RAMBLE ON: Fleetwood Mac's "Isn't It Midnight?"

I didn’t really like Christine.

If you’d asked me which Fleetwood Mac member was my favorite, I think I’d probably say Lindsey. I remember being knocked the fuck out the first time I heard “Go Your Own Way”; I’d never heard a guitar sound like it was in physical pain before. And of course Stevie Nicks was the star, the focus puller, the personality, the best songwriter. The first Fleetwood Mac song I knew and loved was the same one most of their fans knew, “Rhiannon,” the one that would define her witchy image forever. And of course, once I got into Rock Band, I learned to really appreciate a good rhythm section, and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood were one of the best. (“Go Your Own Way” doesn’t seem like it’d be so hard on drums! But it is! Very unique stuff going on in that song. “Dreams” is Stevie’s finest moment but it wouldn’t be half the song it is without that perfect groove from John and Mick.)

By contrast, I couldn’t get into Christine McVie. Didn’t really like her voice, didn’t really like her songs; “Don’t Stop,” “Say You Love Me,” “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” too corny for me, all of them. They didn’t have Lindsay’s edge or Stevie’s witchy mystery; it seemed wrong that one of the band’s three main songwriters was so… normal. Just sitting there behind her piano, singing with her AM easy listening voice… there was just something just flatly uncool about Christine McVie that I just could not vibe with.

I had two Fleetwood Mac albums, the two really beloved ones, Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. It would be a long long time before I heard Tango in the Night, the fifth and final album from Fleetwood Mac’s superstar-era lineup. Even by Fleetwood Mac standards, Tango in the Night was apparently a tortured affair; it wasn’t even supposed to be a Fleetwood Mac album, but Mick convinced Lindsay Buckingham that his planned solo album would make a lot more money with the band. It must have been meant to make a lot of money, because it certainly sounds expensive.

The late ‘80s were a ruinous time for classic rock acts. Not necessarily commercially – many of these records sold in buckets – but certainly artistically (and worse, aesthetically). By this point the old guard had begun relying on (or were forced to use) outside songwriters, and layering their songs in up-to-date production like synths and gated drums. Almost all of these records sound like shit now, and were disavowed by their artists once the ‘80s were over, and even if things turned out well, it felt wrong. Heart scored several giant hits after their mid-‘80s comeback that are still loved today, but they had to become a viscerally different act to do it – barely a band at all, singing songs they didn’t write played by musicians who were not members of Heart. Fleetwood Mac walked into that zeitgeist still carrying some semblance of integrity – lineup still intact, all writing their own songs – but the times still took a toll on them. Like so many veteran bands trying to carry on in the glam ‘80s, they sound completely disconnected; the music doesn’t sound like any of the members were in the same studio in the same time (which in this case was often the case; Stevie Nicks was in and out, preoccupied with her solo record and substance abuse treatment). Fractiousness was always part of the Fleetwood Mac story, but it hadn’t been a problem before – “The Chain,” stitched together from three different songs that didn’t pan out, is their most cohesive song. Here, you can very much hear studio razzle-dazzle before you hear anything human.

So it’s some kind of miracle that Tango in the Night sounds fucking amazing. Lindsay Buckingham put everything into it as a producer; where so many of the synths of that era sound gloopy and tacky now, they sound absolutely perfect here. Even more impressively, they don’t sound like anything else going on – not the new wave that launched these sounds nor the adult contemporary that shitted up the charts at the time. But the biggest revelation, for me at least, was Christine. Christine fucking owns that record. The album’s two biggest hits from it, “Little Lies” and “Everywhere,” were both Christine’s (and for my money “Little Lies” is Christine’s finest moment period). “Isn’t It Midnight?”, meanwhile, was the forgotten sixth and final single, the last glimpse of the classic band before they started shedding members and headed into their flop-and-reunion-tours legacy years. It should have been a bigger song. “Isn’t It Midnight?” cooks.

The music video, as per a late single for a big album, is just live concert footage. It fits here though; “Isn’t It Midnight?” is the closest that Fleetwood Mac ’87 sounds to a real band. The guitar riff drives, the drums lock in a groove with it rather than booming over top. This is surely the hardest song in Christine’s catalog. Then the synths kick in. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” sings Christine, and then a male voice (Lindsey?) repeats it, speaking rather than singing. It’s faintly ridiculous but in the good way. The fact that they don’t sound like a physical band works in their favor, turning the sound into a magical unreality; it evokes a specific brand of ‘80s fantasy heavy on orbs and unicorns and pink fog. Stevie had always been the mystical one, but something about Buckingham’s production unlocks Christine, makes her voice smoky and dreamlike. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” doesn’t sound like a forgotten lover’s lament; it sounds like the key to unlocking a magic spell of some kind. Or maybe it’s the fact that this is the one song of her that remains in a minor key; “Isn’t It Midnight?” finally makes me understand why Christine is a member of this band, delivers all of the things I love about Fleetwood Mac, the passion, the mystique, the drama.

The song finishes with a minute and a half of shredding from Lindsey. Lindsey was the first to leave. Fleetwood Mac would soldier on with various lineups, do reunion tours, have a revival after Bill Clinton used “Don’t Stop” as a campaign theme. People don’t remember this (including me; I was shocked to discover this) but in the ‘90s Fleetwood Mac were actually pretty uncool, a dinosaur act not particularly loved by critics, a mega-seller pop act like ABBA and the Bee Gees, still well-remembered but not necessarily well-respected. The Simpsons listed them alongside “Disco Duck” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” as dated kitsch from Homer and Marge’s youth. Somewhere along the way, around the late ‘90s, their reputation went from something similar to The Eagles – soft-rockers begrudgingly admitted by critics into the rock canon – to the coolest band that ever existed. That glamour mostly applies to their ‘70s output and Stevie’s solo hits, but when Christine died in 2022, Tango in the Night is the record I reached for instinctively. At the time “Everywhere” was everywhere, thanks to a persistent car commercial, but “Isn’t It Midnight?” still leaps out to me as the standout, and it hit me harder as a eulogy for Christine. Do you remember the face of a pretty girl? I do now.