Though Stevie Nicks has only now called time on Fleetwood Mac – there’s no point in continuing after the death of Christine McVie, she told Vulture – this is a band that has been on the brink of ending for more than 50 years. They might have called it a day when their leader, Peter Green, left in 1970. Or when their sublime guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan left in 1971 and 1972. Or when the group’s three main writers – Nicks, McVie and Lindsey Buckingham – wanted to pursue solo work in the early 80s. Or when Buckingham left for the first time in 1987. Or when McVie departed in 1998. Or when Buckingham was sacked in 2018. But every time they found a reason to carry on.
“Hey,” wrote Steve Albini in the sleeve notes to his group Big Black’s final album in 1987, “breaking up is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups, sometimes to the wrong ones.” That sentence – written as a fan as much as a musician – captures the tension between the observer, who wants their favourite musician to leave a perfect legacy, and the performer, for whom making records and touring is their job – the thing that puts food on the table and is often the only thing they actually know how to do.
For musicians, the right time to take their bow isn’t when the albums aren’t as good as the ones that made their name, or when the lineup on stage has only a tenuous connection to the one that found fame. It’s not even when the crowds have thinned, and the only people coming are the fans who can forgive anything. It’s when the members no longer get anything – financially or emotionally – from the experience of being in that band.
Fleetwood Mac, one suspects, long since achieved financial security (though Mick Fleetwood, their drummer, says he has “lost count” of how many times he has been declared bankrupt). Their ending has come about because without McVie, they evidently feel some vital part of the heart of the group has disappeared. As a fan, I’d have preferred them to have called it a day when they decided they could no longer play with Buckingham. It’s not that I blame them for that decision; if the many accounts of Buckingham’s abusive and controlling behaviour towards Nicks are to be relied upon, it’s a miracle they put up with him as long as they did.
But the idea of Fleetwood Mac since their 1977 album, Rumours, had been built on the contrast between Buckingham’s barely contained rage and Nicks’ gauzy mystery, and the legend of their past relationship. Without Buckingham singing them, his songs just became very good pop songs. Their 2018 tour without him felt like high-class karaoke.
Sometimes it appears as though a band should split, and it turns out they shouldn’t. In 2016, after Brian Johnson left AC/DC (he has since returned), I wrote that the band should end it now. They then toured with Axl Rose replacing Johnson, and they were the most thrilling shows I had seen from the band in years. I didn’t really see how Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band could do without Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, but Springsteen’s shows never let up in their brilliance (though it took three horn players to replace Clemons).
I can offer a long list of bands whose legacies would, in my view at least, be perfect if only they had split up long before they did, but that’s not my call to make. And sometimes I’d have been depriving myself. Had the Ramones, plainly the greatest band in pop history, ended after their perfect first three albums, rather than continue to do the same thing a little less well with each successive record, I would never have got to see them play live, and my life would be poorer. And the band would probably have not forged their legend to the point that you still see kids wearing Ramones T-shirts on the street.
The groups that have been able to split at the perfect time tend to be the very few where the option of a second act is open: Big Black ended at the perfect time (their guitarist Santiago Durango went to law school), and Albini became a hugely respected audio engineer and producer, and formed another fantastic group, Shellac. But as in all cases, you can go back to the group who did everything first: the Beatles. They split at the peak of their fame, with the downward slope of their collective creativity just heaving into view, but before they had started careering down it.
Of course, they were the Beatles. They knew that whatever came next, the world would lap it up, which is not a luxury open to most groups. So I can be more forgiving than Albini: yes, breaking up is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups. But then again, walking out of one’s job isn’t an easy thing to do, is it?
Michael Hann is a freelance writer, and former music editor of the Guardian
