Tango in the Night POLL (Fleetwood Mac)

this is hard. i'm definitely not voting for "welcome to the room... sara"

Great idea for a poll...

This is such a strange album: of its time yet so determined NOT to be, thanks to Buckingham. It's not as consistent as Mirage, but Tango contains little El Lay studio-pop residue. Quite top-heavy too: are any of the album tracks as strong as the singles? Nicks' tracks, "Seven Wonders" excepted (mostly cuz of the synth-chime hook) are her worst ever. "Caroline" and the title track aren't anything more than catchphrases and excuses for Lindsay to shred.

Anyway, my vote is for "Little Lies," a fully deserved huge hit that manages to sound contemporary and deeply weird.

It's also an oddity in that, for the first time since Rumours, no one singing/songwriting member had an edge on any of the others, and all the singles (I think, at least) far surpass any that came from Mirage.

(note: I actually like all the Nicks tracks on this album)

"caroline" is amazing tribal-pop, how can you deny those drums! sounds like lindsay had been listening to japan. also, christine's fake eastern chanting is gorgeous.

It's also an oddity in that, for the first time since Rumours, no one singing/songwriting member had an edge on any of the others, and all tihe singles (I think, at least) far surpass any that came from Mirage.

Post-Rumours, I've always thought they were equal!

Duds on Tusk: "Honey Hi" (McVie), "Angel" (Nicks), "I Know I'm Not Wrong" (Buckingham)

Duds on Mirage: "Straight Back" (Nicks), "Wish You Were Here" (McVie), "Empire State" (Buckingham).

I must say, "Welcome to the Room...Sara" (love the ellipsis) is a masterful arrangement saving a dull song. Luurve Christine's harmonies in the last third ("For Sc-a-a-r-l-e-e-e-t-t...") and Fleetwood's drums.

I wasn't talking about equality in duds, Alfred. Equality in peaks!

Buckingham kind of owned Tusk and Mirage, and Tango was the return of everyone having not only stellar singles, but also pretty good deeper cuts too.

oops! I keep forgetting to hit the BBcode button.

Alfred I can't believe you list the excellent "Empire State" rather than "Oh Diane" as Buckingham's dud on Mirage!

As for Tango in the Night, I've been very partial to "Isn't It Midnight" recently. After that I'd probably plump for "Caroline".

Couldn't vote for "Big Love" only because the live acoustic version is so much better.

"Seven Wonders" is Stevie's weakest big single and the album tracks are her weakest album tracks.

For feel, I love "Mystified" best--not the album's strongest song, but what a gorgeous sound. Between that, "Little Lies" and "Everywhere." (I guess on this particular album I like McVie's stuff the best.)

As for Tango in the Night, I've been very partial to "Isn't It Midnight" recently

I used to be, but there's a tension between Buckingham's raunchy valedictory solo and the programmed percussion and chimes that's never quite resolved.

tim mostly otm, but i like 'everywhere' best

Yes "Everywhere" is brilliant. I was very annoyed when someone made a swirly house-pop cover version, only because I felt they'd stolen my idea and not done as good a job with it as I would have done.

I should note that I find it odd when people say this album is more idiosyncratic than Mirage. I guess the production has that whole pristine rainforest feel to it, but Buckingham's songs are so much more straightforward than on Mirage, and he's even got that smooth 80s vocalist vibe going on. Surely the whole point of the album is that it unambiguously goes for the pop jugular?

Can't say I'm too partial to "Family Man", which feels like such a pointless wisp of a song, although the guitar bits are excellent.

"there's a tension between Buckingham's raunchy valedictory solo and the programmed percussion and chimes that's never quite resolved."

Ha ha this sounds like an argument for the song's greatness. But i think I particularly love the new wave sheen to Christine's vocals.

This was my first FM record. Took me more than a decade to get the others (read: classics). I honestly can't remember much from the album even though I did play it on repeat for weeks. Hmm.

Al-FRED. How could you possibly say I know I'm not wrong is a dud? The chorus alone is so elegant, the way it deflects the melody just a bit to the side instead of forcing a hook. And it works! Its the perfect new-wavey Beach Boys pastiche. Explain yourself please! (not too well though, I'd like to continue liking it!)

I suppose I can't, but of many fascinating Buckingham songs it's not my favorite. The introduction, for instance, reminds me too much of my beloved "Not That funny."

Also: when on earth are we getting remastered versions of this and Mirage? Anyone heard any of Tango's b-sides??

But they're sister songs, Not that funny has almost the same music and chorus and don't they both contain the "here comes the night time" bridge?

Yeah, I've never heard Mirage. Would kill to. But i've never even seen it for sale. I'm gonna have to amazon the thing soon.

"Little Lies". Do it for me. Honestly.

the b-side to "7 wonders" is a pretty cool instrumental, "book of miracles" i think it's called. sounds like christine wrote it. it's nice.

"Little Lies" is the best thing Fleetwood Mac did ever do. Thus, my pick is easy even though "Tango In The Night" had lots of strong tracks.

the b-side to "7 wonders" is a pretty cool instrumental, "book of miracles" i think it's called. sounds like christine wrote it. it's nice

Oooh!

At the moment I'm leaning towards Everywhere, it might be McVie's best ever, after Over & Over of course.

Lots of Lindsey being very Lindsey on the production as well.

About this album gets the same HDCD treatment their three late 70s albums got. It's better than all of them.

lolz

This may sound even better.

little lies

LULZ I'd forgotten how lame Lindsey's replacements were. xxp

Ha ha ha that Kids Inc. one is especially great since that's FERGIE.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

LULZ I'd forgotten how lame Lindsey's replacements were. xxp

Lindsey once said, "At least it took TWO guitarists to replace me, heh heh."

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

C.McVie pwns all.

The only surprise is how well "Welcome to the Room...Sara" did.

Correct winner :)

"Seven Wonders" got NO VOTES?!

Oh shit I forgot to actually vote for "Isn't It Midnight".

Seriously, seven people think "Welcome to the Room... Sara" is the best song on this album? Surely these people have not actually heard it and are just assuming any Stevie song with the name "Sara" in it must be good?

It is awful.

Shame to see "Family Man" getting no love.

just picked this up for £1 + i love it even more than i remembered but wtf at 7 votes for welcome to the room sara!?!!

2. "Seven Wonders" (Stewart, Nicks) – 3:38 0

This is one of the fuckedest things in the history of ILM polls.

otm

wtf at 7 votes for welcome to the room sara!?!!

The seven core members of ilm's Stevie stans, innit.

Yeah but what's weird is that it's the worst of her three songs on there. Voting for it seems terribly perverse.

exactly!! it cant just be abt stevie nicks fans

It's NOT worse than "When Will I See You"!

WASSA MADDA BABY....BABY...BAY-BEE....BABY!

ennyoooseeeeeiiiiwanyoooo rmphrumph

That second half, though! I read it was another Nicks scrap that Buck stapled. Beautiful.

y'all heard this? my god

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=558bIK_X1ZY

I totally became a Mac-obsessed 11year old at this point, thanks to the Big Love video and some really exploitative documentary that was on UK TV around the release of Tango, with its tales of guitarists going mad and multiple touring Macs... Picked up a cheap copy of that 1980 live album shortly afterwards and was in deep

I've not spent a lot of time with the Tango extras, I should but I wasn't hugely enamoured the first time I streamed em. Yeah, obviously a lot of those Nicks tracks were glued together from scraps on the factory floor - really skewed my nascent sense of what a song could/should be at an early age tbh. Maybe in a good way.

My favorite outtake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYCEWeD_4lg

I need to stream em again - I'm not home-schooling tomorrow so hopefully I'll get a chance then!

This was the other thing that ran on UK TV around this time and made me a pre-teen Mac devotee - absolute fire drama and intensity, Lindsey and Stevie look like they're spitting at each other during The Chain...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdolGLi0Ayg

I've seen that Mirage tour doc, and, yeah, they're uh jacked up on something

Jacked up on love, my friend.

Also, metric tonnes of cocaine.

Good Bucky demo of "Big Love" here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBSWt0b4K8E

One thing I like about it is for a split second he doesn't have the right effect or mix or whatever enacted, but he quickly switches what needs to be switched.

There are lots of revelatory Bucky talks Bucky clips out there. Like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCGKFY9NBZY

(Hilariously, he gets the time signature of his own virtuoso song wrong and has to be corrected!)

holy shit that acoustic Big Love is WILD

thrilled that that "big love" performance can still blow minds, as it did mine when i was 13 years old

I still stan for the original too, which sounded nothing like what I heard on the radio in early '87. The dance remix w/the house piano break is hot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJh72NlHlmc

Can someone mount a defense of “You and I Pt II”? I always kind of want this record to flicker out exhausted with “When I See You Again” - the closer feels tacked on and inappropriately jaunty to me, but I am no Mac expert so I am keen to know if it works in some way that I don’t understand.

Listen to it this way, with both parts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3SOOUtnJWg

Yeah the jauntiness of the second half makes more sense when it emerges out of the first half.

On the album it feels like an endearing but only partly successful attempt to recreate "Never Forget".

Ok I can totally see how the full version would work as a closer - but if I had to trim for time I would keep the first half for sure! I mean if they wanted a nothingy little ditty to finish the album on an up note that’d still work fine!

I am over invested apparently but for me this is a perfect sultry summer evening album and a masterpiece of mood and production as much as songwriting - but that last track always breaks the spell a little.

^agree with the last part. album is on a very short list of default throw-it-on-because-no-one-should-complain lists for me.

idk, that two-parter "You and I" sounds like a bad iteration of "No. 1 Song in Heaven." the two pieces don't fit right at the seams. that full version would've elevated the album, though.

LOVING the two part You & I, tbh

Really digging into extras on the deluxe reissue and damn if there is some good stuff. I have to wonder if Buckingham was on some Prince kick with all of his vocal moves throughout the material.

The subtle changes in the alternate version of “Mystified” have me feeling like that was the kind of sound ABBA would have been putting out if they’d stayed together.

"Little Lies" is such a perfectly constructed song abetted by sympathetic production that I never tire of it. I often think Nicks' nasally TELL ME LIIIES chorus backup vocal is the shrewdest, most moving of her Mac tenure.

Pretty sure huge hunks of the album were patched together with a Fairlight. I was blown away learning from the Replacements book that Jim Dickinson used a Fairlight to cobble together acceptable drum takes, and if even the Replacements were (unwittingly) using the Fairlight for that purpose there is no way that Bucky wasn't doing it the same way (and, coincidentally, the same year), especially given members of the Mac were as fucked up as the Mats (and Bucky, if he had his way, probably would have replaced them all with machines if he could have, anyway).

Agreed. The “Play in the Rain” section of the album especially popped into my head upon hearing the two parter version of “You and I”

Low quality bootleg camcorder recording of "Little Lies" from 1987. Sound quality dicey but comes off well

Better one from 90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxBP5CnRZwE

(tho obv no Lindsey on either)

Burnette/Vito sounds awful.

I want that Stevie cloak.

yeah they had big shoes to fill and they filled it with....oh u know

Reminds me that I've never checked out any footage from the Campbell/Finn tour. I'm really curious, because I can't imagine the addition of either of those guys ever making something worse.

OK, here's a full show (Little Lies slotted second in the setlist!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHmWxsGLNcU

Sounds fine, the biggest problem is that neither Neil nor Mike sound much like Bucky.

Admittedly, Nicks hasn't sounded much like herself for 35 years.

I have my own biases/tastes, but I've seen Fleetwood Mac minus Christine and they sounded great. I've seen Christine and Bucky tour together without the others and their take on Mac stuff sounded great. I've seen Bucky tour with his own band and he sounded great, too, Mac stuff included. As if it hadn't been demonstrated by his absence before, clearly Bucky as constant is pretty key to the Mac sound from S/T on, either by force of will or force of musical imagination.

Of course, I've seen Stevie solo a couple of times, too, and she was pretty good as well, but she doesn't need to lean *too* hard on the Mac stuff, given all her hits. Bucky sort of comes at it from a different perspective, rewarding people with some Mac stuff for putting up with all of his non-hits. Which admittedly are often pretty great, but he knows they're not substitutes, just alternatives.

Man, this quaalude mix of “Mystified” with Lindsey doing Mike Oldfield interludes in the guitar is p dope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=558bIK_X1ZY

i wish i'd grabbed the alt-Tango when it came out for RSD, it's £££s on the discogs now

10. "Isn't It Midnight" (McVie, Quintela, Buckingham) – 4:06 0

scandalous

God, I love "wassa madda baby"

― Ray Cooney as "Crotch" (stevie), Monday, January 25, 2021

Baby!

Baby!

Didn’t realise Quintela had credits on Isn’t It Midnight

“Isn’t it Midnight” is among the very best songs to ever be recorded by Fleetwood Mac. Unbelievable vocals and guitar

He does shred.

God, I love "wassa madda baby"

― Ray Cooney as "Crotch" (stevie), Monday, January 25, 2021

They actually snapped a photo of Stevie working on this track in the studio:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GkR4wATWsAAl7S0.jpg

BABY

still blows my mind that "little lies" won this poll it's like when "the macarena" or w/e would win pazz & jop

"Everywhere" is the one I'm sick of.

Here's another amazeballs Buckingham-McVie outtake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr4eRRd1v8g

still blows my mind that "little lies" won this poll it's like when "the macarena" or w/e would win pazz & jop

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, April 15, 2025 11:47 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Everywhere" is the one I'm sick of.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, April 15, 2025 11:54 AM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I hated these both at the time because I was dumb and they were all over the radio and MTV. Now I love them both. Bouncy and immaculate fun.

"everywhere" is my favourite but "little lies" is wonderful too. no votes for "seven wonders" is surprising

https://www.salon.com/2017/04/02/he-could-be-brash-he-could-be-harsh-he-was-very-motivated-the-real-story-behind-fleetwood-macs-tango-in-the-night/

i'd never read about how weird the recording process was before - buckingham was recording everything at half-speed and then overdubbing further takes of each part at different speeds. very unsurprising to hear that buckingham was very influenced by kate bush

I think he still uses super old digital reel to reel multi tracks literally no one else uses.