Covid Island Discs

Day 399: You make loving fun, Fleetwood Mac

Time to end the week with this classic from Fleetwood Mac. This song of course is one of their classics from their most famous album rumours. It is kind of an oddly appropriate title given the personal shenanigans that were going on in the band when this album was recorded. Below is a little snippet from the Wiki article about the making of the Rumours album.

As the studio sessions progressed, the band members’ new intimate relationships that formed after various separations started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac. The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. At the time, the hippie movement still affected Sausalito’s culture and drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album’s production. Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant’s owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought “excess at its most excessive” by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, “The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn’t do anything, they’d start recording”.