"Rumours" at 45

A note on everyone's favorite dad album

“Rumours” has defied the test of time because it was made by people who love to write songs; people who love to write songs so much they’ll jeopardize their hearts, their health and their sanity over it. It was recorded after the band’s biggest commercial success (self-titled, 1975), and was infamously delayed, overworked and interrupted by excessive drug use and the band’s relationship drama. Not only had bassist John McVie and pianist Christine McVie recently divorced, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks were in a tumultuous on/off relationship and the fighting only ceased when they were working on music. The McVies had stopped seeing each other in any capacity other than to discuss songwriting. In the completely dysfunctional world of Fleetwood Mac, the only thing that worked was song craft. Which is why a group of Transatlantic misfits found themselves in a room together in the first instance.

With “Rumours” - the band’s eleventh LP - they built a British-American rock record that housed every emotion, story, and behavior that the genre should, while showcasing all of their individual virtues as players. From Mick Fleetwood’s thick, steady drum patterns to Buckingham’s stinging solos (‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘The Chain’); from Christine McVie’s mid-album soft reflection ‘Songbird’ to Nicks’ brooding ‘Dreams’, a seductive witch’s spell cooked up with a Fender Rhodes instead of a cauldron. It possesses every rise and fall of a chaotic romance, or several.

The album is majestically sequenced, as each track converses with another. From the very start, the soap opera begins. “I know there’s nothing to say/When someone has taken my place,” ushers Buckingham on ‘Second Hand News’; a cutting shout-out at an ex who has moved on, immediately introducing one of the rumours promised by the title. It’s followed by ‘Dreams’. “Now there you go again, you say you want your freedom/Well, who am I to keep you down?” sings Nicks, as if answering him, with a countering accusation. So which is it? Did she leave him, or did he want out?

Buckingham’s main emotion is jilted anger, as he constantly infers that she (ie, Nicks) was at fault. On ‘Never Going Back Again’ he demands that it’s over, before sticking the knife in one last time on ‘Go Your Own Way’ (“Packing up/Shacking up is all you want to do”, he writes, suggesting an infidelity on her part). For the classier Nicks, mythology and parable speak louder. On ‘Gold Dust Woman’, she paints the picture of a magic temptress who was too strong, too independent to be mastered. “She’s a dragon!” she sings. Imagine being Buckingham and Nicks making this record in the same studio for a year, mad in love, and even more mad out of it. Thankfully, it produced the goods.

“Rumours” won the coveted Album of the Year award at the Grammys in 1977. It has sold upwards of 40 million records, and counting. It’s one of the best-selling albums ever made. Fleetwood Mac remain a huge pull on the global touring circle, largely because of the staying power of this album, whose songs are never out of rotation. They exist in our own stories, pieces of our own lives, such is the power of groundbreaking tunesmiths.

In 2012, I was traveling to Los Angeles to interview Nicks for the 35th anniversary of “Rumours”. But I didn’t know it until I was mere hours away from her Malibu vacation home. It was December. I was newly adopted by the NME, and as a senior editor it was a problem that I had never written a cover story. So it was decided that in order to promptly fix this, I was to get on a plane immediately for a weekend away to California where I was due to write about a rock band from Scotland called Biffy Clyro. They were playing a tiny gig in Silver Lake at the Satellite (which had just changed its name from Spaceland) before putting out their sixth LP “Opposites”. I wasn’t particularly a fan of Biffy’s angular proggy hardcore shtick, but I was given this task because we shared a homeland. “You’re Scottish, you should write this!” OK boss.

Anyway, I was on the plane to LA, journal-ing about how all my wildest dreams were coming true at once, and how the hell did I know how to write a 3,500 word cover story on a band I didn’t really care about? Minor details. I landed, and there was no Uber in 2012. I had to get a taxi to my hotel by Rodeo Drive (ie, nowhere near anything useful), and I remember feeling like I was time-traveling backwards across the 405 while submerged in jetlag as it took almost two hours to arrive. This city was a fucking nightmare. I dumped bags, went to the rooftop bar to meet my two male counterparts for the weekend (the band’s PR, and a broadsheet music journalist who was doing the same coverage as me), and as I knocked back a tequila, I left my own compass and inhibitions behind and decided to say “yes” to everything that would come my way over the next 72 hours.

It was a great 72 hours. Memories are hazy now but the QVC channel can be hysterical apparently at 6am when you’re too high to sleep. I also learned that if you’re going to conduct interviews while not sober, you’re going to have to be prepared to listen to them back when you’re transcribing them…

Anyhoo, on the morning of the middle day, it was suggested to me by the PR that I interview his other act while I’m in town, because why not kill two birds with one stone, and we had a free evening. But who was the other act?

“Stevie Nicks. You a fan?”

Fuck. Off. Fuck right off, I thought. Uh, yes.

I think my boss would have liked me to have said no. It took some convincing upon my return to get the interview to run. Believe it or not, in 2012 Fleetwood Mac were on the precipice of being reappraised by a new generation, but they were still very much the band your uncle with the balding mullet listened to when he couldn’t find his Carpenters cassette tape. There was a sharp swing to retromania with Fleetwood Mac the second Florence & The Machine and Mumford & Sons started to cover ‘The Chain’, and the instant a new band called Haim began playing London club venues that same year. A covers album was put together starring the hottest acts around, including Lykke Li, Tame Impala, MGMT and St Vincent. (In 2012, Harry Styles was still in One Direction and an entire shape-shifting career change away from reeling Nicks out for his performance of ‘Landslide’ whenever possible.) I made the case for this budding trend, and justified my Saturday night at Stevie’s. The broadsheet journalist was in on the twofer too, but he knew nothing about “Rumours”, the band, or Nicks. And I recall, we pre-gamed in a bar in Malibu down the street, and as we sat in her driveway awaiting permission to enter, he peered over at my notebook, and asked to borrow my questions while I went first. He had at least 15 years on me. I tightened the grip on my notebook and left him in the car alone.

Nicks’ Malibu vacation spot was all white and cream interiors, lit by candles, protected by shawls, filled with the sound of the crashing waves outside and the new age jazz from the stereo. She had a small dog. She wore tinted aviators. Her nails reminded me of my mother. Her skin was smooth like a child, and she maintained a naive wonderment that was both hopeful and quite tragic.

Nicks only gave me thirty minutes and ran her own agenda, ignoring questions, and scoffing time with her theories about how the internet killed rock’n’roll, and one-hit-wonders, and Twilight, which she appeared obsessed with.

“We lived in a circle of drama,” she said of making “Rumours”. “Drama is great for creating. If you’re just happy-happy-happy, things come out on that sunny side that nobody really wants to hear.”

I relished gaining her perspective on attitudes towards her gender in the 1970s. I felt almost embarrassed asking her once her response came because to Nicks it wasn’t even a consideration. “When Christine and I were in Fleetwood Mac we made a pact that we would never be treated as second class citizens,” she said. “We would be standing in a room with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and Pete Townshend and Steve Winwood and all those men and we would not ever be treated that we weren’t as good as they were. Because we are. I never had that problem. Nobody ever packaged me. Nobody ever told me what to wear and if anybody ever did…” She slowly wound up her middle finger at me.

I didn’t get to ask her half of the things on my mind. She told me to write the names of Florence & The Machine and Haim down on paper for her, because she hadn’t heard of either, and she didn’t own a computer to look them up, but she was going to find a way.

I liked her.

I left my notebook in her house. It was an accident. There was a handwritten instruction to myself at the end of my questions reminding me to ask her – if the room read right – whether the “rumour” that during recording she resorted to having cocaine blown up her ass because her nose had a cavity in it bore any truth. My notebook was returned to me the next day. I have no idea if she read it.

When we left her house that night, she politely dismissed an invitation to Nobu with us, explaining that she “doesn’t eat fish”, and preferred to stay in alone at night and write songs, even on a Saturday. She said she found her purpose at the age of 12: songwriting. And that to this day, it’s what makes her happiest. And we left her there, at her grand piano, with her Twilight books, and her quiet sadness, to keep working out the kinks of a broken heart, hoping it might heal others along the way.