The history of Fleetwood Mac has been rife with feuds, fallouts, and internal conflicts. The band barely made it as members walked out and quit left, right, and center. But it was never harder than in the mid-1980s.
Many believe that the Rumours era marked the pinnacle of the band’s drama. During the 1976 sessions, the band’s couples all separated. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham wrote increasingly cruel songs about each other, compelling the other to perform them. Christine McVie even wrote a song about her affair, ‘You Make Loving Fun’. It featured her husband, John McVie. It seems impossible that things could get any worse than this.
But Buckingham claims a different era was even more difficult for the band. Ten years after Rumours, the band’s schisms and worsening drug addiction made the 1987 album Tango In The Night their most difficult project.
It’d been bubbling for a while. The band went on hiatus in 1982, following their Mirage tour, as tensions reached new heights. And, while the band did eventually reunite in 1987, they were very different people in very different situations.
“I think it was our darkest period,” Lindsey Buckingham said of the sessions. The atmosphere in the studio changed from one of lovers’ quarrels to one of genuine doom and worry as drug addiction gripped the band.
During their hiatus, Stevie Nicks’ cocaine addiction worsened to a terrifying extent. The band had all experimented with drugs, both recreationally and to cope with the stress of a hectic touring schedule. Many musicians did at the time, and Nicks’s use developed into a true addiction.
By 1986, Nicks’s usage while away from the band was fatal. Doctors informed her that she had burned a hole in her nose due to excessive use. She went to rehab for the first time after being urged to do so by her bandmates, who wanted to reunite for a new album.
But as the Tango In The Night sessions began, it was clear that her treatment had not been effective. “Stevie was the worst she had ever been. I didn’t recognize her,” Buckingham said, adding sadly, “She wasn’t the person I knew before.”
However, Nicks does not bear sole responsibility for the band’s most difficult times. Buckingham admits, “Everyone was at their worst, including me. We’d made the progression from what could be seen as an acceptable or excusable amount of drug use to a situation where we had all hit the wall.”
It was appropriate for the time, but it did not promote a productive work environment. “The way people lived their lives made it difficult to complete serious work. Mick was nuts back then. We all were. In terms of substance abuse, that was the worst of it.”
However, Nicks was undeniably the worst of them. While the others maintained their focus, the singer would completely disappear from sessions. “We spent a year recording, but we only saw Stevie for a few weeks. “I had to pull performances out of words and lines and create parts that sounded like her but weren’t her,” Buckingham explained.
Mick Fleetwood was also a letdown, as the guitarist admitted, “Half the time, Mick was falling asleep.” Overall, Buckingham concluded, “We needed to rise to the occasion. It was an extremely difficult record to create.”
According to Lindsey Buckingham, the Tango In The Night sessions were the “worst” of the band’s history. They were gripped by drug addiction and simply trying to keep it together enough to finish the record. It was such a bad atmosphere that the guitarist walked out at the end. It effectively ended Fleetwood Mac’s most successful and well-known lineup.
