The only Mac I really knew at this point was their latest single, Big Love, which crackled with a delicious darkness, a danger signposted by the guttural love grunts that punctuated its chorus.
It was this energy that first entranced me when I was twelve, catching an old Fleetwood Mac concert from their 1982 Mirage tour, rerun on British TV to promote 1987’s Tango In The Night LP. Such soap opera should’ve sunk the band instead, it was the undercurrent that electrified the group’s best-selling album (and, indeed, one of the best-selling albums of all time).
Infamously, during the writing and recording of the line-up’s second album together, 1977’s Rumours, Nicks parted from Buckingham and the marriage between bassist John McVie and singer/keyboard-player Christine dissolved in the aftermath, Nicks began an affair with Fleetwood, who was in the process of divorcing from Lloyd. While the arrival of Buckingham/Nicks to the ranks put an end to the constant reshuffling that had plagued Mac in the preceding years, life within the group was no less tumultuous. The next guitarist to grasp this seemingly poisoned-chalice was young Californian Lindsey Buckingham, who’d previously recorded a 1973 album, Buckingham/Nicks, with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks, with precious little success Buckingham joined on the understanding that Nicks would also become a member of Fleetwood Mac. Following the traumatic acid-fuelled breakdown of genius founder guitarist Peter Green in 1970, the next few years saw Mac bid farewell to guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan, along with their replacements, Plymouth-born Bob Weston and laconic Californian Bob Welch.
It’s an oft-told tale, but the last of a series of seismic membership upheavals that shook Fleetwood Mac throughout the seventies proved the making of the group. And so it is with Fleetwood Mac’s 1980 live album, gleaned from the global tour in support of their 1979 album, Tusk.
The best live albums are often more than just an artist’s greatest hits recreated in concert: they can offer glimpses of vulnerability beneath an artist’s PR-upholstered surface, illuminate a chapter in their existence, tell a story all their own.
Wherein the biggest band in the world run aground, leaving the tape recorders rolling to capture rancour, pathos and grace under pressure…