Any band would struggle to follow up the phenomenal success of an album like Rumours.
But by the time they started work on their next album in the summer of 1978, Fleetwood Mac were not just any band – they were a volatile, disjointed unit of drug-addled, extremely talented and newly rich prima donnas.
Eventually released in 1979 as a double album, the expectations heaped upon Tusk were huge. And when it revealed itself as a very different beast to its huge-selling predecessor – with polished, radio-friendly anthems in short supply and fragile, melancholy ballads and bursts of punky energy taking their place – the album perplexed many.
Still, Tusk reached No 4 in the US, hit No 1 in the UK and sold four million copies worldwide – an enormous success by most bands’ standards.
'Recording Tusk was absurd'
Again though, Fleetwood Mac were not most bands. Tusk’s fractured nature – very clearly the work of three distinct songwriting talents – echoed the band’s dynamic at the time. While the recording of Rumours was informed by the break-ups of two couples – Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and Christine and John McVie – by the time they came to record Tusk, things had become even more tangled.
Christine McVie was now involved in a tempestuous relationship with Dennis Wilson, The Beach Boys’ heartthrob drummer who had recently released his solo masterpiece Pacific Ocean Blue. 'He was a mess, but he was charismatic, charming, and really handsome,' McVie later told Uncut.
'He swept me off my feet big time, and we had a very rollercoaster affair for a couple of years. I just adored him… [he] awakened things in me I’d been scared to experience and made me feel the extremes of every emotion.'
Wilson was a hopeless romantic, prone to grand gestures – from planting a heart-shaped flower bed on McVie’s lawn as a surprise or serenading her with an orchestra – but he was also struggling with alcoholism and had a voracious appetite for illegal substances, so there was usually a downside (for instance, he charged her for the flower bed).
'Her cocaine use had escalated wildly'
Meanwhile, her former husband, bassist John McVie had married the band’s secretary, Julie Rubens.
Unsurprisingly then, McVie’s contributions resembled her melodically seductive moments from Rumours had they been dragged through the emotional wringer, with gorgeous-but-desolate ballads such as ‘Over And Over’, ‘Never Make Me Cry’ and ‘Brown Eyes’ (which featured the band’s founder, Peter Green, playing on the fade) alongside breezy and bittersweet beauties ‘Think About Me’, ‘Honey Hi’ and ‘Never Forget’.
Another of Fleetwood Mac’s songwriters, Stevie Nicks, was also going through a tricky spell in her personal life. By 1978, her cocaine use had escalated wildly and – this is possibly connected – she had embarked upon a stormy affair with the band’s drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was still married.
'Don’t go after other women’s husbands'
'The crazy accidental affair,' Nicks later said. 'Never shoulda’ happened. And we knew it from the beginning… If there’s anything I learned from that relationship, it was, "Don’t go after other women’s husbands," because it never works out.'
To make matters worse, the affair spilled over into the Tusk sessions, where it came to an end when Fleetwood got together with Nicks’ best friend, Sara Recor, and Nicks fell for the engineer Hernan Rojas.
Fittingly, Nicks’ songs for Tusk were brooding and intense rock ballads, charged with gothic drama (‘Sara’, ‘Sisters Of The Moon’, ‘Storms’, ‘Beautiful Child’).
The most drastic change came with the songs Lindsey Buckingham brought to the table. Buckingham had become smitten with punk and new wave and was determined not to make ‘Rumours II’. Buckingham informed the rest of the band that he’d be recording his material at home and bringing it into the studio for overdubs.
He turned one of the bathrooms of his LA home into a makeshift studio, using the tiled, reverb-heavy ambience for vocals and hitting boxes of tissues for percussion. Buckingham’s desire to ensure Fleetwood Mac were keeping up with musical trends – not to mention his predilection for industrial quantities of confidence-enhancing and sleep-banishing substances – made for some thrillingly frazzled tunes in ‘That’s Enough For Me’, ‘Not That Funny’, ‘Walk A Thin Line’ and ‘I Know I’m Not Wrong’.
Elsewhere, Buckingham’s experimentation resulted in the gorgeous, 70s Beach Boys-recalling ‘That’s All For Everyone’ and the tribal rhythms of the album’s title track and improbable lead single. At a point where Buckingham could have been content leading the biggest band on the planet, he was pushing the envelope and producing some gloriously odd music.
'It had to be the best... no thought of what it cost'
Tusk took over a year and cost over a million dollars to record – a staggering amount for the time. Talking to Uncut in 2003, Christine McVie recalled the excess that characterised the sessions:
"Recording Tusk was quite absurd. The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a telephone directory. Exotic food delivered to the studio, crates of champagne. And it had to be the best, with no thought of what it cost. Stupid. Really stupid. Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night, they could have made an entire album. And it’s probably true."
That sense of decadence was matched by the décor of the studio, a former Masonic temple called Village Recorder, Los Angeles. "Shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows," Nicks recalled, "and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground."
The wild atmosphere in the studio eventually got to Fleetwood, who collapsed one evening among a melée of champagne bottles. Hard living and a spectacularly unhealthy diet had taken their toll on the drummer and he was diagnosed with hypoglycaemia.
'It's Mick's favourite Fleetwood Mac album'
When Tusk was released on 12 October 1979, it struggled in the shadow of Rumours. As the man who pushed the Mac away from the mainstream, Buckingham has since defended the album. 'The rest of the band had a cynical view towards the way Tusk was made and the reasons why I thought it was important to move into new territory,' he told Uncut.
'It wasn’t just negativity. There was open hostility. Then I got a certain amount of flak because it didn’t sell as many [copies] as Rumours. Mick [Fleetwood, drummer] would say to me, "Well, you went too far, you blew it." That hurt. And so, it’s gratifying now to hear Mick tell anyone who asks that it’s his favourite Fleetwood Mac album.'
Adding to the pressures, thanks to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that had pulled the band apart, the outfit that embarked on the 113-date world tour to promote Tusk were combustible, even by their standards. Despite the troubles, Tusk stands up as a lavish, stormy, brave and often heartbreaking document of a dizzying time in the group’s history.
It might have disappointed some of their newfound fanbase, but it is the fantastically excessive, beautifully bruised and fascinating album that Fleetwood Mac had to make.
All photos Getty Images / Album art Amazon
Top image Fleetwood Mac at the 1978 Grammy Awards. L-R Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood (hidden), John McVie
