Mirage :30 Years
 

Today Mirage is 30! It's still my favorite Fleetwood Mac album ,a shame there's no Remastered edition to mark this anniversary but hey,this thread:all about Mirage ,photos videos,everything!

http://www.animaki.com/bild_skivor/f...holdme7_fr.jpg

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/albu...2920/86882.jpg

http://homepage1.nifty.com/wildone/7...ac%20gypsy.JPG

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2367/3...de9a5aa0_z.jpg

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2138/3...0876b88c_z.jpg

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/albu...a09/242084.jpg

http://images.45cat.com/fleetwood-ma...-back-1983.jpg

http://www.gottahaverockandroll.com/...pa_330_lg.jpeg

http://a2.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/i...17083036/l.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CCGU-83Xk8...ge%2Bpromo.jpg

Does anyone have the outtake from the Mirage cover shoot where Christine is in Stevie's place, and Lindsey is turned looking at Stevie and she's closer and gazing in the other direction?

Happy birthday!

Happy 30, Mirage!!
 

I'm so happy!
And yeah, maybe is my favourite album too. All the songs have a very special sense, a very special sound for me. I discovered it recently but I liked quickly.

The Masters:
http://a3.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/i...7499dc43/l.jpg

The Goddess...
http://www.vh1.com/sitewide/promoima...sy/320x240.jpg

And one of my favourites!
http://images.45cat.com/fleetwood-ma...r-brothers.jpg

HAPPY 30, MIRAGE!!

Here are the other outtakes:
http://i.imgur.com/BzVXh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vSkxY.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/x5Q12.jpg

This is a great thread! Can't agree with you more on the subject of a Remastered & Expanded version, which I mentioned in another thread. Here are the tracks that exist that could be put on to Disc 2 of a Remastered & Expanded version, although not necessarily in this order...

1. Book of Love (Demo)
2. Blue Monday
3. Can't Go Back (Instrumental Demo)
4. Cool, Cool Water ("Gypsy" b-side)
5. Eyes of the World (Alternate Version)
6. Hold Me (Alternate Version)
7. Hold Me (Alternate Version with Christine's vocals only)
8. Oh Diane (Demo)
9. Straight Back (Early & Long Versions)
10. That's Alright (Demo & Long Versions)
11. Smile at You (versions 1 & 2)
12. If You Were My Love
13. Make Me A Mask
14. Teen Beat
15. Goodbye Angel

I have most of these tracks. I think the majority of them are available on YouTube, although the sound quality varies. Hopefully if these tracks are released, they will use the original 2-track mix master tapes as the source or the closest possible to those tapes.

I'm a bit amazed that it's anyone's favorite FM album with so many to choose from. It's my least favorite of the 1975-1987 lineup, but still a good album. Happy 30th.

While Mirage isn't quite even in my top 5 favorite Fleetwood Mac albums I would be happy to buy a remaster which it needs pretty badly.I did attend the filmed Forum shows for the tour so the era has some great memories for me ..plus I think Stevie was at her most beautiful during that time.

I've just noticed by sheer coincidence that the Hold Me video shoot that you posted was filmed 30 years ago to the day - 24th June 1982.

Holy crap.Time flies by.I love this album .

With Gypsy, Mirage became the reason I am a Fleetwood Mac fan. However it was after listening Rumours and Tusk entirely, that I always felt something was missing in this album, though I'm not sure what. Anyway it's still...
My favorite album cover
My favorite video clips (well, actually only Tango and Mirage got produced videos as in the MTV classic era, I mean with this lineup).
My favorite single (Gypsy)
My favorite penguin icon (the french!)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6...rxto1_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6...rxto1_1280.jpg

30 years ago I was listening to Gypsy about 45 times a day.

And the video! Amazing.

I remember thinking, I love about half of this record more than the other Mac albums I've heard (Tusk, Rumours) but think the other half of it is crap. I still feel pretty much the same way--only now I'm tipping a little more towards loving slightly more than half of it.

This is one of the best band pics ever. I wish it were the cover of the album.

Yes, I had the other silhouette as my screensaver for a long time. Love it.

Generally speaking in pictures, I always am enamored when you can see someone's personality traits without actually seeing their face. So, if you have a photo of someone in shadow or you take it from the back and you can still tell something about them from their body language that really gets to me.

With these 2 silhouettes, I think we see something about each band member individually and collectively and it really moves me.

Michele

My favorite FM album cover is Mirage. I love the album! It's hard to believe sometimes that 1982 can be 30 years ago!

I love this pic too...always have.


But I am completely kooky-obsessed with this one, always have:
http://www.animaki.com/bild_skivor/f...holdme7_fr.jpg

I think it was a very nice rendering by Lindsey and I like to imagine what it says about his view of the band. In fact, it's something that more people should ask him to sign in concert.

Michele

Gypsy
 

Its interesting to me how much of an impact "Gypsy" seemed to have on Mac fans at the time. It's one of those songs where the eventual impact of it has made it a bigger "hit" than it actually was at the time. I bet most people would assume "Gypsy" was a top 10 hit, but it actually did worse chart-wise than "Rhiannon", "Dreams", or "Sara" had.

You are totally right about this. I will add, however, that even back then I was surprised that "Gypsy" didn't make the Top 10 because I heard it on the radio ALL THE TIME, and of course MTV loved the video. Maybe the Vegas radio stations just had their own little love affair with Stevie, because as often as I heard "If Anyone Falls" and "Nightbird" the following year, I thought both of them would have charted higher as well.

I feel like so many (regular) people know Gypsy (even people that weren't alive at the time, aka my generation) and I hear so many non-hardcore FM fans say it's their favorite song. Weird it happens like that, despite it not being necessarily a total chart-topper.

Music video plays don't have anything to do with chart numbers, do they? That might have something to do with it, because it still would expose a lot of people to the song.

Gypsy played constantly on both radio & MTV at that time in OZ, Im pretty sure that was the only song that got airplay from Mirage... Straight Back should of been the next single released imo:thumbsup:

Thank you for this pic, Sanne! I didn't have it! :xoxo:
Chris is too beautiful in this photo session. And in 1982 she was breathtaking (she had begun to "breathe again" after what she had suffered from the previous three years)

Happy 30th Birthday, Mirage! This album is almost as old as me :D
I love all the songs in it, but my favs are Hold me and Gypsy. And I still can't believe that when the Mirage tour ended, I was..uh...somewhere in the air. So this album for me is very special. Thanks, Fleetwood Mac ;)

I think it's largely that five-tone pattern that Lindsey wrote and played. It's a powerful hook in that it gets inside your head and stays there for the rest of your life.

The Oriental Five-Tone phase Lindsey is in on Tango in the Night started back in 1981 with Gypsy.

Yep, it really is infectious.

Gotta love that pentatonic. :lol:

Hold Me received a lot of airplay in the States. Straight Back was, is and will always be my favorite song on the album but it was only fair to release a song by Lindsey next. It's a shame it turned out to be Oh Diane. That song destroyed the momentum of the wave the group was riding on at that time. I know some Ledgies like that song, though I particularly thought EOTW would have been a better choice. That was the one they performed in concert as well.

I'm not sure if here in Italy "Gypsy" was well known as in the US (and UK), but I'm sure MTV and italian radio stations often aired it in 1982/1983. Maybe my mum remembers this song (she remembers "Dreams"!):woohoo:

When you put it like that, I wonder what Lindsey thought should be his single. He may have been thinking EOTW too. Maybe he thought that was his GYOW. I know he made wry comments about the record companies choosing Did You Miss Me as his single recently. Maybe he felt that way about Oh Diane as well. He certainly was never interested in playing Diane in concert.

Michele

I just wanted to create it today, but I format my laptop and had to reinstall Photoshop, so I add it now..

http://s6.imagestime.com/out.php/i737674_30thmirage.jpg

Definitely agree Oh Diane was a poor choice for a follow up single, even though i would like to believe Lindsey perhaps wrote that song after i meet him on the bus that day.LOL:thumbsup:
regards
Di;)

Was "Oh Diane" released as a single in the U.S. or only overseas?

It was the fourth single in the US. but flopped here and made the UK top 10..go figure.

Yes, plus the sparkling guitar solo at the end.

Many loathe Oh Diane. I'm one of them. But I can see why it was released as a single in the UK in the early 80s. It resembles The Kinks' "Come Dancing," which was also a big hit in the UK at that time. Other UK groups were coming out with 50s send ups. It was oddly marketable at that particular time.

Regarding any other possible Lindsey singles from Mirage, I suppose "Book of Love" would have been the most potentially radio friendly song. Eyes of the World is, I think, his best, but it was too "hard" for pop and too quirky for rock stations. Goodbye Angel would have made a decent single.

But nothing on Mirage is as commercially viable as Trouble from Law and Order.

This is what Mick wrote in his book about the Mirage...

We arrived as the sun was rising on the day we were to actually begin recording. As we drove down the sixteenth-century chateau's long tree-lined lane, Richard and I marveled that no sooner had we laid the whole African chapter to rest that it was time to begin yet another era, with scarcely pause for breath. We pulled up into the drive, looked up, and saw Stevie Nicks peering out of the ancient leaded-glass window of the chateau, looking like Queen Guinevere in the misty early light. It was as if she were waiting for us, being the dawn-type lady that she is.

....
It turned out that the writers had some splendid new music together, and recording was fun. Le Chateau, the "Honky Chateau" of Elton John fame, was a muchfavored studio of Euro-rock aristocracy private, very red mantle, with great food and stupendous ambience. (We had it redecorated for the girls, spending the usual pile.) Plus it wasn't too far from Paris. So into Paris I'd go, with our crew member Dennis Keen. One morning on the way back from one of these forays, we passed a stable and I decided I had to ride the remaining distance to the chateau through the ancient fog-shrouded countryside. So I got this big grey mare, took a long pull from my everpresent silver flask of good cognac, and rode home, and then right up the stone steps of the house's main entrance. Quelle scandale! Amidst a grand to-do, Stevie swept down the big staircase, leapt on the back of my horse, and cantered off through the greening orchards, her long cape billowing behind her.

Mirage, the album we recorded in France, was an attempt to get into the Rumours groove again, but updated. Chris's songs, especially "Hold Me," reflected her bit tersweet reflections on her relationship with D ennis Wilson, which had almost resulted in marriage but had ended instead the previous December, when Dennis had moved out of Chris's house and her life. ..... "Hold Me" was a great song, and became the first hit single of the new album.

Stevie's songs including the utterly majestic "Gypsy" were what she had saved for us after recording her first album, Bella Donna, which was about to sell ten million copies and make Miss Nicks the Queen of Rock. Some leftover! "Gypsy" is one of Fleetwood Mac's greatest works of art; for me it really crystallises that whole period of the early 1980s, when we were in our mid-thirties and beginning to look back on our lost youth.

Lindsey Buckingham had also been recording a solo project, which became the Law and Order album. He arrived in France with two good songs, "Can't Go Back" and "Eyes of the World. " Three others, "Book of Love," "Empire State," and "Oh Diane," were written with Richard Dashut at the chateau and in the three other studios in L.A. where Mirage was wrapped up over the next seven months. Tired of being typecast as the archetypal northern California hippie, Lindsey had now veered from his New Wave sound into a 1955 Eddie Cochrane rock and roll feel. (I remember some semitense conversations on musical direction in this era, as Lindsey still felt that I blamed him for the relatively weak sales of Tusk. I thought we should do what we do best, and insisted on doing this album as a band. This time, the whole band played on almost every track; then Chris, Lindsey, and I spent months in the studio, overdubbing in typical Fleetwood Mac fashion.)

Wow, amazing quotes, Gracias Villavic!!
As Mick said, Gypsy is one of the most beautiful marvels of Fleetwood Mac, even if we're talking about the 70s, the 80s or even the 90s of the band...
Was Stevie keeping the song specially for the new album, or was there any chance to include it before on Bella Donna?

Hold Me was quickly a hit, but as I know Gypsy, maybe the most popular song of Mirage over here, I thought it was the second hit...and Lindsey's songs?? :shrug:

Thanks to Eddie Cochrane and all the things Lindsey used to change his style!! All his songs in Mirage are amazing!! (yes, Empire State too!). But, I'm not convinced with the idea that Lindsey's only hit was Oh Diane. So, why he only played Eyes of the World??

Regards!

You might find it interesting that Don't Stop was rarely performed on the Rumours Tour but always performed on the Tusk Tour. When the Mac were in rehearsals for the Mirage Tour, Oh Diane wasn't even known as a possible single at that point. I don't know this as fact but it sounds good when typed.:nod:

Actually in an interview a few weeks before Mirage was released it was either in Rolling Stone or RS off the record ,Lindsey when asked about Mirage stated that Christine had some well crafted songs on there and one of mine is very commerical ,very Beach Boys so at least in his mind it was going to be a single.The reason I likely recall the interview verbatim though is because he didn't say a mumbling word about any of Stevie's Mirage songs.

I actually very much like Oh Diane, always have. I also prefer the Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits UK/European CD better than the US, as it includes Oh Diane and Seven Wonders. Sure the UK version dropped Over My Head, but easily added to the Playlist. :thumbsup:

Back in 1982.. the only Lindsey song from Mirage I remember they played in (peruvian) radios was... Oh D.. NO! It was.. Eyes of t... NO!

It was "Can't Go Back"

I agree