetwood phoned Lindsey Buckingham, a young guitarist he’d met at Sound City studios, on New Year’s Eve 1974 to offer him a job in Fleetwood Mac, it seemed like a last roll of the dice. Buckingham agreed, on the condition that his partner – musical and otherwise – Stevie Nicks came with him.
Buckingham and Nicks had been playing together since high school, first with psych-rock act Fritz and then forming an eponymous duo that released one album, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks, before they hitched their wagon to Fleetwood Mac.
Along the way romance blossomed, as Nicks told Uncut in 2003, “Lindsey and I were in total chaos a year before we met Fleetwood Mac. I had already moved out of our apartment a couple of times and then had to move back in because I couldn’t afford it.
"Our relationship was already in dire straits. But if we’d broken up within the first six months of Fleetwood Mac there would have been no record and we would have been in big trouble, so when we joined the band, we took the decision to hang in there.”
"Everybody was pretty weirded out"
Buckingham and Nicks joined a group with its own internal problems.
Singer-songwriter and keyboardist Christine Perfect had married bassist John McVie and joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970 after a whirlwind romance, but their relationship had deteriorated through years of touring and infidelities, and they separated during the band’s 1975 US tour to support their self-titled tenth album, the first record made with Buckingham and Nicks.
Improbably, considering the behind-the-scenes turmoil, Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album saved the band. Recorded in just three months in early 1975, it saw the newcomers’ songs beautifully complement Christine McVie’s, giving the group a sonic makeover.
Nicks’ ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ were hazy, mystic pop with dark undercurrents, Buckingham’s ‘Monday Morning’ made for a playful, West Coast-inspired opener; dig a little deeper, however, and there’s already the barbed, restless energy that would become his calling card. And perhaps the competition was good for Christine McVie, who was inspired to pen the dreamy ‘Warm Ways’ and ‘Over My Head’.
Still, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t an instant success. It was only after giving 1975 over to relentless touring that the new line-up made up for lost ground, and by the time the album finally reached No 1 in the US, in September 1976 (15 months after release), they’d already been holed up for six months recording what would become their next record.
Rumours had the working title ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ – perhaps a reflection of the group’s collective mindset as they entered the studio. Time on the road had caused ructions in the already volatile Fleetwood Mac lineup and once the group’s penchant for hedonism was added to the mix, the new sessions were fraught.
“Everybody was pretty weirded out,” Christine McVie told Rolling Stone. “Somehow Mick was there, the figurehead: ‘We must carry on. Let’s be mature about this, sort it out.’ Somehow we waded through it.”
Sessions began in February 1976 at the Record Plant, Sausalito, California. Resembling a wooden shack from the outside, the studio was a largely windowless, cocoon-like collection of small, dark recording rooms.
A bed surrounded by a giant pair of bright red lips
In the Record Plant, day became night and vice versa – hardly the healthiest of environments for a band with a growing appetite for illicit substances. This was compounded by an obsessive work ethic, with the band recording for 35 days without a break at one point.
One of the rooms was nicknamed ‘The Pit’ and had been customised for Sly Stone during the endless sessions for Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On with a bed surrounded by a giant pair of bright red lips, so that the singer – who was spending all his time there anyway – could record vocals before crashing out.
The Pit became Nicks’ personal space during the Rumours sessions – a velvet-draped sanctuary, much-needed as she had told Buckingham shortly before sessions began that their relationship was over.
The McVies managed to record Rumours while barely speaking to one another, while Buckingham and Nicks were prone to explosive rows. Meanwhile, Buckingham and John McVie were butting heads, and Fleetwood has having relationship problems of his own.
"I thought I was going to be making a regular album," engineer Ken Caillat later told MOJO. "Then I heard this yelling and saw Chris throw a glass of champagne in John’s face. Then Stevie and Lindsey started having an argument over the microphone. Then Mick walked in with tears in his eyes as he’d just got off the phone to his wife. I started to think it was contagious."
The sessions became ever more drawn out, decadent and pernickety. At one point, recording came to a standstill while a piano was tuned to their satisfaction.
“If you took out all the bad stuff, Rumours wouldn’t have happened"
"Yes, it did drag on for four days," Buckingham told MOJO, "but we weren’t tuning for 12 hours a day. We were trying different tuners. Though it’s quite conceivable that in those days when everyone was a little… er, wacked out, it took longer than it should have done."
Unsurprisingly, the psychic unrest manifested itself in the songs, which ran the whole gamut of break-up emotions, from heartbreak (‘Oh Daddy’) to resignation (‘Dreams’), anger (‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Second Hand News’) to moving on (‘Don’t Stop’, ‘You Make Loving Fun’).
As Nicks said in 2003, “If you took out all the bad stuff in the band, the songs wouldn’t have happened. There simply wouldn’t have been a Rumours if everything had been fabulous.”
But if Rumours only amounted to late-night diary entries and barbed asides, we’d not be talking about it today. Winningly, the album married the psychodrama of the lyrics to bulletproof melodies, gleaming production and dazzling musicality.
These are songs and performances that mix sorrow with euphoria, make sunshine-pop out of agitation, and they’re all underpinned by a slinky, fabulously indulgent sound – all heavy harmonies and muscular rhythm section.
On release, Rumours spread like wildfire, selling 10 million copies in its first year alone and giving the estranged group the incentive to stay together.
The albums that followed would see Fleetwood Mac stretch out and continue to enjoy huge success, but Rumours represents the point where burgeoning talent met established musicianship and a whole lot of emotional upheaval and decadence to forge something magnificent. And we still can’t get enough of it.
All pics Getty Images
Top image Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie and Stevie Nicks (centre), 1976
