‘Mirage’: The Fleetwood Mac album Christine McVie described as “nuts”
Few bands have accumulated quite as many stories and internal squabbles as Fleetwood Mac. Since the band’s inception in the late 1960s, their drug-induced antics and romantic affairs have become just as well-known as the hits they spawned, only adding to their musical legacy. But their sonic output hasn’t always been quite as chaotic as their lives behind the scenes.
Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus, 1977’s Rumours, would become most well-known for taking inspiration from their turbulent relationships with drugs and with each other, but its instrumental content was much more tame. While the lyrics on the record were fuelled by impassioned love and bitter loss, their scorned songwriting was always softened by pop-rock soundscapes.
There was no shortage of enduring hits on Rumours – from the sprawling ‘The Chain’ to the swaying ‘Dreams‘ – but it wasn’t Fleetwood Mac at their most eccentric. The chaos behind the scenes had not bled into their studio sessions. It was only with their follow-up album, 1979’s Tusk, that Fleetwood Mac would try their hand at something a little more experimental.
Though it would never become quite as iconic as Rumours, Tusk provided a glimpse at another side of Fleetwood Mac. Leaving the soft rock strums behind, the album was driven by Buckingham’s desire to try something new, to sample boxes of tissues and to pull from post-punk. It was certainly a new direction for the band, but not one that would last long.
By the time they reconvened in the early 1980s to record Mirage, it seemed that Fleetwood Mac had reverted back to their old ways. Leaving the chaos to squabbles over solo careers behind the scenes, the band created another collection of radio-friendly rock, finding their biggest hit in ‘Gypsy’, a shimmeringly simple track helmed by Stevie Nicks.
Between that return to soft rock stylings, though, keyboard player Christine McVie once suggested that instrumental chaos was still brewing. While the late musician acknowledged that the album wasn’t her favourite release with Fleetwood Mac, she remarked that it held both “great songs” and “good memories” during a conversation with The Arts Desk.
“It harkens in a vague sense not to the soul of Rumours,” she stated, “but to more commercial roots after Tusk, which was the antithesis of commercial.” Despite their conscious decision to return to catchier territory, though, McVie seemed to suggest that their newborn penchant for eclecticism still came through. “But it’s still a pretty eccentric record when you listen to it,” she concluded, “It’s nuts!”
While much of the album seems to sit firmly in that first category – in radio-friendly soft rock wanderings – there are elements of more off-kilter instrumentation. On ‘Can’t Go Back’, for example, Mick Fleetwood incorporates some playful percussion with bells and shakers, but nothing quite on the level of a Kleenex container.
The album isn’t quite as “nuts” as McVie suggested, finding much more comfort in that more familiar realm of soft strums and muted percussion, but it’s an intriguing listen nonetheless. It’s a culmination of the soft hits that earned Rumours magnum opus status and the new eccentricities they picked up in the years that followed. Still, it’s nowhere near as “nuts” as the stories that follow the band around.