Credit: Far Out / Mick Fleetwood
Thu 13 August 2026 23:00, UK
Fleetwood Mac‘s 1987 album Tango In The Night came exactly one decade after Rumours. It was a record of complete difference, soundtracking the band on the slow decline, yet despite the stark change in quality, it was almost as if everything behind the scenes had stayed exactly the same.
Fleetwood Mac have always been a dramatic band, that much is for sure. Even in the days prior to Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s recruitment, they were operating in the face of turmoil. Their musical identity was constantly shifting to accommodate the ever-changing lineup of the band, and when they finally built the right band around their charismatic frontman, Peter Green, they had to start again when he had a drug-induced mental breakdown.
Then, of course, came the truly famed dramatic chapter of the band. Buckingham and Nicks joined the band and simultaneously folded their own personal drama into the songwriting to create what is now one of the most beloved albums of all time. Rumours was the soundtrack of a band falling apart yet growing stronger at the same time, forged by the success of their own toxicity.
Naturally, the only way to deal with such turmoil in the ‘70s was to turn to drugs. Cocaine became the unofficial sixth member of the band during the Rumours recording and continued on through the ‘80s, despite attempts to boot it out. Rumours never really resolved anything for the band and instead opened up their personal wounds further, making for a messy future ahead.
Fast forward a decade to the band’s record Tango In The Night, which represented some semblance of a return form, and it was a firm case of the more things changed, the more things stayed the same. The band were once again flying by the seat of their pants, balancing songwriting with drug taking at a breakneck speed, with the band’s founder, Mick Fleetwood, even claiming that they were doing more cocaine during the making of Tango In The Night than when they were recording Rumours.
“Actually, it was way worse on Tango In The Night, for sure,” Fleetwood admitted. That’s a pretty telling assessment from a band that used cocaine so much on Rumours that they were even considering crediting it on the liner notes.
Sadly, it was Nicks that Fleetwood named as the main culprit of the trend. Ever the victim in the Fleetwood Mac tales, Nicks was once again at the face of suffering while working on Tango In The Night, despite even trying to distance herself from recording.
Further reading: From The Vault
While Nicks contributed three songs to the album, it was rumoured that she was in the studio for only two to three weeks, in a bid to distance herself from the drama of the band. “She was not hugely present,” Fleetwood remembered. “I don’t remember why. And I don’t think we would remember – Stevie and me were nuts!”
While Tango In The Night may have sounded like a brief return to form, the tales of the studio confirm something that most music fans have believed since the release of Rumours. That, after the success of that seminal ‘77 album, maybe it would have been best for them to all have had their separate ways and free themselves of the pain that comes with being a Fleetwood Mac member.
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