FEATURE:
Big Love and Wonder
Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night at Thirty-Five
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ONE of Fleetwood Mac’s greatest albums…
the superb Tango in the Night is thirty-five on 13th April. It was produced by Lindsey Buckingham and Richard Dashut. Although there are a couple of weaker songs on the band’s fourteenth studio album, some of their best material can be found on Tango in the Night. From Lindsey Buckingham’s opener, Big Love, to Stevie Nicks and Sandy Stewart’s Seven Wonders, Tango in the Night gets off to a tremendous start! Christine McVie’s classic, Everywhere, completes one of the strongest opening trio of songs in music history. Elsewhere on Tango in the Night, there is the incredible title track and Little Lies. As Rhino wrote in their article, even though the material on Tango in the Night is superb, Fleetwood Mac were not unified and solid when they started recording:
“Fleetwood Mac was in pretty rough shape when the band got together to record what would become the group's 14th studio effort, Tango in the Night. The record was originally conceived as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project; it was Mick Fleetwood who coerced the guitarist into morphing it into a full Fleetwood Mac release.
"That was in my estimation when everybody in the band was personally at their worst," Buckingham recalled years later. "If you take the whole subculture that existed in the 1970s, and what it led to -- and how it degraded -- by the time we did Tango in the Night, everybody was leading their lives in a way that they would not be too proud of today. It was difficult for everybody."
That included singer Stevie Nicks, who spent most of the laborious 18-month process making Tango in the Night out on the road promoting her third solo album, Rock a Little. Ultimately spending only two weeks at Buckingham's home studio over the course of recording, Nicks customarily got drunk on brandy before singing her vocal takes. Most of them were left on the cutting room floor.
Once the dust settled, Fleetwood Mac released Tango in the Night on April 13, 1987. Much like Rumours, the behind-the-scenes drama was the genesis for hit records. Lead single "Big Love" cruised up the charts, peaking at #5 on the Hot 100 for the week of May 21, 1987. The song was also a hit on the dance floor, with an extended remix of the track twirling all the way to #11 on the Billboard Dance Sales chart in June 1987.
The second single from Tango in the Night was another radio winner: "Seven Wonders." The Stevie Nicks showcase made a formidable chart run, breaking into the top 20 to peak at #19 on the Hot 100 for the week of August 15, 1987.
It was Christine McVie who shined on third Tango in the Night single, "Little Lies." Peaking at #4 on the Hot 100 in November 1987, the song soared all the way to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart for the week of October 10, 1987.
Christine McVie again took the spotlight with the album's fourth single, "Everywhere." The song followed "Little Lies" up the Adult Contemporary chart, hitting #1 on January 15. 1988. Over on the Hot 100, "Everywhere" broke into the top 20 to peak at #14 in February 1988.
Tango in the Night was a massive success for Fleetwood Mac, reaching #7 on the Billboard 200 chart over the week of May 23, 1987. The #1 album in America that week: U2's The Joshua Tree.
"The album was well received," Mick Fleetwood told Classic Rock in 2013. "Somewhat sadly, the kudos of that was never really fully attributed to Lindsey because he wasn't present... He was coerced and persuaded to do that album - mainly by me. And, to his credit, he put aside everything that he'd dreamt of doing, including making his own album, for Fleetwood Mac; but then realized that he'd made a mistake... Lindsey was not being heard. We just didn't get it."
Tango in the Night is the last Fleetwood Mac studio album to date that features the classic lineup of Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, and John McVie. Selling more than 15 million copies worldwide, it stands as group's second-most successful release behind Rumours.
Lindsey Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac after the release of Tango in the Night. The band recruited guitarists Billy Burnette and Rick Vito to make up for his absence on the subsequent tour. It wasn't until 1997 live album, The Dance--released 10 years after Tango in the Night--that Buckingham would return to the fold”.
Receiving a large amount of positive reviews, Tango in the Night is Fleetwood Mac’s second-biggest-selling studio album (after Rumours). The album was a success in the United States, where it peaked at number seven for three weeks, spending more than seven months within the top twenty. Tango in the Night It was certified 3× Platinum in October 2000 for selling three million copies in the United States. It is a remarkable album that ranks alongside the very best of Fleetwood Mac. Before finishing off, I want to quote a couple of reviews. The second relates to the 2017 reissue. AllMusic underline how strong and consistent Tango in the Night is:
“Artistically and commercially, the Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham/Mick Fleetwood/Christine and John McVie edition of Fleetwood Mac had been on a roll for over a decade when Tango in the Night was released in early 1987. This would, unfortunately, be Buckingham's last album with the pop/rock supergroup -- and he definitely ended his association with the band on a creative high note. Serving as the album's main producer, Buckingham gives an edgy quality to everything from the haunting "Isn't It Midnight" to the poetic "Seven Wonders" to the dreamy "Everywhere." Though Buckingham doesn't over-produce, his thoughtful use of synthesizers is a major asset. Without question, "Family Man" and "Caroline" are among the best songs ever written by Buckingham, who consistently brings out the best in his colleagues on this superb album”.
I don’t think there are too many big plans around the thirty-fifth anniversary, Five years ago, Tango in the Night was re-issued. Pitchfork note that the album is abstract, in terms of the way love is written about, and the fact Fleetwood Mac were falling apart:
“Still, it’s McVie whose work is most realized by Buckingham’s impressionism. Her “Everywhere” is the best song on the record. Like “Big Love” it too is about encountering an idea too big to contain within oneself (love, again). But where “Big Love” apprehends it with icy suspicion, “Everywhere” responds with warmth, empathy, and buoyancy, describing a kind of devotion so deeply felt that it produces weightlessness in a person. Its incandescent texture is felt in almost any music that could be reasonably described as balearic. Elsewhere, “Isn’t It Midnight,” McVie’s co-write with Buckingham and her then-husband Eddy Quintela, seems an inversion of the values of “Everywhere,” a severe ’80s guitar rock song that gets consumed by a greater, more unnerving force by its chorus, as if it’s succumbing to a conspiratorial dread. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” McVie sings, and Buckingham echoes her in an unfeeling monotone (“the face of a pretty girl”) while behind him synths chime in a moving constellation, UFOs pulsing in the dark.
This is the essence of Tango in the Night: something falling apart but held together by an unearthly glow. More of a mirage than Mirage, it is an immaculate study in denial (its most enduring hit revolves around McVie asking someone to tell her “sweet little lies”). It’s a form of dreaming where you could touch the petals of a flower and feel something softer than the idea of softness. In this way, Tango seems to emerge less from Buckingham’s pure will and imagination than from a question that haunts art in general: How can one make the unreal real, and the real unreal?
The remaster of Tango in the Night isn’t as topographically startling as last year’s Mirage, where new details seemed to rise out of the mix as if in a relief sculpture; it sounded good on CD in 1987. The reissue does sound warmer and brighter, and the instruments feel less digitally combined, which lifts background elements to the surface, like the seasick drift of the bass notes in “Caroline” and the coordinated staccato harmonies in the title track. The reissue also includes two discs of b-sides, demos, and extended remixes, several of which were previously unreleased. “Special Kind of Love” is described as a demo but sounds like a completely developed Buckingham song, gentle and simple, with every edge expressively filigreed; it could’ve been a potential second sequel to “You and I.” “Seven Wonders” appears in an earlier, more relaxed arrangement, with Lindsey’s guitar warmly swanning between the notes that would eventually be reconstructed in perfect digital isolation by a synthesizer.
The demos also reveal the ways in which the songs could fold into and out of each other. On the “Tango in the Night” demo you can hear Buckingham, at the edge of every chorus, begin to invent the trembling choral part that opens “Caroline.” Nicks’ eventual solo track “Juliet” is present in two of its primordial forms—as the instrumental “Book of Miracles” (credited to both Buckingham and Nicks) and as a five-minute “run-through.” The run-through is especially curious, reducing “Book of Miracles” to a formulaic blues-rock over which Nicks’ voice produces a just-barely musical static, full of wobbles and distortions and exclamations. After the take she says, ecstatically, “I thought that was wonderful! I didn’t play! I did not play because I am so smart!”
Nicks exhibits a strange, dissonant giddiness in this moment that isn’t present in any of the band member’s memories of the recording process. At the time, in his interview with the Times, Buckingham imaginatively described Tango in the Night as a restorative process. “This album is as much about healing our relationships as Rumours was about dissension and pain within the group,” he said. “The songs look back over a period of time that in retrospect seems almost dreamlike.” Twenty-six years later, Buckingham summarized the experience to Uncut in more severe terms: “When I was done with the record, I said, ‘Oh my God. That was the worst recording experience of my life.’”
The jealousy and resentment he felt toward Nicks for the success she experienced in her solo career, and the prevailing feeling that his architectural work on the band’s records went unnoticed and unappreciated, had built to a flashpoint. Later in 1987, the band met up in anticipation of the promotional tour for Tango, for which they had already secured dates and signed contracts. At the meeting, Buckingham announced he was quitting the band. “I flew off of the couch and across the room to seriously attack him,” Nicks told Classic Rock in 2013. “...I’m not real scary but I grabbed him which almost got me killed.” They spilled out of McVie’s house and into the street. Buckingham ran after Nicks and threw her up against a car. She “screamed horrible obscenities” at him, and he walked away, from the moment and the band. What’s left, after these harsh fragments of reality are swept away, is Tango in the Night: a remarkably complete album, a lavish garden growing out of negative space. Just a dream”.
Tango in the Night’s title did almost point to a last dance for Fleetwood Mac. 1990’s Behind the Mask did not feature Buckingham predominantly. It was a bit of a low point for the band. Tango in the Night was this amazing album that was created at a time when things were strained. Like Rumours, out of turmoil and dissolvement, the band created something remarkable and enduring. Maybe not as timeless as 1977’s Rumours, Tango in the Night is full of incredible material. This remarkable album is one of Fleetwood Mac’s…
VERY best works.