What do you get when you mix the abstract surrealism of 1980s music videos, a searingly hot day in the desert, plenty of stimulants, and a group of some of the most contentious and “fractious” musicians in rock ‘n’ roll history? The fever dream music video for Fleetwood Mac’s “Hold Me,” the shooting for which was so arduous and tense that it was one of many instances Fleetwood Mac almost broke up in a haze of drug-fueled rage.
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Hard days on set are one thing. But when your producer calls the video shoot a” “f***ing nightmare,” that’s another thing entirely. Still, as has always been the case for Fleetwood Mac, they put their many (many) differences aside to provide us lucky listeners with a trippy, quintessentially ‘80s piece of rock ‘n’ roll history.
Behind Fleetwood Mac’s Fever Dream Music Video
Fleetwood Mac released their thirteenth studio album, Mirage, on July 2, 1982. The first single off the record, “Hold Me,” came one month earlier, and the second, “Gypsy,” followed in August. While it didn’t seem possible to make Fleetwood Mac more tense than it was in the late 1970s, the early 1980s proved just how much rampant c****** use and messy love triangles could make a lousy situation unbearably worse.
Such was the case for the making of the music video for “Hold Me,” which featured the band in a desert (Mirage, get it?) with recurring themes of mirrors, portraits, and their instruments sinking into the hot white sand. The entire band never makes a joint appearance on camera during the trippy, surrealist music video, a consequence of their toxic relationship dynamics that prevented more than two musicians being together at one time.
“Four of them—I can’t recall which four—couldn’t be together in the same room for long,” video director Steve Barron said in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “They didn’t want to be there. Christine McVie was about ten hours getting out of the makeup trailer, by which time it was dark. That wasn’t a good video, that one.”
Producer Simon Fields had even harsher words for the whole experience, calling it a “f***ing nightmare” and “a horrendous day in the desert. John McVie was drunk and tried to punch me. Stevie Nicks didn’t want to walk on the sand with her platforms. Christine McVie was fed up with all of them. Mick thought she was being a b****. He wouldn’t talk to her. They were a fractious bunch.”
Stevie Nicks Defends Her Attitude, Explains The Rest
Fleetwood Mac’s long-running relationship issues are no industry secret. In fact, the constant romantic drama and subsequent songs about it are part of what made the British-American rock band so intriguing and successful. Its tambourine-wielding frontwoman, Stevie Nicks, offered her two cents about her and the band’s attitude in I Want My MTV.
“First of all,” she began, “it was 110 degrees there in the desert, and I’m in flowing chiffon and platform boots with five-inch heels in a chaise lounge on a white sand dune, and I couldn’t leave until they got that shot. It was so hot, and we weren’t getting along.”
“Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t happy with me because I’d broken up with him six years before. I’d had an affair with Mick Fleetwood, which was a secret until Mick told Lindsey, and Lindsey was horrified. Then Mick fell in love with my best friend, who left her husband for Mick, so I lost Mick and my best friend in one fell swoop. And everybody hated Mick because of what he had done to me. So, it was a bad situation.”
From their tempestuous music video shoots to awkward bedside covers of Rolling Stone magazine, Fleetwood Mac undoubtedly went through more tense situations during their professional careers than most people would hope to suffer through in their whole lifetime. Nicks’ advice to avoid a similar situation? “Don’t ever go out with a rockstar.”
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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