Rumours is the sound of a disintegrating band. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were embroiled in a bad-tempered separation while making the album; they apparently hurled insults at each other across the studio in between recording their vocals. Christine McVie was blissfully loved up but, unfortunately, not with John McVie, Fleetwood Mac’s bassist and the man she had recently divorced; instead, she had taken up with the band’s lighting director. To cap it all off, the album was recorded in late 70s California, with the embers of the hippie movement still smouldering, and so liberal amounts of mood-altering substances were added to an already volcanic mix.
The result is surely one of the greatest breakup records in the history of rock. The music is a culmination of the folky, accessible soft-rock sound that ran throughout the US charts of the 1970s and, though it sometimes branches off into funkier, more countryfied, or more piano-driven directions, it makes for a remarkably cohesive listen, an easily digestible succession of concise soft-rock songs which are clearly designed to get as much radio play as possible. But the real secret to the album’s brilliance lies in its manifold and disorienting mood swings, from the resentment and anguish of Buckingham’s contributions to the sad, more conciliatory vibe struck by Stevie Nicks, topped off by McVie’s spellbound ballads. The result is that Rumours perfectly reflects the subjective experience of a dying relationship, told from all sides and encompassing all the moods – anger, grief, bitterness, guilt, continued disorienting resuscitations of love and affection – which comprise it.
Buckingham sounds the most wounded, and it’s hard to escape the impression that he came off worst from his dalliance with the impossibly sultry Nicks, the very incarnation of late 70s, post-hippie, West coast sensuality. The album opens with the bouncy soft rock of “Second Hand News”, which some reviewers have described as “euphoric”, but which in my view articulates an unhinged mania. He won’t miss her when she goes, of course, but he nonetheless asks her to let him do his stuff, a plea of carnal desperation from a still-besotted ex-boyfriend. The uncomplicated folk of “Never Going Back Again” conjures a similar mood; an ostensibly lackadaisical chirpiness concealing a wide-eyed inner turmoil. Lindsey is not going back – back, that is, into the ever-beckoning black hole of grief and depression. On “Go Your Own Way”, the full weight of his rancour finally emerges; the verses basically confess to still being in love, and to being utterly perplexed by the breakup, while the choruses retreat from this vulnerability into a poker faced wounded pride and vitriolic Schadenfreude over Nicks’ coming loneliness.
By contrast, Nicks’ songs seem gentler, more reconciliatory, more “godspeed” than “go your own way.” The verses of the sultry, bass-driven “Dreams” accept Buckingham’s desire to leave the relationship, while the choruses warn of the perils of singledom, in a striking, but much less vitriolic echo of “Go Your Own Way”. The up-tempo country rock song “I Don’t Want to Know” is also generous. The vengeful Buckingham aims to wound; Nicks grieves, but wishes him only the best. In my view, this contrast between Buckingham’s obvious inner-turmoil and Nicks’ comparatively calm compassion gives the game away; it’s tempting to conclude that the impulse to end the relationship came from Stevie. Perhaps the most illuminating insight into her mindset at this time is provided by the album’s closing song and its darkest moment, the menacing “Gold Dust Woman”, a – surely autobiographical – depiction of a femme fatale who rather mockingly asks her victim if she is responsible for destroying his rosy conception of love. The oblique reference to a black widow during the song’s haunting fadeout is instructive indeed.
The listener is periodically offered a respite from the rancorous back-and-forth between Buckingham and Nicks by Christine McVie’s songs, which comprise rare, sunny moments of unalloyed good feeling on an emotionally fraught record. The gentle piano ballad “Songbird” is a bit of a tearjerker, an unreserved, almost childlike and simple-minded, but utterly sincere declaration of love. A moment of similarly innocent, starry-eyed idealisation comes on “Oh Daddy”. “You Make Loving Fun” has a different, more energetic, much funkier tone, but the sentiments are similar; in the lush, shimmering chorus, McVie likens romantic love to magic and miracles, to being under a spell.
These songs were clearly written during the initial sugar-rush of her dalliance with her new boyfriend but, juxtaposed against the Buckingham / Nicks psychodrama, they make for an interesting reminder that the collapse of a relationship can be accompanied by moments of intense affection and longing, the nagging doubt that maybe this breakup isn’t such a good idea after all, given how great things were at the beginning. The debilitating confusion of such mood swings is crystallised on the buoyant “Don’t Stop” which, though it’s ostensibly about optimistically looking to the future, is actually shot through with torment. Fittingly, Buckingham sings it; when he barks “yesterday’s gone” in the chorus, it sounds like a self-directed admonition to get over his heartache and carry on.
But the album’s centrepiece, the point of concentration for the collapsing relationships, extra-marital affairs, and personal vendettas which produced it, is provided by “The Chain.” Tellingly, this is the only song on Rumours that all five members of the band contributed to. It begins with a slow, ominous fade in, Buckingham lamenting the fact that his relationship with Nicks is conclusively dead, his rage and sadness manifesting in a nihilistic rejection of both darkness and light. Then, of course, the Formula 1 theme kicks in, the throbbing base, the stabbing guitars, the distressed wail, the agony of a man who knows that it’s over, really, and that the chain certainly will not keep them together.
Rumours, then, rather brilliantly taps into the fact that breakups are maelstroms of different kinds of emotions, including disorientating and unsettling recollections of the initial honeymoon phase of the relationship. To some degree, Fleetwood Mac achieved this effect by accident, because different musicians in different headspaces contributed different songs. But the album remains cohesive, held together by its central theme of interpersonal romantic drama. The fact that none of the songs overstay their welcome, that every single track on the album could’ve been a hit single, doesn’t hurt either.
10/10
Highlights: “Go Your Own Way”, “The Chain”, “Gold Dust Woman”