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Until a few months ago, I had never heard the band’s follow-up to Rumours. This was a concept album of sorts, although many at the time thought the concept was simply “We are not Fleetwood Mac!” In short, Tusk appeared to be a wholesale attempt by the band to completely subvert their brand. In the late Seventies, their only rivals in this – bottling the marshmallow musical essence of Los Angeles and Southern California – were The Eagles, and they had spent the best part of the decade working up to it with Fleetwood Mac it sort of happened by accident.Īnd then they went and recorded Tusk, a double album of wildly eclectic and eccentric lo-fi, high-concept material that Mojo magazine once called “one of the greatest career sabotage albums of all time”. This imperial version of Fleetwood Mac achieved something quite rare, conquering a country and seemingly able to define it too.
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Fleetwood Mac managed to fuse the singer-songwriter pretensions of the early Seventies with a slick pop -sensibility (and a great drum sound) that sounded just fine on FM radio, especially in your first car, with the top down and four or five friends in the back, passing beers and smokes between them. These dysfunctional romantic struggles informed the bulk of the songs that turned up on Rumours, creating one of the most popular albums of all time. “Being in Fleetwood Mac is more like being in group therapy,” Mick Fleetwood famously said. Fleetwood was in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Jenny Boyd John and Christine’s marriage came to an end and Buckingham and Nick’s romance fell apart. Soon, though, group -relationships started to crumble. The couple radically altered the band’s sound, adding a West Coast sheen that would quickly result in hit songs such as “Over My Head”, “Say You Love Me”, “Rhiannon” and “Landslide”. Seeking a reinvention of sorts, in 1974 the band moved to the US and, having seen Buckingham Nicks play in California, Mick Fleetwood asked Lindsey and Stevie to join them. He was replaced by Christine Perfect soon after she married John McVie, and various other members came and went, rarely having much lasting impact. However, Green’s use of LSD -exacerbated his schizophrenia, causing him to quit the band in 1970. Honing a hip, blues-rock sound, they had commercial success with songs such as “Black Magic Woman”, “Man Of The World”, “Oh Well” and “Albatross”. The band was formed in 1967 in London by the -guitarist Peter Green, who recruited drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Some say that Fleetwood Mac’s Wikipedia page reads like a Russian novel, with new characters popping up, before exiting in grim circumstances, including mental illness, alcoholism, adultery, a religious cult and romantic trauma.