The Rebound Years
Buckingham and Nicks returned to the band, Christine McVie left, Christine returned… and another series of episodes of rock’s longest-running soap opera were written.
There’s a theory that Fleetwood Mac operate on a 10-year cycle, one that reaches peak success, maximum drama or a combination of both whenever the year ends in a seven.
Since they formed in 1967, much of the band’s career has worked to that schedule. The year 1977 produced the worldbeating Rumours, a soft rock masterpiece that played out against a backdrop of romantic complication and personal psychodrama. In 1987 it was Tango In The Night, a Yuppie-era landmark created amid struggles with drug addiction and barely suppressed acrimony that precipitated the departure of Lindsey Buckingham before the album had barely cooled on the shelves. Then 1997 was no less chaotic, with Buckingham returning for a lucrative live reunion, only for Christine McVie to bail soon afterwards.
If 2007 and 2017 – so far – have bucked this trend, it isn’t for lack of trying. The past 20 years of Fleetwood Mac have been no less eventful than their first 30, albeit for different reasons. The tangled relationships that exist between the five members – and especially between Buckingham and
Stevie Nicks – continue to define the group as much as their music.
“There’s a subtext of love between us, and it would be hard to deny that much of what we’ve accomplished had something to do with trying to prove something to each other,” Buckingham said in 2013. “Maybe that’s fucked up, but this is someone I’ve known since I was sixteen, and on some weird level we’re still trying to work some things out.”
Or as drummer Mick Fleetwood neatly put it: “This band is the most abused franchise in the music business.”
Mid-way through the 90s, Fleetwood Mac were in trouble. Their last studio album, 1995’s pallid Time had been a disaster. It wheezed into the lower reaches of the British charts for one week, and didn’t even make the US Top 200 – unthinkable only a few years before.
The problem was simple: there was no Lindsey Buckingham and no Stevie Nicks. It might have said ‘Fleetwood Mac’ on the record sleeve, but this was a pale imitation of the real thing.
After the band found themselves on a soulless US package tour, Mick Fleetwood decided that enough was enough. “It was starting to be too much hard work,” he said a few years later. “We made an album that was a total failure and I couldn’t see myself starting all over. So we stopped.”
Except it wasn’t that simple. The weird bond that existed between the members of Fleetwood Mac never allowed them to truly escape each other. Within weeks of putting things to bed, Fleetwood began working with Buckingham on his new solo album, soon pulling John and Christine McVie into their orbit.
Nicks hadn’t been idle during her time away from Mac, and by 1996 she was clean and, more surprisingly, collaborating with Buckingham again on Twisted, a song for the disaster movie Twister.
With Buckingham at the centre of things it was only a matter of time before the fragments of Fleetwood Mac were pieced back together. “Lindsey was very much the focus of it all,” acknowledged Fleetwood. “I’ve gotten real close to him over the last year, to a place we’ve never been before.”