Buckingham and Nicks’ romance was failing throughout the writing process (although the band didn’t know this until most of the way through its recording) John and Christine McVie’s marriage had collapsed and Fleetwood’s wife and mother of his two children was in the process of divorcing him.Īll of which makes for a rather voyeuristic listening experience. However, the intense touring following that record had taken its toll on the band’s relationships, famously making for Rumours’ emotional bitterness and barely disguised heartbreak.
The success of this line-up’s first album in 1975, and Stevie Nicks’ personal anthem ‘Rhiannon’ which was a smash hit, crucially allowed them the time they needed in the studio to tweak and perfect its follow-up throughout 1976.
In 1974, the then-quartet permanently decamped from Britain to America, and guitarist Bob Welch made way for the Californian songwriting duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to complement the trio of Christine and John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood. The band’s revolving-door membership had seen a number of singers and musicians serve time in the previous ten years (notably the enigmatic guitarist Peter Green in the ‘60s, responsible for the beautiful chart-topper ‘Albatross’). However, four years before that Grammy win that cemented their position in the highest echelon of rock, Fleetwood Mac was in the wilderness and in disarray. Globally, it has sold just over 45 million copies. To date, it has spent 630 weeks in the charts. Likewise in the U.S., where it is the sixth biggest-selling record ever (with 20 million copies sold) and was awarded the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978. It was a similar story back in 1977: while it sold as strongly as had been predicted following the success of 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, it took a while for it to become the sales behemoth of legend, eventually topping the UK charts after 11 months in January 1978, a rare example of a slow-burning smash hit. You’d have been ridiculed (or worse) for admitting to liking it in certain circles a little over ten years ago when it turned 30 years old, but in 2017, the year of its 40 th anniversary, Rumours is as relevant as it was back at the time of its release, and sells almost as consistently. Some much more successfully than others, it must be added, but for better or worse its influence is beyond dispute.īut Wolk’s piece did hit upon a truth that’s often forgotten: until quite recently, Rumours was not considered to be a great album, merely one that had sold a lot of copies, but it’s quite amazing how its reputation has been rightly restored over the last decade. Artists who broke big at the end of the noughties and throughout the 2010s, such as Mumford & Sons, Haim, The Lumineers and Lorde just to name a few, have sought inspiration from the Mac’s ability to unite huge and different musical tribes with crowd-pleasing, malleable hits with a universal relatability. It has long since become a yardstick for accessible yet substantial pop, a template for any kind of music whose gleaming, immaculate exterior seeks to hide emotional chaos or darkness underneath.ĭouglas Wolk’s 2004 article for Slate concerning the band’s album re-issue campaign called Fleetwood Mac the ‘least influential great band ever’, a claim that looks laughable in view of what happened over the subsequent decade. Fleetwood Mac’s 11 th album Rumours, a multi-platinum, easy-listening cultural phenomenon, is one of that handful of records – famous for the emotional turmoil that underpinned its sunny yet uneasy So-Cal harmonies. Some records are so massive that you don’t even have had to actually listen to them to know what they’re about, for them to have shaped your listening habits. Influenced by: Ry Cooder, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Everly Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, The Bee Gees, Neil Young Influenced: Beck, The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, Death Cab For Cutie, Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, The Besnard Lakes, The Civil Wars, The Lumineers, Ladies Of The Canyon, Sharon Van Etten, Lorde, Haim, Best Coast, Taylor Swift
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