The late 1970s produced several classic breakup records. The romantic collapse of ABBA’s two couples fuelled a succession of bittersweet pop hits, while Marvin Gaye turned the end of his marriage into an entire double album. But few records wear their heartbreak as openly, or as successfully, as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
A comparatively modest 39 minutes of music, it has shifted a staggering 45 million copies and come to define the band’s West Coast, sun-kissed soap opera of sex and drugs.
Fleetwood Mac had been a veteran, primarily blues-based British concern until the arrival in 1975 of the young, romantically involved American couple Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Their laidback California mindset dovetailed neatly with Brit mainstays Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and the latter’s wife, Christine. An eponymous album established the new lineup and performed well, but it was a drop in the ocean compared to the gargantuan sales its follow-up would achieve.
By the time sessions began for Rumours in February 1976, however, there was trouble in paradise. The McVies were estranged but still living under the same roof, while Christine embarked upon affairs, first with a member of the group’s stage crew and then with their married co-manager.
“There was something seedy about [the affairs] that dented my self-respect,” she told her biographer Lesley-Anne Jones years later. “Maybe that was how the others made me feel. If they did, it was subliminal, nobody actually said anything, which in some ways made it worse. I didn’t like myself during that whole period, I sank very low.”
The Buckingham-Nicks relationship, meanwhile, had settled into an on-off routine where none of their bandmates were ever quite sure how it stood from one day to the next. At the same time, drummer Mick Fleetwood was struggling with the breakdown of his own marriage. He and Nicks would later embark upon an affair, but not until after Rumours had been completed.
Perhaps as part of a coping mechanism, drugs became a constant distraction in the studio, a way to decompress when the realities of the myriad romantic entanglements, and the songs they inspired, became too much. In his 2014 memoir Play On: Now, Then And Fleetwood Mac, the drummer wrote: “We had a ritual in which the engineers and band members all started humming a tune, it changed regularly, which would serve as a siren’s call for cocaine, specifically the cocaine that I was holding.”
Nicks addressed the band’s heavy drug use during the emotionally wrought making of Rumours in an interview with Mojo magazine in 2012: “You felt so bad about what was happening that you did a line to cheer yourself up.”
Yet, in the midst of the fog of fragmenting love and chemical escape, the group fashioned 11 songs that were instantly, universally alluring, pristine pop-rock, while not especially going out of their way to disguise the dramas of their creators’ private lives. Right off the bat, opener “Second Hand News” finds Buckingham taunting Nicks with the couplet: “One thing I think you should know/I ain’t gonna miss you when you go.”
Nicks fires back immediately on “Dreams”, warning him that he’ll have to come to terms with “the stillness of remembering what you had, and what you lost.” Buckingham remained adamant, though, on the opening lines of “Go Your Own Way”: “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do/How can I ever change things that I feel?”
A rebound relationship inspired Buckingham’s “Never Going Back Again”, with the guitarist admitting to Entertainment Weekly in 2021 that the song was “obviously about Stevie”. Conversely, Nicks’ “I Don’t Want To Know” is not about the couple’s collapse, as many listeners initially assumed. It dates from before the star-crossed lovers joined the band and were performing as a blissfully happy duo.
A pragmatic truce of sorts is reached on “The Chain”, the album’s only track with a five-way writing credit, on which Lindsey and Stevie echo each other in the call-and-response chorus. There is palpable resignation in the line: “If you don’t love me now you will never love me again/I can still hear you saying you will never break the chain.”
Christine McVie, the group’s other songwriter, is considerably less combative in her lyrics, although one wonders how her then-estranged husband John felt about playing bass on “You Make Loving Fun”, a celebratory ode to her new paramour. Elsewhere, she is tenderly thoughtful on “Oh Daddy”, a ballad pondering the impact of Mick Fleetwood’s marital woes on his two daughters.
Speaking in 2012, Fleetwood said: “I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out not too long afterwards, that the song was actually written about me. At that point, I was the only parent in the ranks of Fleetwood Mac, and Christine wrote something for me with the love and care of a sister.”
The album’s legacy is such that it formed the basis of the smash-hit Broadway play Stereophonic, prompting a lawsuit from studio engineer Ken Caillat, who claimed parts of the script were direct lifts from his 2012 book Making Rumours. Another fictionalised account of events, the Amazon Prime mini-series Daisy Jones & The Six, inspired Nicks to post on Instagram that it “made me feel like a ghost watching my own story.”
Mick Fleetwood is on record as saying Rumours is the most important record the band ever made. For Buckingham, speaking in 2006, there is also a lingering sense of melancholy whenever he thinks about it.
“Looking back at those days, the irony of it was that the disappointment wasn’t about the couples breaking up, the whole soap opera, it was the realisation that we didn’t all want the same thing. We let go of an idealism.”
And yet that may be the ultimate reason Rumours continues to endure. Fleetwood Mac did not conceal their romantic failures or attempt to turn them into grand statements. Instead, they transformed jealousy, regret, resentment, longing and acceptance into songs that felt intensely personal yet instantly recognisable. The details belonged to Fleetwood Mac, but the emotions belonged to everyone.
That combination of private anguish and flawless pop craftsmanship remains remarkably hard to resist. Nearly 50 years on, Rumours still sounds like a band falling apart in the most beautiful way imaginable.