Rumours ()

This album just IS mid seventies Coastal music. Be that coast California or Croatia, Clearwater or Rio de Janeiro. The sixties had the Beach Boys, they made you feel the palm trees and the warm sun, the tanned girls and the freedom just by the songs they created and the way they sang them. Fleetwood Mac - in Rumours - were the seventies Beach Boys. The whole feel of the freedom, love and honesty the band managed to encapsulate on the vinyl made our lives better. I dare you to stay depressed when listening to something like Don't Stop! It's Up'ness is so totally infectious. You can very easily imagine yourself at the wheel of some sports car spinning along in the sun without a care in the world while you listen to song after song of sheer happiness.

The billboard and poster advertising in the UK for the album had pictures of very staid looking establishment types with - apparently despite themselves - beatific smiles as they listened to the album on headphones. The caption was Everyone listens to Rumours'. Everyone did! It's still an outstanding collection of classic absolutely CLASSIC rock songs. This is what FM radio was invented for. Rumours did for the seventies music scene what MTV - and via it Dire Straights - did for the eighties, it gave a definition, a shape to the culture. When years afterwards I read of how the band had been fracturing at the time into it's constituent pieces of Fleetwood and McVie, (a single unit), and the rest of the personnel it almost makes me believe that there must be a divine being whos one purpose was to ensure the time was punctuated by musical brilliance.
This album should be made compulsory listening. Its a defining, seminal moment in modern musical culture.