35 Years Ago Today: Fleetwood Mac Comes Back With ‘Tango In The Night’

It was 35 years ago today (April 13th, 1987) that Fleetwood Mac released their first new studio set in five years, Tango In The Night. The album peaked at Number Seven and spent a whopping seven months in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 album chart.

Tango In The Night, which is the band's second biggest selling album — following 1977's Rumours — and spawned four hit singles “Little Lies” (#4), “Big Love” (#5), “Everywhere” (#14), and “Seven Wonders” (#19). The album, which topped the charts in the UK, has since sold over seven million copies worldwide.

Lindsey Buckingham recalled that during the time of Tango In The Night, the creative process was literally the opposite way around for him and the band: “The Tango In The Night album has tracks on it that were the beginnings of my third solo record. And I started that, and the group sort of moved in and said, 'Hey, we gotta do this.' So, the song 'Big Love' switched gears and got into the group thing. There was more than one time when I was tempted to sort of go out and leave the group — but it's like anything else; you have to check your own impulses and make sure that you're really doing the right thing and you're ready for it.”

Buckingham famously quit the band just prior to the Tango In The Night tour and explained to us that it had gotten to the point where he had to submerge too much of his creativity to keep the commercial continuity of the band in motion: “In '87, you had a working atmosphere that could not really be called 'creative' — I mean, everyone was so zonked out, for one thing — and there was very little unity. Somebody had to make up for the lack of what should have been happening more naturally as a band, and wasn't. It was really a challenge just getting anything to happen.”

2017 saw the releases of deluxe and expanded editions of Tango In The Night. Both versions include a disc of rare recordings — including unreleased gems like the alternate version of “Mystified,” a demo for the album's title song, plus the rare B-sides: “Down Endless Street” and “Ricky.” Also included is a third disc that compiles more than a dozen 12-inch mixes. Dub versions of “Seven Wonders” and “Everywhere” are featured along with an extended version of “Little Lies” remixed by John “Jellybean” Benitez.

The collection also comes with a DVD featuring videos for five singles: “Big Love,” “Seven Wonders,” “Little Lies,” “Family Man,” and “Everywhere” — with the deluxe edition including Tango In The Night as a 180-gram vinyl LP.