Rumours

“As of February 2023, Rumours has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the sixth best-selling album of the 1970s, and the 12th best-selling album of all time.” (Wikipedia).

I’d never heard of Fleetwood Mac until their first hit, the instrumental “Albatross”, released in 1968. and though Rumours came out in ’77, I never heard of it till ’85. I was working as acting program manager at Her Majesty’s Stationary Office in Norwich. I had two programmers assigned to the project, because the consultancy firm I worked for had not yet agreed with the client what computer systems they required. Bob Taylor was the senior one and we sat on opposite sides of a battered mahogany desk from the days of Queen Victoria. When needed to be seen working, we wrote reports about timescales for the programming, testing and implementation of a hypothetical system. This left most our days free for chatting.

A Cockney “Knees-up”, keeping alive an old tradition. Note the “Pearly King” at left

Bob was a contractor paid double my salary. He was a Cockney, unconcerned with the niceties of middle-class office behaviour, as it was plain he knew what he was doing and didn’t respond kindly to raised eyebrows of our Civil Service client. We spent interesting days comparing our backgrounds and interests. He was sorry for me, with my limited exposure to pop culture and having fun of a Saturday night. So he gave me a cassette of Rumours. It’s one of my most treasured albums. You regularly hear one or other track on Radio 2.

It inspired Radcliffe and Maconie’s The Chain, “officially the longest running listener-generated thematically linked sequence of musically based items on the radio”. You can view the list here, all 8466 songs. You can hear an example of the programme with its theme based on the Rumours song The Chain.

So if you are interested in obtaining any item, let me know via “Contact Me” and we can agree a price.

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