Vinyl Wednesday: Tango in the Night

Fleetwood Mac

Welcome back to Vinyl Wednesday! I said I’d be talking about an older album this week, and I’m keeping that promise with Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album, Tango in the Night.

Guys? This is a solid-ass album. Like, really. It’s super of-its-time, but if we’ve learned anything from television lately it’s that the eighties are back and we love them. Fleetwood Mac’s 14th studio album and a follow-up to 1982’s Mirage, it was released a full 10 years after their smash hit and best-known release Rumours (colloquially known as ‘the one where they were all cheating on each other’) and went on to become their second highest-selling record. It spawned no fewer than six singles, many of which still receive regular airplay. It also features significant songwriting contributions from Christine McVie, who, despite her induction into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 as part of the band and a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music remains, in my opinion, one of the most underrated songwriters in the popular music canon (I mean, the lady wrote Songbird).

Let’s back up a bit, though, and talk about Fleetwood Mac. Originally formed in 1967, the band’s lineup has changed over the years (and continuing into the present with the recent firing of longtime guitarist and songwriter Lindsey Buckingham). The original lineup consisted of Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and John McVie. Christine McVie (married at the time to bassist John McVie) officially joined in 1970, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined in 1974 after a number of other lineup changes. At this point the band consisted of Fleetwood, both McVies, Buckingham, and Nicks, and stayed consistent until the late eighties, with a full reunion in the nineties and various comings-and-goings over the subsequent decades. I mean, things happen over the course of 52 years.

Anyway, back to Tango. The album opens with the intriguing Big Love, penned and sung by the raspy-voiced Buckingham, followed by Nicks’ Seven Wonders, which these days is probably most closely associated with Nicks’ appearance and performance of it on American Horror Story: Coven. The third track is McVie’s Everywhere (and oh my goodness, check out the music video for the most delightfully eighties dramatization of The Highwayman), which is up there with Don’t Stop in terms of universally recognizable Fleetwood Mac songs. One of the things I really like about Fleetwood Mac is how they utilize their entire lineup. Band members contribute songs both individually and collaboratively, and generally sing their own material. There is no defined lead singer (not even Nicks, although her voice is certainly the most distinctive and she remains arguably the most iconic member of the band), and vocals are generally performed by either Buckingham, Christine McVie or Nicks, with Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass.

You can’t really talk about Tango in the Night without mentioning the album cover. While maybe not as instantly recognizable as Rumours‘ iconic photograph of Nicks and Fleetwood, it certainly stands out as one of the band’s better-known covers. Painted by Australian artist Brett Livingstone Strong, who is best known for his depictions of celebrities (including, famously, Michael Jackson), it is officially titled ‘Homage à Henri Rousseau’, and the influence of the French post-impressionist is obvious, but with a particularly eighties sensibility. It looks like it would be equally at home airbrushed onto the side of a van as painted onto canvas, lush and kitschy and complete with sparkly lens-flares and a tiny UFO and a host of African animals and a macaroni penguin because John McVie loves penguins (a 1973 album is titled Penguin, and they sometimes feature as a band mascot). I remember my dad having a copy of Tango on cassette tape in one of his desk drawers when I was growing up, and always being fascinated by the artwork (I don’t know why I never actually played the cassette).

Rounding out the album B-side are Christine McVie’s Little Lies and Isn’t it Midnight, Buckingham’s Family Man, and Nicks’ Welcome to the Room… Sara. Buckingham did most of the album production himself in his home studio in LA, making use of some of the newer recording technology available at the time. The result is a soundtrack full of synth and shimmers and little sparkly flourishes that produce an overall dreamy effect. Looking back on the recording experience 26 years later, Buckingham described it as one of the worst of his life. The band was again plagued by internal conflict during that period, and Buckingham left for the first time later that year after an altercation with Nicks. I think Fleetwood Mac remains one of the most enduring examples of the idea that art is chaos, but from chaos comes art; proof that you can fight like crazy and do a ton of drugs and still produce iconic records that one day some lady in her late 20s will pick up at a second hand store because she’s just gotten into vinyl and she remembers the album cover from her dad’s desk drawer. There are worse legacies, I think.

If you’d like to listen to Tango in the Night in its entirety, you can check it out on Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play. The band also released a remastered version in 2017, which you can find on vinyl here. That’s all for this week! I’ll be back next Wednesday with another album. Until then, be nice to your bandmates and don’t do cocaine.

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