British Tango

[michelej1]

[After Yahoo searching to see that they weren't elsewhere online, I am uploading some UK articles]

Sunday Times (UK), May 15, 1988

Arts (Music): A no-frills harvest of soft rock - Fleetwood Mac (585)
By ROBERT SANDALL

WHEN the veteran soft-rockers Fleetwood Mac released their 18th album, Tango in the Night, more than a year ago, pundits and industry alike conspired to treat it as a complete non-event. Here, surely, was another band that was dead but wouldn't lie down.

Since the glory days of their 1977 classic collection, Rumours, a 20m-selling global smash, the Fleetwood Mac story had gradually degenerated into a Californian morality tale of squandered wealth, tangled relationships, and visits to drug clinics. Sales of their previous album, Mirage, had been disappointing, and that was way back in 1982. The consensus prior to last April was that Fleetwood Mac had probably broken up and just not told anyone.

Tango in the Night, a competent unambitious reworking of their old sun-drenched harmonies formula, has since become the major surprise of the past year. Never out of the British Top 30 albums chart, currently back at number one and with sales now galloping up to the 1.5m mark, it has seen off a great deal of highly rated, younger and more stylish opposition.

The scale of the group's success stands principally as a testimony to the fact that pop is really not the musical jamboree for fashion-conscious under-30s that it is so often taken to be. There are many record-buyers out there who know what they like: a nice sentimental tune, a toe-tapping beat, the odd instrumental solo perhaps, for variety's sake really, and nothing too tricky or ironical in the way of presentation. And, to the despair of most critics, Fleetwood Mac amply fulfils all these modest requirements.

Their first British concert tour for eight years arrived at Birmingham's NEC on Thursday night. For the uncommitted observer, the main point of interest centred on how a band which has never been able to hang on to any of its guitarists would deal with the recent departure of Lindsay Buckingham, who wrote most and sang a lot of Tango in the Night.

For the rest of the audience there was nothing to prove. This was a victory parade, unhindered by the fact that one of Buckingham's two replacements, Billy Burnette, has a snarl of a voice which quite ruined their best song, the finale number Go Your Own Way.

Perhaps most interesting was the way that Fleetwood Mac - an Anglo-American pop operation for most of their 21 years - paid such respect to their long-obscured roots as pioneers of the British blues revival of the late 1960s. Their two bleached-blonde female vocalists actually left the stage at one point so that there of the boys could boogie through Stop Messin's Around.

More generally surprising was the band's awkwardness with the audience: Christine McVie would keep calling us 'Birmingham' from behind her keyboards as if she couldn't quite believe we and they were really there; and she thanked the adoring crowed so often and so incredulously at the end that you wondered whether she had seen any of her British chart placings recently.