Cunningham Bird

Buckingham Nicks

Lindsey met Stevie in 1966, long before the pair of them were invited to join Fleetwood Mac. They were at high school in Atherton, California, Stevie in the year above Lindsey.. Later they attended college together, played in a band together, lived together, wrote songs together, recorded demos together. Stevie waitressed and cleaned houses while Lindsey practiced his guitar. (I know, I know…) Eventually, there was a breakthrough. They were signed to Polydor and invited to record an album, with a decent budget. Stevie spent a lot of the money she had on a white shirt for the cover shoot. To her distress, she was persuaded to remove it. (I KNOW.) The album was released, not promoted, and bombed. It was then deleted from the backlist, and has remained unavailable ever since, although you can hear it on YouTube.

There are a couple of bootlegs of the tour with which they supported the album, and of the complete demos; they had a bunch of songs that weren’t included on the record. One was called ‘Rhiannon’, another ‘I Don’t Want To Know’, another ‘Monday Morning’. After the record failed, Stevie went back to the day jobs.

Mick Fleetwood heard the album being played through the speakers at a recording studio. He liked the guitar, and offered Lindsey a gig in Fleetwood Mac. He refused to accept it unless Stevie was allowed to join, even though their relationship was already rocky by that point. She was waitressing on the day she met Fleetwood. Fleetwood Mac, the album they made together, was the band’s tenth release. It’s difficult to know what it would have sounded like, or consisted of, without the contributions of the two new recruits, who were still there in the twenty-first century.

And now, cleverly, the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird, who was born the year the Buckingham Nicks album was released, and the singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham, born thirty years after Stevie and Lindsey met, have covered the album in its entirety, and I keep playing it. Bird and Cunningham weren’t even tempted to ditch the two instrumentals that featured on the original.

I was twenty when Rumours was released, and I couldn’t have been less interested. It was 1977 and I was too busy with punk rock, with the Buzzcocks and the Clash and the Jam. They don’t get much of a look-in these days, but I have come to appreciate the songwriting and harmonies of Fleetwood Mac, especially the songwriting and harmonies of Buckingham and Nicks, more and more with each passing year. What a treat, then, to get what feels like a new batch of their songs, interpreted with respect, taste and wonderful musicianship. And the cover art is a lot more tasteful.