know where and to whom they wanted to
target their next offering.
One thing was certain though; they
weren’t going to waste any time debating
the issues, so, less than a month after the
group first got together they headed back
to Sound City Studios in LA to begin
work on the album they would simply
call Fleetwood Mac.
It could be said that the hassles over
the group’s name and the doubts as to
whether Fleetwood Mac could rise,
phoenix-like, from the ashes of so many
line-up changes, encouraged them to
state their name boldly on the album as
a gesture of solidarity. It perhaps also
served to convince anybody who had any
doubts, after the court case with Clifford
Davis, over who owned the name – it was
definitely Fleetwood Mac. The desire to
get cracking in the studio and come up
with an album meant the band didn’t
have a lot of time to get to know the new
members, so the album was created by
bringing together individual styles rather
than the members working together as a
cohesive unit.
Thus, Buckingham and Nicks added
in their back catalogue of songs, which
made up virtually half of the material,
while Christine McVie and the rhythm
section covered the remainder of the
tracks, except for one cover song – the
Curtis Brothers’ Blue Letter. A track
that served to prove Stevie Nicks had
been a strong addition to the band, was
the beautiful Rhiannon, a wonderfully
crafted ballad about a Welsh witch that
was to become one of the band’s most
popular songs and one that became a firm
fixture at gigs.
Christ ine’s Sugar Daddy also became
one of the band’s staples, whilst Over
My Head and Say You Love Me showed
that she had by no means lost her talent
for writing top-class lyrics and melodies.
The album Fleetwood Mac was released in
July 1975, and didn’t take long to reach
the prestigious No. 1 position in the
American album charts.
Christine summed up the appeal of
Fleetwood Mac ruminating, ‘I think
we were just a product that everybody
wanted at the time. It was a very versatile
album, and on stage the band projected
a kind of exciting image, a new sort of
image, which hadn’t been seen before. It
was unique to have two women in a band
who where not just back-up singers, or
singers period... The five characters on
stage became five characters, as opposed
to just five members of the band.’
Fleetwood Mac’s astounding success
also could be a product of the changestheir audience was undergoing at that
time. By the mid-seventies, the music-
listening public from the sixties had
grown up. They were no longer a bunch
of reprobate teenagers, all taking their
clothes off for the first time and running
around the festival fields while singing
hymns to ‘peace and love, man’. They had
seen what war, and in particular Vietnam,
had done to a lot of young people. They
had witnessed the race riots and the
protest marches. They had matured, and
by the mid-seventies they wanted a kind
of music and lyric that reflected that older
viewpoint. The appeal of twenty-minute
lead guitar and drum solos was beginning
to wane; they were looking for something
a bit deeper and more melodic.
Where the charts are concerned,
it often doesn’t matter how amazing
songs are, or how well they’re produced;
it comes down to public opinion as
to what sells, what doesn’t sell, and,
most importantly, what goes platinum.
Sometimes the oddest and least
commercial song can cut right through
all the noise of the music industry, and
by sheer public demand creates a monster
hit. At other times an artist can turn out
an album that is at least as good as its
predecessor, only to find the listening
audience has moved on and doesn’t wantLindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and John McVie on stage in 1977.