For better not worse
Marcus Berkmann
Td rather jack/Than Fleetwood Mac,' 1sang two dippy girls in the heady summer of 1988, thus cocking a snook at all the sorry old people who still occasionally played Rumours. These days no one remembers what 'jack' meant, but the same sorry old people still occasionally play Rumours, and are still surprised by how good it is. For me, I have to admit, it's an album dulled by familiarity, not unlike Dark Side Of The Moon. But there was always so much more to F. Mac than that one album, or the internecine relationship horrors that underpinned it. Even now, some 40,000 years later, it's almost impossible for anyone to write about them without mentioning that Lindsey Buckingham used to live with Stevie Nicks, and John McVie and Christine McVie were once married, and Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood once had an affair, and they all wrote loads of miserable songs about it. There, I've done it now. It's all that anyone's interested in. As Elton John often complains, why doesn't anyone talk about the music?
Because somehow, amazingly, the band has endured. I say 'band', but 'brand' may be closer, as the personnel have changed fairly regularly since Mick Fleetwood and John McVie opened up for business 35 years ago. They may be one of the finest rhythm sections in rock, but it has always been other people who have written and sung the tunes. Let's skip over the critically credible but fantastically dull early years, when Peter Green's blues guitar dominated. For most listeners the story only really starts in 1975 when Buckingham and Nicks joined. They and Christine McVie wrote the songs on Fleetwood Mac (the template), Rumours (25 million sales plus), Tusk (the experimental double album everyone hated), Mirage (water-treading) and Tango In The Night (10 million sales plus). In 1988 Lindsey Buckingham left to go solo. Fleetwood and McVie recruited a couple of American journeymen with mullets to replace him, and the quality of the albums declined swiftly. Behind The Mask (1990) and Time (1995) have been all but obliterated from the band's history. Even the people who made them have probably not listened to them more than twice.
Meanwhile, Buckingham's solo career came to nothing. Stevie Nicks had always sold records under her name, hut Buckingham never managed it, even though he is the presiding genius of the Fleetwood Mac records. I'm particularly fond of his 1992 album, Out Of The Cradle, which at the time sounded more like Fleetwood Mac than Fleetwood Mac could. I have never met anyone else who has heard it, let alone bought it. Buckingham rejoined for a 1997 live album and is fully involved in the new Fleetwood Mac album, Say You Will (Reprise). Which means they are worth listening to again.
I must admit, I am quietly thrilled by this new record. No one gives Fleetwood Mac much credit for anything, but they have managed the rarest achievement in a long
pop career they haven't become appreciably worse. Say You Will isn't a faded shadow of past wonders. Although rather louder than previous Fleetwood Mac albums — there's a particularly horrible heavy metal screecher halfway through which I have already started to edit out — this is a living, breathing pop record weighed down with good tunes. Stevie Nicks songs never sound better than when they are produced by Lindsey Buckingham. And Buckingham himself is always trying something new, which inevitably means a couple of failures but infuses the whole project with a sense of adventure you don't normally associate with pop musicians in their mid-fifties. And how distinguished they all look. Mick Fleetwood, the world's tallest drummer, now has a white ponytail to match his expensively groomed beard. John McVie, who looked a wreck 30 years ago, hasn't changed a bit. Christine McVie is absent
she apparently couldn't bear the idea of touring again. But Buckingham and Nicks are in remarkably fine fettle. Not that American rock stars ever get older; they just go a little more out of focus.
Say You Will is absurdly long. Generous to the point of lunacy, Buckingham and Nicks have supplied nine songs each, which adds up to 76 minutes (70 without the awful heavy metal blot). Nonetheless, it's an album that grows, and there's one song — 'Bleed To Love Her' — which I reckon is as good as anything used as the theme to Top Gear. Who could ask for more?
Previous page
