STACK #227 September 2023

MUSIC FEATURE

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Fleetwood Mac in 2014, shortly after announcing their tour reformation

he refused to take out despite her objections). ”He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry

thing that he said. Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ’I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.” Rumours Live by Fleetwood Mac is out Sep 8 via Rhino Records. Fleetwood’s wooden balls Already a staple of his stage get-up, the wooden balls dangling between Fleetwood’s legs in the album’s cover photo, snapped by Herbert Worthington, were in fact toilet chains pinched from a club the Mac played during their formative years. ”I must admit I had a couple of glasses of English ale, and came out of the toilet with these,” Fleetwood confessed during a 2009 interview. ”I was very destructive – I ripped them off the toilet and had them hanging down between my legs.”

THE WRITING AND RAGING OF RUMOURS

”Excess at its most excessive” When Fleetwood Mac took over the Record Plant studio for endless recording sessions, Chris Stone, one of the studio owners, described the scene as ”excess at its most excessive.” ”The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party ’til 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked out they couldn’t do anything, they’d start recording.” Cran-Raspberry Dreams When an Idaho potato warehouse worker named Nathan Apodaca uploaded a video selfie to TikTok – cruising down a freeway on his skateboard, lip-syncing to Dreams and sculling a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice – we’re tipping he never dreamed that Fleetwood himself would create his own TikTok account and upload a homage. After Apodaca’s video went viral, many virgin listeners Shazamed and streamed this classic song, which resulted in Dreams re entering the charts.

McVie on the volatile Rumours sessions During an interview with famous music journo Cameron Crowe (who wrote/directed the semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous ), McVie described the Rumours sessions thusly: ”Trauma, trauma. The sessions were like a cocktail party every night – people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms... and of course

Fun fact: The album title Rumours was actually suggested by

Largely considered Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus, the Grammy-winning, diamond certified Rumours is about to be released in a brilliant live recording captured just six months after the album’s release in 1977. The original album was recorded amidst a substance haze and multiple marriage/ over ten million copies globally in its first month, topped the Billboard 200 for 31 nonconsecutive weeks, and has been in the UK charts for an incomprehensible 939 weeks to date. In 2003, the album itself was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Boasting singles including Lindsey Buckingham’s Go Your Own Way , Stevie Nicks’ Dreams (the band’s only US number one) plus Christine McVie’s You Make Loving Fun and Don’t Stop , Rumours also features a tune written by all five bandmembers in The Chain . So what makes album number 11 by the ’Mac one of the most commercially successful LPs of all time? It contains exactly zero stinkers. Here are a few fascinating facts about Rumours, ahead of the Live LP release. Words Bryget Chrisfield relationship/affair splits within this British-American band. Rumours sold

John, in response to the amount of wild stories that were circulating about their intra-band affairs around this time.

John [McVie, her bassist ex-hubby] and me were not exactly the best of friends.” Lyrical digs through song ”I very much resented him telling the world that ’packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks has admitted of Buckingham’s Go Your Own Way lyrics (which

Nathan Apodaca in his viral TikTok

Emerging from Nirvana’s metaphorical birth canal this time 30 years ago was the group’s third and final album, In Utero . For this collection, the grunge trio sought to recapture the caustic sound of their ’89 debut Bleach , leapfrogging the comparatively commercial feel of breakout Nevermind (1991). To achieve this end they hired producer Steve Albini, as frontman Kurt Cobain very much admired the icon’s previous work with Pixies and The Breeders. Recorded six months after the birth of Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter Frances, In Utero became a massive critical and commercial success, spawning singles Heart Shaped Box and All Apologies , and sealing their unimpeachable legacy.

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Kurt Cobain in the clip for Heart-Shaped Box (1993)

66 SEPTEMBER 2023

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