Little Lies 35 Years Ago

[aleuzzi]

Originally Posted by David

I think we tend to assume that the widespread interest in the people in the band was always an interest in whether those romantic relationships were crumbling. That grouping of Mac was interesting as a configuration of people and personalities. Even if they had all been happily married, they would have connected with the public more as people than, say, the Eagles or Jethro Tull or Heart (whose lead singers were beloved but whose bandmates were nondescript as personalities). But Mac decided to feed the press romantic problems for years and kept that angle alive. Some of the savvier writers starting in about 1980 even started rhetorically asking readers why Lindsey and Stevie hadn’t quit talking about each other in that way because it was several years later (see the New Musical Express writer in the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac, published in 2016).

In my own case, apart from trying to find little romantic “clues” in the songs, I never cared much about the breakups or even thought the breakups made for a fascinating perspective on how the band could keep working together. But I did very much always glom on to the five people because I thought they were all very attractive and very odd, and I loved hearing them talk about things or the character-driven way they looked. There was charisma in the five of them splayed out on a page spread in a rock magazine. It can’t be articulated or quantified all that successfully. (It’s like the much older question of what made a movie star a star.) If I had hated their music in 1978, I still would have found them unusual and attractive in a magazine or onstage. I think lots of people had that reaction to Fleetwood Mac, too.

Yes. It’s hard to find a band shot of them all together that isn’t compelling. I remember watching the Little Lies video and feeling some annoyance that they weren’t all together in one space—but then that 2-second moment at the climax of the video when they are (and Christine isn’t wearing that silly hat) was so exciting. All of the features or characteristics that make any individual member annoying or bland or ridiculous somehow becomes attractive or enticing when all five of them are in the same space.