Where do you actually begin with excess? Do you start with the 18 million albums sold with your second album proper? The mountains of cocaine? The Lear Jets? The pandemic of gossip and rumours spreading out from a spring of broken-hearts? Or do you start somewhere in-between all that, in the moments you catch yourself looking in the mirror first thing in the morning, when you’ve barely been able to tear yourself out of bed for fear that another day spent like the last one is likely to finish you off completely, and that the man looking back from the mirror is no longer a man you recognise? Those ‘splinter’ moments. Those little cuts in time when the damage spreads from the surface to someplace under the skin and lodges itself squarely in your conscience. It’s not that you can’t continue doing what you’re doing to yourself, it’s that you can’t continue to do it without it rupturing the remaining soft tissue around you. And like quicksand, it swallows you up. The more you try to pick the splinter out the deeper it goes. At this point any reaction, whether it’s to tear yourself away, or to continue, is a signal that you are still a part of the chain, and you’re locked in a circle of endless denials and in a spiral of concessions. It never dawns on you until it’s almost too late that, that all you have to do is stop reacting to everything that happened yesterday and to all the mania that helped you arrive at yesterday in the first place. To rebel or to comply: that is the question. Either way, you’re simply adjusting to the weight unevenly distributed by someone else. When you can get up and walk away and walk right back there just as easily; that’s when you know you’ve left the chain. That’s when the man in the mirror starts looking more like yourself again.
Lindsey Buckingham is no stranger to chains. As a member of Fleetwood Mac he’s been one of the most celebrated chains of the late 20th Century: a chain braced by love, betrayal, recrimination and forgiveness. And he’s similarly no stranger to excess. The man who turned the knobs 180 degrees on ‘Rumours’ with ‘Tusk’ is also the man who gave us glimpses of a Phil Spector Christmas in almost every song he crafted. Lindsey was the man who sprinkled copious amounts of magic dust over other people’s classics: ‘Gypsy’, ‘Rhiannon’, ‘Sara’, ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘Dreams’, ‘Everywhere’, ‘Seven Wonders’ – all bore those little incendiary layers of tweaks and doubling-up devices, those web-like vocal arrangements and those heavenly chiming guitars. He was the man who made (what is by fashion at least) fairly conservative music appear uniquely charged and vital. It wasn’t obvious to those who simply listened to the radio, or who had tuned-in (and turned-on) for Stevie Nicks, but it was apparent to the rest of us. When you scratched beneath the surface and the invisible threads of studio-trickery, there was a fiddling, studio maverick working tirelessly against the grain: someone who was putting a rather fanatical, perhaps even unbalanced, adult into oriented rock. Put it this way; if you ever wondered why in ‘87 you found yourself whistling along to tracks like ‘Everywhere’ and ‘Little Lies’ against your better judgement and the wishes of your cool friends, then it’s likely that you were responding to those classic ‘Lindsey’ devices, those little Velcro hooks that the sadly overlooked Buckingham had sunk into the mix: a mix that too was steeped in excess. Sometimes it was too many songs. Sometimes it was just too many things going on in the songs for any one pair of ears to cope with. Either way, it helped cover more tracks than it ever truly revealed.
As the title suggests, ‘Under My Skin’ is Buckingham without the make-up and the devices, an intimate, sparse and fearlessly confessional portrait of a man who has woken from a dream to find his other half broadly more comfortable, relaxed and emotionally geared-in than it ever was whilst dreaming. There’s still those spine tingling fifties and early sixties melodies (‘Show You How’/’Under The Skin’), those dark thoughts blessed with tender, sunshine harmonies and those whimsical country retreats (‘Cast Away Dreams’/’Down On Rodeo’). There’s still that chorus of chiming guitars, those hairpin arpeggios and those impossible vocal achievements (‘Not Too Late’/’To Try For The Sun’) but there’s also something hitherto not realised; Buckingham’s ability to produce hymns of modesty and understanding for the modern soul. A mantra-like cover of the Jagger-Richards songs, ‘I Am Waiting’ and Buckingham’s own melancholy and understated, ‘Shut Us Down’ reveal the spirit of a man that has bronc ridden a life beset by tragedy and success and come out the other side, not unscathed, just more human. Of course, Lindsey’s recent status as father may something to do with it, but his field of vision, narrowed by the insurmountable success of the Mac and a life spent in competition with those around him, has finally embraced a whole new world, one that exists beyond the fringes of the building line and the circular concerns of an intensely private life. It may seem something of a contradiction in terms to see a member of the Mac piqued by anything other than themselves, but the moving reconnaissance offered by anti-war lament, ‘Someone’s Gotta Change Your Mind’ not only features the thumping, rallying horns enjoyed by ‘Tusk’ it also revives its blistering, anti-establishment polemic. The song’s prosaic, unworldly delivery might not be to everyone’s tastes but it works well in this context. The robes and vestiges might have fallen, but they reveal a better king.
Whether or not ‘Under The Skin’ is the album he always intended to make is no else’s concern but his own, but it’s certainly his most intimate, his most honest, his most whole and most complete. And that’s something his children and the guy looking back in the mirror can be really be proud of. He’s taken a chance, and it’s paid off.
The best album by the best Dad in the world. What better legacy is there than that?