Fleetwood Mac in '77- Mirage in The iZine

Just occasionally , along comes a record that has meaning way beyond the music and words that occupy its spaces. We all have them; songs that represent a special time and place; albums that belong to a distant relationship or a current love; bands and people whose prescence made life that bit special, more meaningful, enjoyable. THE iZINE's music editor, MIKE GEE, takes a trip down memory lane to the days of "Rumours" and "Fleetwood Mac" as this seminal band launches a comeback bid that is absolutely brilliant.

It was '76. Maybe it was '77. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago. That was when the big Mac, Fleetwood Mac, came to town. For two and a half days, three or four months earlier, the late Autumn concrete outside the Perth Entertainment Centre had been home to a motley group of hippie students with two mattresses determined to see the Mac front row and centre. We staked our turf. We stayed put - even when a bunch of bikies started heckling at 3am on the second morning.

We got the tickets. We were front row and centre. We only had five months to wait.

Why, might seem a pertinent question? But the answer's the same now as it was then. Music's a glorious beast. That year, yeah, it must have been '77, the communal stereo spun through a mixdown of Can, Joni Mitchell, Faust, King Crimson, Genesis, Roy Harper, David Bowie, Neil Young, Patti Smith, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, Spectrum, Madder Lake, Tamam Shud, AC/DC, Kansas, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Kraftwerk, the Beatles, The Who, Amon Duul, Ashra Temple, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the first brave helter skelter of punk (Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Stranglers) ... and Fleetwood Mac - the legendary British blues band who suddenly found a new direction and an extraordinary future.

My how we'd played that self-titled first album from the new line-up of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Christine and John McVie, Mick Fleetwood. Not since The Beachboys had American dreaming seemed so perfect, so wispy, so ethereal, so mystical. The perfect West Coast mix of sun, nature, the mythic and the real.

Buckingham and Nicks were the most beautiful of couples. He with his dark looks, long tightly curled hair, sharp eyes offset by beard; she with her permed hair flooding down, over lace and chiffon, boot length, black and white dresses. She was Rhiannon, the Welsh witch, whose story became an anthem that year as Nicks incanted its chorus, huskily, intrusively, seductively, "dreams unwind, love's a state of mind", and Buckingham unleashed a lead break that was the equivalent of penetration.

The girls just wanted to bed Buckingham, the guys had a thousand fantasies of Nicks naked and that hair.

And there was Christine McVie, already a veteran of the British blues scene of the late '60s. A voice so contrasting to the huskiness of Nicks, by degrees, pure, warm, serene, heart breaking and soul lifting. Under her rippling keys, husband John McVie and the madman of drums, Mick Fleetwood, picked out a bottom end that seemed to only know some distant horizon where it could run bubbling to infinity.

"Rhiannon", "Warm Ways", "Over My Head", "Crystal", "Say You Love Me", "Landslide" - aah, they were songs. Full of harmonies, melodies, beauty. Yes, beauty, my friends.

Then "Rumours" arrived and we played it even more - and squabbled endlessly over which was the better album: "Dreams", "Never Going back Again", "Don't Stop". "Go Your Own Way", "Songbird", "The Chain", "Gold Dust Woman" - it had a lot going for it. So we just kept arguing.

We got dressed up for that night. The girls were lace in extremis, bras showing boldly through the black mesh, legs stocking clad, hair a mess of perms, braids, curls; the guys dug out white shirts, best faded jeans, boots. We got there an hour and a half early and who the support was that night remains a mystery. It doesn't matter. Sorry, whoever you were.

At precisely 9.12pm, Fleetwood Mac came on. I swallowed hard then, just as I do now listening to the Mac's brand new, quite magnificent, reunion set, "The Dance". But to that a little later.

Somebody gave Stevie a red rose. She smiled, a curl of those impossibly perfect lips that seemed to beam across that vast hall, and they launched into "Say You Love Me". Fleetwood Mac weren't perfect that night, but they were damn close.

Buckingham in black and white, already a fine, inventive guitarist, capable of switching between picked acoustic and great smashes of electric chording; Nicks, a whirl and twirl of black, white and red; Christine McVie, smiling, poised, earthy, behind her piano; John McVie, the quiet man picking away at his bass, smiling happily at anybody who cared to look at him; big Mick Fleetwood, in his semi-tights, those tassles already hanging between his legs, hair long and pony-tailed, beard devilish, character manic.

"Rhiannon" was seven-and-a-half minutes long that night, an ebb and flow of mystic thunder, an anthem to the mystic in all of us. It's impossible to forget Nicks then, caught in the spotlight, radiant, alive with a sublime mixture of innocence, sensuality and serendipity. She sparkled.

At the end she bent over the guard barrier, shook hands. That night, for 10 seconds I held Stevie Nicks hand and looked into her eyes. Everything got very warm and fuzzy. As a fan it was the very first of a bunch of unforgettable moments that have made 25 years at music's beck and call so worthwhile. That's what being a fan is about. And then fans were still Fans.

As the Mac churned through their "Fleetwood Mac" and "Rumours" songbooks, we didn't know it that night, although perhaps we did in a way, that we were listening to the incandescent emotion that accompanied the beginning ofrock history's most remarkable chapters .

Stevie's gorgeous ethereal "Dreams", Christine's rollicking "Don't Stop", Lindsey's thumping "Go Your Own Way", that group rhythm rumble called "The Chain". A furious, pluse raising "I'm So Afraid" that closed on a hail of feedback on the eight-minute mark.

"Rumours" is the single most defining American record of its time. The more remarkable because of the circumstances under which it was made and the emotions at play.

You wouldn't have known it to look at them that night, but Fleetwood Mac was in the midst of a personal maelstrom as Buckingham and Nicks fragile relationship disintegrated, the McVies' marriage was over and Fleetwood was going through a painful divorce. Recorded over six stifling, cocaine-crazed, months of claustrophbic tension in what Fleetwood would later describe as "an emotional holocaust", "Rumours" smashed the charts asunder.

Its achievements are still staggering today: more than 25 million copies sold (and closing on 26 million); a Grammy Award winner; No 1 in the UK, US, Australia and heaven knows where else; 450 weeks in the UK Top 100, 100-plus weeks more than "Dark Side Of the Moon", and second only to Meatloaf's "Bat Out Of Hell"; an extraordinary 31 weeks at No 1 in the US; and until Michael Jackson's "Thriller", the best-selling album in rock history.

Why? Because you could hear a heart break, touch a raw nerve, sense the human mystery, hope, hurt and love. "Rumours" was the you and me of songbooks; an epic, deeply personal, brave, triumph of the spirit.

They were never the same again. How could they be, although 1987's swansong "Tango In The Night" went mighty close. Over the ensuing years I've interviewed Nicks, Fleetwood, Buckingham and Christine McVie. And I always asked about those times, these two records. Fleetwood has no real explanation. Buckingham, warm and philosphical, believes that it was meant to be, that out of all the pain and agony something good, profound, had to come; McVie in her gentle ways remembers the songs, their greatness, the way the band fought its way, refused to throw in the towel; and Stevie ... we've talked about it a couple of times.

The first, at the time of her debut solo set, she was angry at its mention, didn't want to talk about it; a handful of years and the passage of time later, one night late in LA when the dark of night seemed a friend for dreamers, she relented and spoke wistfully of the magic, the uncanny indefinable something that lifted this group of five people into the stratosphere, and tipped them over the personal edge. "I don't think I will ever know such times again," she said, so quietly, it ached.

She was wrong. The Mac are back. There is "The Dance", the fabulous five reunited live in concert for MTV, revisiting their finest songs, not because music's great cycle has made '70s rock user friendly again, but because they wanted to. The early whispers were that this was not an ordinary "In Concert", but a jewel, an event to match the peerless "Nirvana Unplugged".

For once they were right. "The Dance" is absolutely peerless. Fired up and obviously still in love with each other, Buckingham, Nicks, the McVies and Fleetwood, leap into the past like it doesn't exist - and it doesn't.

"The Dance" is an emphatic statement of the timeless nature of great songs, of how much this group really achieved, of how missed they've been. It'll put a tear in your eye, a lump in your throat and it'll make your heart sing. "The Dance" is one of the great live albums in the history of rock - and there are so very few of them.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. This is "The Dance" - may it never end.