Released on this day in 1977, Rumours was actually Fleetwood Mac’s 11th studio album, but only the second to feature guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks.
The pair’s arrival, in 1974, kickstarted the band’s golden commercial era, and in a recently unearthed clip from the BBC Archive, captured in October of 1976, we see Buckingham discussing what we can expect from the upcoming album - which would turn out to be Rumours - and recounting the story of how he and Nicks ended up joining the Fleetwood Mac family in the first place.
“I’d say it’s got more of a general vibe to it than the last one did,” Buckingham says of Rumours in comparison to 1975’s eponymous ‘Fleetwood Mac’. “The last one was more like just a selection of songs that were all written before we even met each other. And this group of songs were all written while we were on the road and they’re all inter-related to each other.
“And, so, I think the whole thing comes across more as a unit of songs that present a whole idea. All the songs are about life on the road and things that were going down within the band, within relationships and things like that.”
Rumours of course, is the ultimate break-up album, dealing with the fallout of not one but two relationships coming to an end. Christine and John McVie were getting divorced; Buckingham and Nicks were also on the point of going their own ways, too.
Of the circumstances that led up to he and Nicks joining Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham says: “Mick [Fleetwood] was looking for a studio in which to record - this was about a year and eight months ago, I guess now - and he ended up in a place called Sound City out in the San Fernando Valley talking to an engineer named Keith Olsen. Keith put on a song of Stevie’s and mine from an album that we had out about a year earlier called Buckingham Nicks just to show Mick what the monitors sounded like and what the whole studio - like, what his sound was like.
“Mick heard a song called Frozen Love and - I guess - liked it and about a week or so later Bob Welch [guitarist] decided that he was going to leave [Fleetwood Mac]. And I guess Mick had been sensing Bob’s unrest for a while anyway and he kind of filed the song of ours that he had heard away for future reference. And he just called us up and said, ‘would you like to join?’’
It turned out to be a shrewd move: “Stevie and Lindsey… that all happened so right, and everything has worked out,” says Fleetwood in the clip, and he wasn’t wrong. Rumours has now sold more than 40 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.
Sadly, it appears that we’ve now seen the last of the band. After Buckingham’s acrimonious exit in 2018 he was replaced in the touring line-up by Neil Finn and Mike Campbell, but the sad death of Christine McVie in 2022 has seemingly put a full stop on Fleetwood Mac’s career. "Without her, it just couldn’t work,” Stevie Nicks told Mojo in 2024.
