BBC Two is celebrating Fleetwood Mac this weekend by showing four programmes back to back. The channel will give up its Saturday evening to the blues and folk band, which has been together for almost 60 years. Christine McVie’s death in 2022 has meant the band are unlikely to play together in earnest again but are fondly remembered by the legions of fans who have enjoyed their 17 studio albums.
The BBC is not showing the programmes for any particular tie-in or anniversary that we can tell other than to celebrate the legendary band. The programmes, which will all show on Saturday, February 22, are:. It follows the Beeb recently going through its archives to bring watchers an all-nighter for artists such as Wham! and Bob Marley.
It goes without saying, Fleetwood Mac have a hell of a lot of hits; far too many to squeeze into a top ten ranking, and the reason why we’ve reluctantly had to omit honourable mentions such as Seven Wonders, Gypsy, Never Going Back Again, Albatross, and Tusk’s brilliantly bonkers title-track. Look, don’t blame me, blame the band for being too good to cram into such a small number of spots.
So, what did make the cut, if not those classics? Step this way for our rundown. Despite finding a home on Fleetwood’s best-known and most pain-addled album, Rumours, the late Christine McVie conjures up a potent sense of hope in Don’t Stop, an upbeat, chugging pop song exploring her break-up with her bandmate and ex-husband John McVie. The pair were married for eight years, but split during the making of Rumours.
Despite this, there’s joy bursting out of Don’t Stop, from its yowling guitar solo and jaunty piano melodies, to McVie’s lyrics, which forget about the past and look towards brighter, bluer skies. “If your life was bad to you, just think what tomorrow will do.”.
Stevie Nicks has called Sara her most personal song – and given how hard she goes in on Silver Springs, Frozen Love, or Blue Denim, that’s quite the emotional bar to set. A lush, gorgeous six-minute epic, it charts various messy strands of love, lust, and heartbreak that tangled at the core of the group.
As well as Nicks’ split with Lindsey Buckingham, it delves into her time dating the Eagles’ Don Henley, and the affair she had with bandmate Mick Fleetwood while Henley was on the road. Though she was never exclusive with Fleetwood, Nicks was still devastated when she discovered he was also dating her friend Sara Recor, whom he later married.
And so began Nicks’ artistic obsession with the name – she wrote this Tusk standout with the Sara in question. Henley also claimed in 1991 that Nicks got pregnant during their relationship, and had an abortion; Sara also serves as a kind of letter to the child they never had. It turns out the true inspiration is a mixture of the two situations. “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” Nicks confirmed to Billboard. “But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”.
After a decade of shuffles, Buckingham and Nicks completed what is now remembered as the classic Fleetwood Mac line-up, and their 1975 self-titled record – technically, the band’s tenth studio album – propelled them to superstardom. Beforehand, though, Nicks worried about whether she would be able to sustain herself on art alone, and wrote Landslide about this dilemma while staying with a friend in Aspen.
“I did already feel old in a lot of ways,” she told New York Times. “I’d been working as a waitress and a cleaning lady for years. I was tired.” A love song to music itself, Landslide is about Nicks’ choice to pursue music, with her fingers crossed that the band would finally hit the big time. It’s safe to say she made the right call.
Another banger of a meta break-up song (something of a key Fleetwood Mac theme) Buckingham wrote Go Your Own Way in a lonely hotel room following the release of 1975’s self-titled album. He and Nicks had finally ended their tumultuous, on-off relationship, and were drifting further apart. And inspired by the rock ‘n’ roll sound of bands like the Rolling Stones, Go Your Own Way was Buckingham’s sad, bittersweet, acceptance of their drifting apart. Though he grapples with his feelings elsewhere, it’s all there in the first line: “Loving you, isn’t the right thing to do”.
All of this lends Go Your Own Way a symbolic importance, and it also paved the way for Fleetwood Mac’s sonic shake-up on Rumours. “The song became this symbol of independence for each of us and where we were heading as individuals,” Buckingham told The Wall Street Journal in 2021. “It also crystallised the band’s collective desire for a new creative direction on the album we were about to record.”.
Just a handful of Fleetwood Mac songs are credited to all of the band, and this is the only track to be credited to all five members of their classic 1977 line-up. Accordingly, The Chain – painstakingly assembled out of tape using a razor blade – was a real group effort.
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